Washington ? Days before Secretary of State Colin Powell was to present the case for war with Iraq to the United Nations, State Department analysts found dozens of factual problems in drafts of his speech, according to new documents contained in the Senate report on intelligence failures released last week.

Two memos included with the Senate report listed objections that State Department experts lodged as they reviewed successive drafts of the Powell speech. Although many of the claims considered inflated or unsupported were removed through painstaking debate by Powell and intelligence officials, the speech he ultimately presented contained material that was in dispute among State Department experts.

Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the United Nations was crafted by the CIA at the behest of the White House. Intended to be the Bush administration’s most compelling case by one of its most credible spokesmen that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein was necessary, the speech has become a central moment in the lead-up to war.

The speech also has become a point of reference in the failure of U.S. intelligence. While Powell has said he struggled to ensure that all of his arguments were sound and backed by intelligence from multiple sources, it nonetheless became a key example of how the Bush administration advanced false claims to justify war.

Powell has expressed disappointment that, after working to remove dubious claims, the intelligence backing the remaining points of his U.N. speech has turned out to be flawed.

“I believed in what they gave me,” Powell said in May. “I presented it to the United Nations on behalf of my country. And to the extent that it was not accurate, I’m disappointed. Does it affect credibility? Sure.”

Offering the first detailed look at claims that were stripped from the case for war advanced by Powell, a Jan. 31, 2003, memo cataloged 38 claims to which State Department analysts objected. In response, 28 were either removed from the draft or altered to assuage analysts’ objections, according to the Senate report, which was released Friday and included scathing criticism of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services.

The analysts, describing many of the claims as “weak” and assigning grades to arguments on a five-star scale, warned Powell against making an array of allegations they deemed implausible. They also warned against including Iraqi communications intercepts they deemed ambiguous and against speculating that terrorists might “come through Baghdad and pick-up biological weapons” as if they were stocked on store shelves.

Powell and several of his aides spent several days at CIA headquarters working on drafts of the speech, in what participants have described as sessions marked by heated arguments about what to include.

When Powell appeared before the United Nations, he made a series of sweeping assertions that have crumbled under postwar scrutiny, including claims that Iraq had chemical weapons stockpiles, was pursuing nuclear weapons and that “there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.”

In their critique, State Department analysts repeatedly warned that Powell was being put in the position of drawing the most sinister conclusions from satellite images, communications intercepts and human intelligence reports that had alternative, less-incriminating explanations.

For all their skepticism, the State Department analysts did not challenge some of the fundamental allegations in the Powell speech that have since been proved unfounded.