The disclosure, made in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" program due to be broadcast late Sunday, adds to earlier accusations that the Bush administration used intelligence selectively as it built its case for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam's regime. The administration claimed in the run-up to the war that Baghdad had extensive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was working clandestinely to build a nuclear arsenal, therefore, presenting a threat to the world.

An extensive CIA-led probe undertaken after the US military took control of Iraq failed to turn up any such weapons. But Bush and other members of his administration have blamed the fiasco on a massive intelligence failure and vehemently denied manipulating information they had been provided.

However, Drumheller, who was a top CIA liaison officer in Europe before the war, insisted Bush had been explicitly warned well before an invasion order was given that the United States may not find the suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The information about the absence of the suspected weapons in Iraq, according to excerpts of Drumheller's remarks, was clandestinely provided to the United States by former Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri, who doubled as a covert intelligence agent for Western services. Then-CIA director George Tenet immediately delivered this report to Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other high-ranking administration officials, but the information was dismissed, Drumheller said.

"The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested," the former CIA official recalled. "And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'" Drumheller said the White House did not want any additional data from Sabri because, as he pointed out, "the policy was set."

"The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy," he argued.

The CIA declined to comment on the disclosure.

Drumheller admitted that Sabri was just one source, but pointed out that the administration would not shy away from other single-source information if it suited its policy goals. "They certainly took information that came from single sources on the yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all," he complained.

The White House had embraced a British report that Iraq had purchased 500 tons of uranium from the African nation of Niger, allegedly to restart its nuclear weapons program. A special CIA envoy Joseph Wilson, who made a secret trip to Niger in late 2002 to verify the report, dismissed it as unfounded -- much to the displeasure of the White House.

Drumheller, who retired from the agency last year, is the second high-ranking ex-CIA official to criticize the administration's use of intelligence in months leading up to the war. Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, wrote in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs magazine that the White House was "cherry-picking" information and that "intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made."

There was no immediate reaction from the White House to the latest charges.

"They tell us, 'If you leave us here, they will kill us,"' the Post quoted an anonymous Iraqi official as saying.

U.S. military authorities confirmed that there were signs of severe abuse, including separated shoulders and strap marks, at two of the centers, the Post said.

"I was not in charge of the team who went to the sites. If so, I would have taken them out," the Post quoted a U.S. official as having written in an e-mail.

But Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, the commander of U.S. detention operations in Iraq, told the Post, "I would strongly disagree with the statement that Americans are seeing cases of abuse and not doing anything."

Pace's directive to U.S. troops to stop any inhumane treatment they see followed the discovery November 13 of 173 prisoners in a compound run by Iraq's Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry, which also runs most of the detention centers that have been inspected since then.

Safah is part of a seldom-discussed aspect of the epidemic of kidnappings in Iraq: sex trafficking. No one knows how many young women have been kidnapped and sold since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq, based in Baghdad, estimates from anecdotal evidence that more than 2,000 Iraqi women have gone missing in that period. A Western official in Baghdad who monitors the status of women in Iraq thinks that figure may be inflated but admits that sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent under Saddam, has become a serious issue. The collapse of law and order and the absence of a stable government have allowed criminal gangs, alongside terrorists, to run amuck. Meanwhile, some aid workers say, bureaucrats in the ministries have either paralyzed with red tape or frozen the assets of charities that might have provided refuge for these girls. As a result, sex trafficking has been allowed to fester unchecked.

"It is a problem, definitely," says the official, who has heard specific reports from Iraqi aid workers about girls being kidnapped and sold to brothels. "Unfortunately, the security situation doesn't allow us to follow up on this." The U.S. State Department's June 2005 trafficking report says the extent of the problem in Iraq is "difficult to appropriately gauge" but cites an unknown number of Iraqi women and girls being sent to Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Persian Gulf countries for sexual exploitation. Statistics are further made murky by tribal tradition. Families are usually so shamed by the disappearance of a daughter that they do not report kidnappings. And the resulting stigma of compromised chastity is such that even if the girl should resurface, she may never be taken back by her relations.

