In his interview last Thursday with NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, President Bush set off critics by citing what appeared to be a new standard of proof for Iraq's possession weapons of mass destruction.

No longer was the U.S. necessarily on the hunt for the actual weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, the president said. Rather, the investigation of suspect sites in Iraq by coalition forces would prove that Saddam Hussein "had a weapons of mass destruction program." The same day as the interview, at an Abrams Army Tank plant in Lima, Ohio, Bush noted that "whether he destroyed them, moved them, or hid them, we're going to find out the truth."

That means that despite months of reassuring Americans that WMD would be found (including most recently earlier this month, when Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer called the weapons "what this war was about") the administration seems to be preparing the country for news of evidence that WMD once existed in Iraq -- with no actual WMD -- and calling it a victory.

Quickly following the Brokaw interview have been a few official pronouncements and well-placed leaks that suggest this spin is taking shape.

A top operative of Al Qaeda suspected of playing crucial roles in both the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000 and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was captured in Pakistan on Tuesday along with five other terrorist suspects, American officials said today

Now is a good time to review what we have learned so far from the war in Iraq. President George W. Bush is scheduled tonight to declare the end of major combat there.

The tensions over the release of 9-11 related material seems especially relevant—if not ironic—in light of recent reports that the president’s political advisers have devised an unusual re-election strategy that essentially uses the story of September 11 as the liftoff for his campaign. The White House is delaying the Republican nominating convention, scheduled for New York City, until the first week in September 2004—the latest in the party’s history. That would allow Bush’s acceptance speech, now slated for Sept. 2, to meld seamlessly into 9-11 commemoration events due to take place in the city the next week.

Some sources who have read the still-secret congressional report say some sections would not play quite so neatly into White House plans. One portion deals extensively with the stream of U.S. intelligence-agency reports in the summer of 2001 suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning an upcoming attack against the United States—and implicitly raises questions about how Bush and his top aides responded. One such CIA briefing, in July 2001, was particularly chilling and prophetic. It predicted that Osama bin Laden was about to launch a terrorist strike “in the coming weeks,” the congressional investigators found. The intelligence briefing went on to say: “The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”

In explaining the gap between the prewar and postwar claims on Iraq's WMD, Dr Rice said the US was now seeing the programs in a different light. "The fact is that we are beginning to see a kind of pattern on how Iraq may have hidden its weapons of mass destruction from the outside world for all of these years," she said this week.

According to Dr Rice, the weapons programs are "in bits and pieces" rather than assembled weapons. "You may find assembly lines, you may find pieces hidden here and there," she said. Ingredients or precursors, many non-lethal by themselves, could be embedded in dual-use facilities.

She had a new explanation too for Iraq's ability to launch these weapons that were not assembled. "Just-in-time assembly" and "just-in-time" inventory, as she put it.

But in the months before the Iraq war, Mr Bush and his advisers, including the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, gave far more frightening descriptions of Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

Addressing the UN Security Council on February 5, Mr Powell said recent intelligence showed a missile brigade outside Baghdad was "dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations". Mr Bush was equally alarmist, describing satellite evidence showing that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq's nuclear weapons programs with his top nuclear scientists, his "nuclear mujahideen". Iraq's deadliest weapons could end up in the hands of terrorists.

"We cannot wait for final proof," Mr Bush said. "The smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."