WASHINGTON, Oct 8: US President George Bush has acknowledged that pre-war intelligence claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was "wrong", but said his decision to invade Iraq was right.

"Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there," he told reporters at the White House on Thursday evening. "The accumulated body of 12 years of our intelligence and that of our allies was wrong."

The blunt acknowledgment came one day after US weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer issued a 1,500-page report on the absence of weapons of mass destruction which Mr Bush had used as a major justification for war.

The report has further intensified the fiery exchanges between Mr Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry over Iraq, with Mr Bush claiming the report showed the invasion was right and Mr Kerry saying that Mr Bush was blind to evidence proving the war was a mistake.

The two candidates, who are to debate each other on Friday evening, have used harsh, even contemptuous, language against each other since Wednesday, when the report was published.

Observers say that the Friday evening debate, the second of the three between the two candidates, may further increase the bitterness already permeating this presidential race.

Giving his interpretation of the report, Mr Bush told reporters that "based on all the information we have today, I believe we were right to take action, and America is safer today with Saddam Hussein in prison."

After the president's remarks, Mr Kerry held a press conference to accuse Mr Bush of going into "absolute full spin mode". "You don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact," Mr Kerry said. "That's not how it works in the United States of America, and that's not how it should work."

He also said Mr Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney "may well be the last two people on the planet who won't face the truth about Iraq." But Mr Bush insisted that Saddam Hussein could have passed on the knowledge (to make WMDs) to "our terrorist enemies had he not been removed".

"In a world after Sept. 11, he was a threat we had to confront." Mr Kerry rejected this argument, saying that President Bush had aggrandized and fictionalized the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Responding to his opponent s remarks, Mr Bush said: "Just a short time ago my opponent had a little press conference and continued his pattern of overheated rhetoric accusing me of deception."

He quoted an extended passage from a speech Mr Kerry delivered on the Senate floor two years ago in which he spoke of "Saddam Hussein, sitting in Baghdad with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction".

In his response to Mr Bush s response, Mr Kerry said the Duelfer report and recent comments by former Iraq administrator L Paul Bremer that the United States committed too few troops "provided definitive evidence as to why George Bush should not be re-elected".