VIENNA, Austria United Nations inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program have angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

Officials of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements."

The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the Intelligence Committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand- delivered to Gregory Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna, Austria.

The letter, obtained Thursday outside a 35-nation board meeting of the IAEA, says the report is false in saying Iran is making weapons-grade uranium at an experimental enrichment site, when it has in fact produced material only in small quantities that is far below the level that can be used in nuclear arms.

The IAEA openly clashed with the Bush administration on pre-war assessments of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Relations all but collapsed when the agency revealed that the White House had based some allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program on forged documents. After no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, the IAEA came under additional criticism for taking a cautious approach on Iran, which the White House says is trying to building nuclear weapons in secret.

At one point, the administration orchestrated a failed campaign to remove the IAEA's director, Mohamed ElBaradei, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The letter was the first time the IAEA has publicly rebutted U.S. allegations about its Iran investigation. The agency noted five major errors in the Hoekstra committee's 29-page report, which claimed Iran's nuclear capabilities are more advanced than either the IAEA or U.S. intelligence has shown.

"This is like pre-war Iraq all over again," said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that's cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors."

Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is currently producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect," noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent and did so under IAEA monitoring.

The letter also says the House report erroneously says that ElBaradei removed a senior nuclear inspector from the team investigating Iran's nuclear program "for concluding that the purpose of Iran's nuclear program is to construct weapons."

In fact, the inspector was sidelined on Tehran's request, and the Islamic republic had a right to ask for a replacement under agreements that govern all states relationships with the agency, said the letter, calling the report's version "incorrect and misleading."

When the congressional report was released last month, Hoekstra said his intent was "to help increase the American public's understanding of Iran as a threat."

Committee member Rush Holt, D-Hopewell, said the Hoekstra report was "clearly not prepared in a manner that we can rely on."

The report was never voted on or discussed by the full committee. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the vice chairman, told her Democratic colleagues in a private e-mail that the report "took a number of analytical shortcuts that present the Iran threat as more dire and the intelligence community's assessments as more certain than they are."

Privately, several intelligence officials said the committee report included at least a dozen claims that were either demonstrably wrong or impossible to substantiate.

The report, written by a single Republican staffer with a hard- line position on Iran, chastised the CIA and other agencies for failing to provide evidence to back assertions that Iran is building nuclear weapons. It concluded that the lack of intelligence made it impossible to support talks with the Iranians.

Democrats on the committee saw it as an attempt from within conservative Republican circles to undermine Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has agreed to talk with the Iranians under certain conditions.

The report's author, Fredrick Fleitz, is a former CIA officer who had been a special assistant to John Bolton, Bush's former point man on Iran at the State Department and now U.N. ambassador.

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