Rice declined to say whether anyone should be fired as a result of the intelligence panel's findings.

As President Bush's national security adviser, she relied on flawed intelligence about Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction to help make the administration's case for an invasion two years ago. She succeeded Colin Powell as America's top diplomat in January.

"We have very good intelligence analysts who were doing their best, but obviously the president's intelligence has to be better than what we got on Iraq," she said Tuesday.

International suspicions about Iran and North Korea go far beyond what U.S. intelligence may have found, Rice suggested.

North Korea has announced it already has nuclear weapons, and it has refused to return to international arms talks. Iran says it is not hiding a weapons program behind a legitimate drive for civilian nuclear energy, "but they've been caught in a number of suspicious activities," Rice said.

"I don't think that there's any doubt worldwide that there is a lot of concern about the nuclear weapons capabilities of these states. And while we may never know the exact nature of any of these programs, we also have to be very careful not to under-react to the fact that you have closed societies that are ambitious in their policies, that are trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

On the Guantanamo detainees, Rice said that in a few cases where prisoners were released, "we met them again on the battlefield."

The Bush administration initially classified all the more 600 foreign-born men it held at Guantanamo as "enemy combatants" ineligible for full protection as prisoners of war and outside the ordinary civil liberties guarantees of U.S. criminal law.

The Pentagon has conducted military tribunals to review the circumstances of each Guantanamo detainee's capture and to determine whether the person was properly held. It says that of the roughly 200 already released, at least a dozen have returned to the battlefield. More than 300 additional cases are still being reviewed.

At the same time, Rice said, "if there is a case to release them, we don't just want to permanently imprison people either."

On Iraq, Rice rejected the idea that continuing attacks on U.S.-led forces were due to American troops' presence in the country two years after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

As democracy spreads in Iraq, she said, "you will see more and more, these are very violent people. They are very ruthless people. They are clearly able to wreak chaos but they actually don't have a political platform."

Rice credited Pakistan with making a shift of "150 degrees" from almost four years ago when it was one of three countries that recognized the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Pakistan and India were on the verge of open conflict.

"It's really night and day," she said. "The Musharraf government has done a lot."

The Bush administration announced last month that it will sell sophisticated F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan over India's objections.

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