WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush, trying again to explain the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said on Saturday that suspected arms sites had been looted in the waning days of Saddam Hussein's rule.

"For more than a decade, Saddam Hussein went to great lengths to hide his weapons from the world. And in the regime's final days, documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

It is believed to be the first time Bush has cited looting to explain the inability of U.S. forces to uncover chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, a U.S. official said.

Bush had previously said weapons may have been destroyed before the war. The U.S. military has been criticized for failing to prevent looting at an Iraqi nuclear facility.

Bush has been widely criticized for misleading the public by asserting that Saddam had stockpiles of unconventional weapons that menaced the world. The allegations were Bush's main justification for bypassing the United Nations and ordering the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

"The intelligence services of many nations concluded that he had illegal weapons and the regime refused to provide evidence they had been destroyed," Bush said. "We are determined to discover the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes."

This week, Bush dismissed questions over his reasons for going to war as the work of "historical revisionists."

In his radio speech, he sought to address problems in post-war Iraq, including attacks on U.S. troops and the slow pace of reconstruction.

"American service members continue to risk their lives to ensure the liberation of Iraq," he said, blaming "dangerous pockets of the old regime" and their "terrorist allies" for the attacks. The U.S. military was combating the threats by hunting down Saddam loyalists and "terrorist organizations."

The United States has provided more than $700 million in humanitarian and reconstruction aid for Iraq, Bush said.

With its allies, it was fixing water treatment plants, boosting electricity supplies and vaccinating children. A $100 million U.S. fund, billions of dollars in recovered Iraqi funds and revenues from oil sales will help pay for reconstruction.

Comment: Bush’s scripted comments aside, the basic facts remain that official and public statements made by the President concerning the presence in Iraq of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction” were lies.

The question remains as to whether or not the alleged evidence quoted by the President in support of these fictional views was prepared for the President’s use with his specific knowledge.

It is to be noted that in the archives of all intelligence agencies repose thousands of reports on every conceivable subject. Some of these reports are from known, trusted and entirely reliable sources. At the other end of the spectrum are reports known to be false, misleading and worthless.

Public statements have been made by the CIA that reports of Iraq’s acquisition of enriched uranium given to the President at his specific request were known by that agency to be very bad forgeries. The question then is whether or not the CIA informed the White House that the supportive documents requested by the President were, at best, unreliable, or at worst, outright and obvious forgeries.

It would seem that if the CIA had misinformed the President as to the accuracy of their reports and that as a consequence, the President misspoke, his obvious response would be to immediately make this information public. That he has never done so would certainly indicate to any reasonable person that Bush was entirely aware that he was using faked material in support of his policies.

 Unless American military or civilian agencies deliberately plant concocted material in Iraq to support the President’s previous allegations, such evidence will never be forthcoming because it never existed in the first place. Claims that the Iraqi government somehow disposed of weapons they could, and certainly would, have used against an invading army prior to the long-anticipated invasion ring very hollow.

The old story about the lazy student who claimed that his dog had eaten his homework appears to be entirely applicable here.