The director of the CIA told a Senate committee on Tuesday that he had privately intervened on several occasions to correct what he regarded as public misstatements on intelligence by Vice President Dick Cheney and others, and that he would do so again. "When I believed that someone was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it," said Director George Tenet. He identified three instances in which he had already corrected a public statement by President Bush or Cheney or would do so but left the impression that there had been more. Tenet's comments, in testimony before the Armed Services Committee, came under sharp questioning from some Democrats on the panel, who have criticized him and the White House over prewar intelligence on Iraq. He insisted that he had honored his obligation to play a neutral role as the president's top intelligence adviser. Tenet said he planned to call Cheney's attention to a recent misstatement, in a Jan. 9 interview, when the vice president recommended as "your best source of information" on links between Iraq and al-Qaida the contents of a disputed memorandum by a senior Pentagon official, Douglas Feith. That memorandum, sent last October to the Senate Intelligence Committee, portrayed what was presented as conclusive evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaida, but it was never endorsed by intelligence agencies, who objected to Feith's findings. Tenet said he was not aware of Cheney's comments in that interview, published by the Rocky Mountain News, until Monday night. In his annual testimony on threats facing the United States, Tenet found himself drawn again into the dispute over whether intelligence agencies or policymakers were more to blame for misjudgments and overstatements about Iraq and whether Baghdad had illicit weapons and ties to terrorism. The other instances in which Tenet said he had acted to correct administration statements involved the State of the Union address in January 2002, when he objected after the fact to Bush's inclusion of disputed intelligence about Iraq's seeking to obtain uranium from Africa, and a Jan. 22 radio interview in which Cheney portrayed trailers found in Iraq as being for biological weapons, and thus "conclusive evidence" that Iraq "did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction." That was the conclusion initially reached by American intelligence agencies last spring, and still on the CIA's Web site. But it has been disputed since last summer within intelligence agencies, and Tenet said he had told Cheney that there was "no consensus" among American analysts. Tenet has acknowledged that intelligence agencies may have made misjudgments in their prewar assessments of Iraq, which expressed certainty that Saddam's government possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program. In the year since the American invasion, no evidence has been found, though Tenet insisted again on Tuesday that it was too soon to draw firm conclusions about the extent to which intelligence agencies erred. At the same time, as CIA director, Tenet is seen as being responsible for preventing intelligence from being distorted for political purposes, and he seemed intent on defending himself and his agencies. Still, Tenet walked a careful line in his answers, and nothing in his comments seemed to suggest that he was distancing himself from the administration. He has promised Bush that he will serve at least through this year. Among the senators who pressed him hardest were two Democrats, Carl Levin of Michigan and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who has been an early and active ally of Sen. John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy asked Tenet if he believed that the administration had misrepresented information about Iraq to justify going to war, to which Tenet responded, "No, sir, I don't."