"The inspectors went in, got good cooperation, got immediate access to the sites they needed to get to, and they found nothing -- nothing related to weapons of mass destruction programs," said Ritter, a former U.S. Marine and senior weapons inspector.

"And yet, we heard over and over again that 'The president knows that these weapons exist, the president knows that this is a threat that can only be responded to by the United States acting unilaterally,' because the United Nations was unable or unwilling to complete the (disarmament) task mandated by the Security Council," he told reporters at U.N. headquarters.


"The entire case the Bush administration made against Iraq is a lie," he said.


Ritter leveled his latest blast at the U.S. administration as Bush fended off critics' charges that he misled the American people by relying on faulty intelligence to justify the war.

A top inspector in Iraq for nearly seven years before resigning in 1998, Ritter was a vocal critic both before and after the war of U.S. claims that Iraq possessed illicit weapons of mass destruction. His latest book, "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America," was just published.

Ritter said Washington had never meant to let U.N. inspectors finish the task of disarming Iraq, as assigned to them by the 15-nation Security Council.

"The policy of the United States toward Iraq was not disarmament. It has always been regime removal -- eliminating Saddam Hussein from power. It's been the stated policy of the United States since 1991," he said.

Bush has come under fire for citing an allegation in his State of the Union speech in January that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa to make nuclear weapons. Administration officials now say they have doubts about the evidence the statement was true.

Bush told reporters on Monday his administration believed the claim was true at the time and only afterward learned there were doubts about it.