New York, June 02 : CIA officials have promised to produce a "round of fresh" evidence of Iraq`s weapons of mass destruction for increasingly wary lawmakers as early as next week even as reports said there was a tendency among the U.S. administration to distort intelligence about Baghdad and assume the worst about its ousted leader. After dispatching dozens of GI patrols to some 200 suspected weapons of mass destruction sites in Iraq over the past few months, only to come up empty handed, the Pentagon announced last week that it will shift from hunting for the banned weapons to hunting for documents and people who might be able to say where the banned weapons are -- or were. But Time news magazine says it is clear that the U.S. is running out of good leads. "We`ve been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," Lieutenant General James Conway, commander of the Marine Expeditionary Force, was qouted as saying. "But they`re simply not there." The magazine says several current and former military officers who saw all the relevant data through this spring charge that the Pentagon took the raw data from the CIA and consistently over-interpreted the threat posed by Iraq`s stockpiles.

"There was a predisposition in this administration to assume the worst about Saddam," a senior military officer told Time. This official, recently retired, was deeply involved in the planning for the war with Iraq, but left the service after concluding that the U.S. was going to war based on "bum intelligence", the magazine says.