A visit to the Khadamiyah Women's Prison in the northern part of Baghdad immediately produces several tales of abduction and abandonment. A stunning 18-year-old nicknamed Amna, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, says she was taken from an orphanage by an armed gang just after the U.S. invasion and sent to brothels in Samarra, al-Qaim on the border with Syria, and Mosul in the north before she was taken back to Baghdad, drugged with pills, dressed in a suicide belt and sent to bomb a cleric's office in Khadamiyah, where she turned herself in to the police. A judge gave her a seven-year jail sentence "for her sake" to protect her from the gang, according to the prison director.

Two other girls, Asmah, 14, and Shadah, 15, were taken all the way to the United Arab Emirates before they could escape their kidnappers and report them to a Dubai police station. The sisters were then sent back to Iraq but, like many other girls who have escaped their kidnappers and buyers, were sent to prison because they carried fake passports. There, they wait for the bureaucracy to sort out their innocence. What happened to the gang that took them? The sisters hear rumors that the men paid their way out of jail and are back on the streets. "I don't know what to do if the prison administration decides to release me," says Asmah, pushing back her gray head scarf to adjust her black hair. "We have no one to protect us."

Women's advocates are trying to set up halfway houses for kidnap survivors. The locations are secret to keep the women safe from both trafficking gangs trying to cover their tracks and outraged relatives who may try to kill the women to restore their clans' reputation. But the new Iraqi government has set up several bureaucratic roadblocks. Even organizations that do not receive government money have to secure permission from four ministries and the Baghdad city council for every shelter they hope to operate. Wringing her hands in exasperation, activist Yanar Mohammed says, "They want to close our women's shelter and deny our ability to open more."

That means that for girls like Safah, there are few havens left in Baghdad. In 2003, after Safah's father died, her grandmother took her to House of Children No. 2 orphanage in Adhamiya without the knowledge of most of her family. At the orphanage, she was befriended by an affable nurse who spent hours chatting up Safah, a fresh-faced girl whose fingers are still pudgy with baby fat. The nurse's modest hijab framed a sweet face that made Safah feel that the nurse was a good, spiritual woman, one she could trust. The nurse convinced Safah that she could be killed over the shame her disappearance had brought to her family. The nurse offered to adopt her. But official channels would have taken too long, so the nurse told Safah to hold her lower-right abdomen, scream and writhe on the carpet of the orphanage director's office, pretending to have appendicitis and requiring emergency medical assistance. Once at the hospital, the nurse whisked Safah into a waiting car.

The next three weeks were the worst in Safah's life. "I was tortured and beaten and insulted a lot in that house," Safah says. She wouldn't provide many details about what happened in the whiskey-soaked den in Karada. But she says that when it became apparent to her that she was about to be sold to Sa'ad, the man on the phone from Dubai, she became desperate. She passed word of her confinement to a neighborhood boy, who reported it to the local police station. Officers raided the place and arrested the nurse. Bureaucratic red tape somehow kept Safah and the nurse in the same prison for six months before Safah was finally released back into the custody of the orphanage a month ago.

At the orphanage, nestled behind a 10-ft. wall on the breezy banks of the Tigris, Safah can take computer classes, practice sewing and paint portraits of the family she wishes she had. But she doesn't feel as safe as she used to there. A social worker tells her that the nurse wasn't at the Khadamiyah Women's Prison during her last visit. Suddenly Safah rushes out of the room, crying and beating her head with her hands in the hallway. "If she is released," says Safah, her eyes darting back and forth in a panic, "I'm not staying here." But deep down she knows she has nowhere else to go.

'I told Tony, I said "rather than lose your government, withdraw from the coalition" - because I felt it was important for him to be the Prime Minister at this point in our relationship,' the President told the journalist Con Coughlin, author of a new book about Blair's relationship with the US. 'I saw his clear view and strength of character. And that's when he told me, "I'm staying, even if it costs me my government".' The account is unlikely to please anti-war Labour MPs, or Labour councillors contesting seats where Labour voters are still angry about Iraq, who would prefer the issue not to be discussed. Some were irritated by Jack Straw's hosting of a visit by Condoleezza Rice in the run-up to the local election campaign, highlighting once again the government's closeness to a White House administration many Labour voters dislike.

