WASHINGTON - A Democratic senator accused CIA Director George Tenet on Monday of making false statements when he said during public hearings that his agency gave the United Nations information about all the top suspected weapons of mass destruction sites in Iraq before the war.

"All such sites were not shared, and Mr. Tenet's repeated statements were false," Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan said in a speech on the Senate floor.

The CIA last month declassified the number of top suspected WMD sites categorized as high and medium priority, and acknowledged that 21 of those 105 sites were not shared with the United Nations before the war, Levin said.

A U.S. intelligence official countered that nine of those 21 sites had been "frequently" visited by U.N. inspectors between 1991 and 1999 and they knew as much about them as the CIA. Three of the sites were added to the CIA's list after Iraq declared them to the United Nations, and three sites were duplicate entries, the official told Reuters.

The CIA did not know the precise locations of several other sites and efforts were being made to develop more data on them, the official said on condition of anonymity.

Levin said if the public had known that not all WMD site information had been shared with U.N. weapons inspectors it might have reinforced sentiment that U.N. inspections should be completed before going to war.

"I can only speculate as to Director Tenet's motive," said Levin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a member of the intelligence committee.

"In other words, honest answers by Director Tenet might have undermined the false sense of urgency for proceeding to war and could have contributed to delay, neither of which fit the administration's policy goals," Levin said.

Prewar intelligence on Iraq has become a key issue in this year's presidential election campaign, with Democrats suggesting the Republican White House exaggerated the threat to build its case for war.

"We provided the best information that we had and the notion that we held back information that would have been useful is simply wrong," the U.S. intelligence official said.

"The U.S. certainly did not hold back timely actionable intelligence information from the (U.N.) inspectors," he said.

”It is an insult to the nearly three million Africans who died of AIDS during the time it took the administration to come up with it.”

© 2004 Reuters Ltd

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