Lawmaker says Bush administration screwed up handling of Iraq Web site

US House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra criticized the Bush administration for its handling of a trove of once-secret documents from Saddam Hussein's covert nuclear program disclosed on a federal Web site, an Associated Press report said.

Hoekstra complained the US intelligence community hadn't properly declassified the documents, the Associated Press report said.

'Well, you know, we have a process in place. It looks like they screwed up,' he said on CNN's 'Late Edition.'

President Bush's director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, ordered the documents posted on the site last March, at the request of Republicans in Congress who wanted to show Saddam was a real threat, the report said.

Scientists at a federal lab raised concerns that the site, as a repository for millions of pages the US government found in Iraq the past 15 years, held sensitive nuclear information, the report said.

Negroponte abruptly shut the site down after The New York Times contacted his office for an article.

His office began reviewing the consequences, including who accessed the documents. Four Democratic senators demanded he also tell them why and how the site began, what role members of Congress played and whether the administration ignored US intelligence officials' concerns, the report further said.