In the interview published in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, Bush praised Blair's courage, vision and personal qualities, calling him 'an easy guy to be around' who was straightforward with him.

The relationship grew after 11 September 2001 because he admired the way Blair saw 'that the free world has an obligation to defend itself against these killers', he added. However, Bush left open the question of how much influence Blair had over him in return for such unwavering support. Asked what input Blair actually had after 11 September, Bush suggested he did not need any: 'I'm the kind of guy that when I make up my mind - you know, I appreciate advice and counsel - but we were going. And the doctrine, if you harbour a terrorist you are equally as guilty as a terrorist, came right from my soul.' However, he said Blair had 'had a lot of sway' over the decision to pursue, ultimately unsuccessfully, a second UN resolution before invading Iraq.

Downing Street will also breathe a sigh of relief over Bush's denial that he was actually committed to invading Iraq almost a year before it happened. Bush insisted he did not take any final decision until 'after the ultimatum' from Washington for Saddam Hussein to stand down - delivered 48 hours before the invasion.

The soldiers are accused of manslaughter in the death of Ahmed Kareem, a youth who was among a group of four Iraqis captured as suspected looters in Basra in May 2003.

According to charges against the soldiers, they were on a patrol when they caught the Iraqis and forced them to swim in a canal. Kareem could not swim and drowned.

The four soldiers appeared at a specially arranged makeshift court martial hall in a giant open loft at an army barracks in the town of Colchester, eastern England.

The defendants spoke only to confirm their identities.

The makeshift hall, with galleries for spectators and press, has been equipped with large televisions allowing witnesses to give testimony by video link.

The case is the second high profile trial of British troops for the death of an Iraqi.

In the first, also held in Colchester, seven soldiers were cleared last year of murdering an Iraqi hotel receptionist.

That trial collapsed because Iraqi witnesses -- flown to Britain and given large stipends to cover their travel expenses -- were found to be unreliable.

In all, about thirty-five Iraq vets cycled through this weeklong procession of 250. For the young, often very broke, very busy veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, this represents a fairly strong showing. But many casual observers, influenced by memories of Vietnam-era protesting, when veterans mobilized in the thousands, expected that US soldiers in Iraq would turn against the war faster and in greater numbers than they have. An estimated 1 million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, but so far IVAW has only about 250 members.

For many of the more activist IVAW vets, their political evolution did not follow the simple trajectory one might expect, from idealism at enlistment to postcombat disillusionment. In fact, many of them shipped off to war despite serious political misgivings. "I went to Iraq opposing the war," says Garrett Reppenhagen, the former sniper with the irreverent potty-mouthed patch on his hat. Reppenhagen served a year with the Army's First Infantry Division in and around the very violent city of Baquba. "I was reading Zinn's People's History and John Perkins's Economic Hit Man before I went."

What's that? Someone went off to be killed or maimed or possibly to kill "hajjis" despite being an antiwar leftist? And Reppenhagen is not alone. A recent Zogby poll found that 29 percent of soldiers in Iraq favored immediate withdrawal, which some see as a sign of an imminent crisis in military discipline. But the poll could be read in exactly the opposite fashion. If the Army and Marines can keep the disgruntled soldiers fighting and fighting, even 70 percent of troops could favor immediate withdrawal and it would mean nothing.

The question for peace activists thus becomes: How is it that antiwar soldiers continue to fight? And what does it really take for an antiwar soldier to resist? The answers lie largely in the sociology of "unit cohesion" and the ways the military uses solidarity among soldiers as a form of social control. Similarly, the peace activism of IVAW requires the spread of an oppositional form of loyalty and camaraderie.

Since 1973, when Congress ended the draft, the armed forces have been restructured using unit cohesion as a form of deep discipline. In other words, social control in today's military operates through a system that could be straight from a text by French philosopher Michel Foucault: Soldiers are managed not with coercion but with freedom. Because they join of their own free will, they find it almost impossible to rebel. Volunteering implicates them, effectively stripping them of the victim status that conscription allowed. Soldiers who would resist are guilt-tripped and emotionally blackmailed into serving causes they hate. During my time embedded in Iraq, I met several antiwar soldiers, but none of them considered abandoning their comrades. They said things like "you signed that paper" or "they got that contract"--as if contracts are never broken or annulled.

