House to probe possible leaks

Hoekstra would not confirm the story's accuracy or whether the prisons exist.

''The depth of the leaks that we have seen in the intelligence community over the last 12 to 18 months have done irreparable harm to our ability to effectively conduct the war on terror," Hoekstra said.

Representative Jane Harman of California, the committee's top Democrat, said the committee should return to its work on the prewar intelligence on Iraq. She was echoing efforts of Senate Democrats to draw attention to the administration's mistakes on the war.

In September 2003, the House committee, led by Porter Goss, then a congressman and now director of the CIA, produced an interim report on Iraq that found the United States went to war in Iraq on the basis of outdated and vague intelligence.

Hoekstra said work on the flawed prewar estimates will stay with the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is in the second phase of its own investigation.

The Senate committee produced a 511-page report in July and is now studying five remaining lines of inquiry, including questions about whether policy makers misstated the intelligence to make the case for war.

President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, took issue with ''the notion that somehow the administration manipulated prewar intelligence about Iraq."

''Some of the critics today believed themselves in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, they stated that belief, and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American people," Hadley said.