"The only difference, if someone is looking for daylight, and wants a news story and they want to make something out of it, the question is: is the glass half full or half empty?" he said.

Tenet defended the US intelligence community's performance in a speech to students at Georgetown University only a week after his chief weapons inspector David Kay stunned the administration by declaring before a Senate committee hearing, "We were all wrong."

Kay said he had concluded after a 10-month search that Iraq had no large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons before the war, and the work of the Iraq Survey Group he lead was 85 percent complete.

Tenet outlined his "provisional" conclusions and said more time and data were needed for the search being conducted by the Iraq Survey Group.

"And despite some public statements, we are nowhere near 85 percent finished. The men and women who work in that dangerous environment are adamant about that fact," he said.

Rumsfeld was on a flight to Munich for an informal meeting of NATO defense ministers when Tenet spoke, but he heard the speech through a live audio broadcast radioed to his air force jet.

In an interview with reporters traveling with him, the secretary portrayed Tenet's views as little different from Kay's.

"Dr Kay properly said in his judgement we're about 85 percent complete, and I forgot exactly what George Tenet said, but he said basically there is work yet to be done," Rumsfeld said.

"My guess is ... someone could find a crack of daylight between them because they are two human beings looking at the same thing and describing it slightly differently," he said.

"I think basically everyone is in agreement as to where we are. I don't think there is anything different between what I heard George Tenet say and what I watched David Kay say," he said.

Asked about his own unequivocal prewar assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld acknowledged he had perhaps gone too far in the first days of the war when he said he knew where Iraq's banned weapons were.

He said he was referring to "suspect sites" that had been identified in areas to the north of the advancing US forces.

But, he added, "There are a lot of things being said about what the administration said which the adminitration did not say."

"I've read the critics comments and I cannot find where I've said those things," he said.

"I've not gone back and researched what everyone else in the administration said, but it seems to me a worthwhile thing to do, for the clarity of the thing, to take what people are saying and going back and checking," he said.

Rumsfeld arrived here for an informal meeting of NATO defense ministers Friday ahead of an annual gathering of foreign policy and national security heavyweights here on Saturday.

He is scheduled to fly to Croatia Sunday for a brief visit before traveling on to London where he will meet with British Defense Minister Geoff Hoon.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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