If veterans are supposed to be at the heart of the peace movement, then it would serve progressives to understand this new military culture. Understanding the world of the military is also important because it is a major force in the socialization of young working-class Americans. If you're 20 or 22 and you're not doing what many rich kids do (like a career-boosting summer internship in New York) or doing what some truly poor kids do (like going to state prison on drug charges), chances are you're learning about responsibility and adulthood, and escaping small-town or inner-city America, courtesy of the US armed forces. One of the key lessons you'll learn there is: Look out for your comrades, because they're looking out for you.

Since World War II military psychologists, sociologists and historians--most notably the army historian S.L.A. Marshall, who interviewed hundreds of combat veterans in the Pacific theater--have agreed that soldiers fight not for justice, democracy or other grand ideas but for the guy next to them. Unit cohesion is the real glue holding the US military together.

"I remember they had this formation to tell us we were going to Iraq," recalls Fernando Braga, a skinny, unassuming 23-year-old Iraq vet who is still enlisted in the New York National Guard. Braga, now a poet and student at CUNY's Hunter College, says he became politicized well before the war, when he helped his immigrant mother clean rich people's homes. "My company is really anti-authoritarian. Guys would regularly skip formations and insult the NCOs. So I thought nobody would go. But, like, everybody went!"

And since everybody went, so did Braga. "I had to go. I wasn't going to leave these guys."

It's worth recalling how badly military discipline broke down during the later stages of the Vietnam War, because those traumas shaped the thinking of today's military leadership and guided a wide array of important military reforms.

At the heart of the matter was the draft, which provoked a massive counterreaction that swelled the ranks of the peace movement but also salted the military with disgruntled troops whose increasingly disobedient ethos spread to many volunteers as well. By 1970 whole companies refused to go into combat, and enlisted men started "fragging"--that is, killing--their officers. Drug use and bad attitudes were rampant (Fort Hood, Texas, became known as Fort Head).

The group Vietnam Veterans Against the War staged dozens of protests. One action was a threatening and theatrical "search and destroy mission" that ran from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. When Nixon invaded Cambodia, the VVAW invaded DC in what the radical vets mockingly called "a limited incursion into the country of Congress." The culmination of it all was the Winter Soldier hearings, in which vets documented US war crimes.

Ending the draft excised much of the disgruntled element from the ranks, and by professionalizing the services, it has helped create a deepening military-civilian divide. Within today's all-volunteer military there is much more intense solidarity than during the Vietnam era. After Vietnam the military also improved its housing, wages, benefits, food and training; it reached out to the families of soldiers and modernized its disciplinary systems and promotions methods, all of which improved morale.

Another key difference between this war and Vietnam is the use of whole-unit rotations as opposed to individual rotations. In Vietnam a soldier was dropped into a unit for 365 days and then, if he survived, plucked out. In Iraq and Afghanistan, battalions (500 to 800 soldiers) train together, deploy together and come home together. During Vietnam the constant flow of men in and out of line companies fighting the war seriously undermined unit cohesion and camaraderie.

"When I showed up in Vietnam we were just parceled out to different platoons as they needed us. I was called the FNG when I showed up--the fucking new guy," remembers David Cline, a legendary activist and driving force within Veterans for Peace. "These kids today face a very different set of pressures."

Is a Vietnam-style collapse of military discipline imminent? Some peace activists think so, pointing to the estimated 400 US military deserters who have made their way to Canada, twenty of whom have applied for asylum, and the roughly 9,000 military personnel who have failed to report for duty since the war began (not all of them have been classified as deserters). Recruiting numbers, meanwhile, have flatlined.

Yet while today's military certainly faces a crisis of quantity, it does not have the Vietnam-era problem with quality.

During the Vietnam War the military had a sufficient number of troops--500,000 in country for much of the war. The problem was qualitative: low morale, rebellion, combat refusal, drug abuse, a crisis of conscience. Today's military is not falling apart Nam-style. Rather, it faces a crisis of size: Though expensive and hardware-heavy, the military is simply too small for the jobs at hand, and it is incapable of growing because too few recruits are joining up and too many veteran soldiers are leaving.

