The United States administration, working to quell internal discord and external criticism of its Iraq policy, launched a new round of public relations efforts on Wednesday to justify the invasion and occupation, the Washington Post newspaper reported Thursday.

Speaking to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice vigorously defended the US actions in Iraq.

In the speech, Rice avoided the part of a CIA report which said inspectors in Iraq have so far not found weapons of mass destruction, the reason why Washington started the war against Iraq.

Instead, she focused on the report's finding that Iraq violated UN resolutions in its ambitions to acquire weaponry.

While Rice was speaking in Chicago, White House press secretary Scott McClellan declared five times during his daily briefing that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terrorism.

On Thursday, US President George W. Bush will deliver a speech to defend the US actions in Iraq, to be followed by Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday.

The fresh efforts by the Bush administration to increase support for its Iraq policy came at a time of slipping public enthusiasm for the operations in Iraq and a controversy over the administration's leaking of an undercover CIA agent's name after her husband criticized Bush's Iraq policy.

Meanwhile, chief US weapons hunter David Kay said in a report released last week that there had been no findings to date of actual nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in Iraq.

Inspectors "have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material," Kay said.

However, Rice pointed to other evidence from Kay's report, including what she called a "massive deception campaign to conceal its weapons program, and its maintenance of prohibited delivery systems.

"We now have hard evidence of facts that no one should ever have doubted," Rice said.

"Right up until the end, Saddam Hussein lied to the Security Council. And, let there be no mistake, right up until the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction and to hide his illegal weapons program," she added.

(Xinhua News Agency October 10, 2003)