By ANDREW GUMBEL in Los Angeles

An unprecedented array of United States intelligence professionals, diplomats and former Pentagon officials have gone on record to lambast the Bush Administration for its distortion of the case for war against Iraq.

In their view, the very foundations of intelligence-gathering have been damaged in ways that could take years, even decades, to repair.

A new documentary circulating in the US features one powerful condemnation after another, from the sort of people who usually stay discreetly in the shadows.

They include a former director of the CIA, two former assistant secretaries of defence, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and even the man who served as President George W. Bush's Secretary of the Army until just a few months ago.

The two dozen interviewees reveal how the pre-war intelligence record on Iraq showed virtually the opposite of the picture the Administration painted to Congress, to US voters and to the world.

They also reconstruct the way senior White House officials - notably Vice-President Dick Cheney - leaned on the CIA to find evidence that would fit a preordained set of conclusions.

"There was never a clear and present danger. There was never an imminent threat. Iraq - and we have very good intelligence on this - was never part of the picture of terrorism," says Mel Goodman, a veteran CIA analyst who now teaches at the National War College.

The case for accusing Saddam Hussein of concealing weapons of mass destruction was, in the words of the veteran CIA operative Robert Baer, largely achieved through "data mining" - going back over old information and trying to wrest new conclusions from it.

The agenda, according to George Bush snr's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, was both highly political and profoundly misguided.

"The theory that you can bludgeon political grievances out of existence doesn't have much of a track record," he says, "so essentially we have been neo-conned into applying a school of thought about foreign affairs that has failed everywhere it has been tried."

The hour-long film - Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War - was put together by Robert Greenwald, a TV producer in the forefront of Hollywood's anti-war movement who never suspected, when he started out, that so many establishment figures would stand up and be counted.

"My attitude was, wow, CIA people, I thought these were the bad guys," Greenwald said.

"Not everyone agreed on everything. Not everyone was against the war itself.

"But there was a universally shared opinion that we had been misled about the reasons for the war."