Despite growing cynicism about the Iraq War, indications are that morale, never super-high during prolonged combat, is not particularly low. Likewise, US training and equipment is among the best in the world. But 150,000 soldiers in Iraq, and 16,000 in Afghanistan--many on their second or even third deployment--is simply not enough. When one looks at special categories like translators, civil affairs and intelligence specialists, the staffing shortage becomes even more acute. Thus the small professional army remains disciplined and functional, while the "battle spaces" around it--Anbar province in Iraq or Kunar province in Afghanistan--spin out of control.

We hear often about the "economic draft"--the financial pressures that force young people to join the military. But there is also what could be called an "alienation draft" or, conversely, a "solidarity draft." The military offers not only jobs but also a type of belonging. "The military is like family, for a lot of people," says one vet. In many ways, the US military is a uniquely straightforward institution. Unlike society as a whole, it doesn't pretend to be a democracy--it's a hierarchy and makes no bones about that, but as such, it contains checks and balances, an appeals process and clear paths forward for promotion.

"The US military has one of the best affirmative action programs in the country," says Stan Goff, a twenty-six-year veteran of the US Special Forces, including the ultra-secret Delta Force. On the march to New Orleans, the rugged and compact Goff is playing the role of sergeant major, rallying the sleepyhead vets for the morning briefings, setting the tempo, always moving. "The other thing about the Army is that it's fair. If you know the regs you can work the system." Goff also points out that the highest-paid military general makes only about fourteen times what the lowest-paid grunt earns--compare that with private-sector pay discrepancies that reach ratios of 700 to 1.

Of course, other vets have stories of racism and broken promises. Demond Mullins is a New York National Guardsman, dance teacher and City University of New York college student who returned from Iraq only six months ago and is now active with IVAW. Mullins is embittered not only about losing a close friend in Iraq and seeing twenty-five others from his battalion wounded and almost getting killed himself when his Humvee hit a homemade bomb; he's also angry at being skipped over for promotion because he is black and about being lied to by his recruiter. "They still haven't given me any money for college."

Such stories aside, there are many ways the military avoids the intense racial and class segregation that marks much of American life. And the armed forces mix people of many different backgrounds.

"The military is one of the only places in America where black people routinely boss around white people," says Braga with a mischievous grin. Another white middle-class vet from the rural South once described to me how his "battle buddy," or assigned partner, in basic training was an ex-hoodlum who had been a homeless street kid in Mexico. "The dude was covered with scars from knife fights. I mean, where else would I have spent every waking minute with that guy, or he with me?"

This egalitarian mingling and the intense camaraderie, plus decent pay, housing for family and constant training opportunities, can make military life look a lot better than the atomized, segregated, economically stagnant world outside. And all of this creates a deep-seated sense of loyalty to the military, even among those who oppose its wars.

On the other hand, Cline, Braga and other activist vets all point out that unit cohesion can cut two ways: It works like Kryptonite to stop rebellion, but after a tipping point unit cohesion can serve to make rebellion even more intense.

To illustrate the point, Braga recalls the story of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, from Rock Hill, South Carolina. In October 2004 this Army Reserve unit (Braga worked alongside them at times) refused what they called a "suicide mission" to deliver fuel in a convoy of old, unarmored trucks. Eighteen drivers from the 343rd were arrested, but the media storm that followed--a whole company had openly refused orders!--helped pressure the military into delivering armor and retrofitting its trucks and Humvees. Similarly, when Reppenhagen the sniper joined IVAW, his spotter, the guy he'd spent a year with in Iraq, also joined--they remained a team.

The rebellion of the 343rd also pointed out the pragmatism of resistance. "Hey, protesting could save your life," says Braga. "I've seen it happen. The 343rd and that soldier who asked Rumsfeld that question about the body armor, those two things got the military to pay attention and buy decent armor."

If 1960s activism was fueled by disillusioned outrage, then today's activism is fettered by a type of world-weary cynicism. Braga says most of the guys in his unit assume the war is based on lies and that it's all about oil, but they won't get involved in peace activism because "They say, 'You can't change anything.' But if you read history you see that usually people already have changed things," he says. "Movements have made lots of things happen."