A former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency has accused the Bush administration of ignoring intelligence assessments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs in the months leading up to the Iraq war, the New York Times said on Saturday.

In an interview with the CBS, Tyler Drumheller, the former head of the CIA's European operations, said that White House officials had repeatedly ignored the intelligence community's assessments about the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, the report said.

In one instance, Drumheller said that George Tenet, then the director of the CIA, told President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that a paid agent in Saddam Hussein's inner circle, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, had reported that Iraq had no active programs for weapons of destruction, the report said.

However, days later, the White House told CIA officials that it was proceeding with plans to go to war, the report said.

A CIA spokesman has said that Drumheller was just expressing his personal views, the report said.

Drumheller became the second CIA veteran in recent weeks to attack the White House's handling of prewar intelligence, the report added.

The Bush administration launched the Iraq war in 2003 on grounds that Iraq's Saddam Hussein regime had weapons of mass destruction, but the United States has failed to find any such weapons after the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

The Bush administration has since changed rhetoric and claimed that Saddam Hussein is a US enemy and the world is better and safer without him.

Source: Xinhua