WASHINGTON, December 20, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – US President George W. Bush admitted Monday, December 19, that faulty assessments on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction damaged US credibility as he staunchly defended spying on American citizens "for so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill our American citizens."

"No question that the intelligence failure on weapons of mass destruction caused all intelligence services to have to step back and re-evaluate the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence," Bush said at the year-end press conference, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

A US presidential report revealed in April that the US intelligence was "dead wrong" on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had forcibly made the case for the Iraq invasion in a UN Security Council presentation, regretted in September his UN statement, saying it was a 'blot' on his record.

Bush said the bad intelligence on Iraq made it harder to convince the general public that the Americans were correct in their suspicions about Iran's nuclear program which Tehran vehemently denies.

"People will say, you know, if we're trying to make the case on Iran, you know, well, the intelligence failed in Iraq, therefore, how can we trust the intelligence in Iran?"

But Bush he insists Saddam "hoped" to develop such arms and the move to topple him was justified.

Feingold called Bush's spy authorization "an outrageous power grab.".

Bush did for just one second what critics have accused him of doing for two years: Mixing up Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden and Saddam.

"In the late 1990s, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone. And then the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak," he said.

"And guess what happened? Saddam -- Osama bin Laden changed his behavior. He began to change how he communicated. We're at war. And we must protect America's secrets," Bush said during a year's end press conference.

Along with the false allegation that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, Bush and top administration officials have often asserted that there were extensive ties between Baghdad and Al-Qaeda.

Vice President Dick Cheney frequently claimed that Saddam had "long-established ties with Al-Qaeda."

An official investigation into the September 11 attacks found no links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam's ousted regime, refuting a claim exploited by the Bush administration to justify the 2003 invasion-turned-occupation of the oil-rich Arab country.

The probe by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States said there was no "credible evidence" that Iraq had helped Al-Qaeda attack the United States.

Bush vowed at the year-end press conference to extend an unprecedented spy effort targeting US citizens with suspected ties to Al-Qaeda and denied that the program was illegal or an abuse of his power.

The president said he presumed the "shameful" leak that revealed the secret program, first reported in the New York Times on Friday, December 13, would trigger a US Justice Department investigation.

"My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in time of war," said the president, who struck a forceful tone throughout the hour-long question-and-answer session.

Bush linked the surveillance effort to the September 11 terrorist strikes and said he would reauthorize it "for so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill our American citizens."

"We need to connect the dots before the enemy attacks, not after," he said as he brushed off a congressional outcry and calls for an investigation into the initiative's legality, saying he had acted within his wartime powers.

In 2002, Bush signed a secret order enabling the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor US citizens' telephone and electronic mail without a warrant when they are in touch with someone abroad, contrary to legal precedent.

US officials including the president struggled to explain why he needed an alternative to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires court approval of wiretaps and electronic surveillance.

But flatly rejected charges that he had kept the US Congress in the dark about the initiative's true extent and that his justification for the secret program amounted to laying claim to "unchecked power" in wartime.

"To say 'unchecked power' basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject," he said. "There is oversight. We're talking to Congress all the time."

But Democratic Senator Russell Feingold told NBC television, "This is just an outrageous power grab."