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By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON, Jan 29 (Reuters) - The United States will showcase more intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs next week as it makes a case for war, but it will be circumstantial evidence rather than a "smoking gun," intelligence experts said on Wednesday.

Analysts said the information must be more compelling than what U.S. President George W. Bush has outlined so far to bring reluctant allies around to the U.S. viewpoint.

The specific intelligence that will be presented by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations on Feb. 5 has not been fully determined as discussions center on what can be declassified without revealing intelligence methods.

"You can be sure that we will be as forthcoming as we can next week, but also mindful of sources and methods," Powell said on Wednesday after talks with Pakistan's foreign minister. Powell said it would be a "rather comprehensive presentation."

He was expected to reveal intelligence that goes beyond what Bush sketched out on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address, which mostly repeated past assertions.

The issue of what to reveal is very sensitive, especially with a possible war looming, because showing intelligence capabilities could help Iraq in battle, said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Those people who want smoking guns are probably not going to get them," Cordesman said. "But the United States does have a great deal of additional evidence on Iraqi activities, imports and facilities."

Even if Powell shows satellite photos, they will not be the crux of the U.S. case because the images do not make for clear-cut evidence and it can get complicated explaining the significance of movements around buildings, intelligence experts said.

IRAQ-QAEDA LINKING

The most compelling evidence would be if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could be linked directly to supporting the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, or if Iraq is shown to be close to having a nuclear weapon. But intelligence in those two areas is tenuous at best, analysts said.

The United States blames al Qaeda for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed about 3,000 people, but intelligence agencies so far have found no evidence directly linking Iraq to the strikes by hijacked airliners on New York and Washington.

Intelligence about al Qaeda's links to Iraq includes fragments such as the fact that Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, a suspected al Qaeda leader, received medical treatment in Baghdad. The Ansar al-Islam group, which operates out of Kurdish-held northern Iraq, is also suspected of having ties to al Qaeda, but it is unclear whether Saddam has control over that group.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said "the evidence has grown" about an alleged al Qaeda-Iraq link and it would be one element of Powell's presentation.

But linking al Qaeda and Iraq is so murky that even intelligence analysts cannot agree among themselves on how strong a tie there is. This prompted one U.S. official to describe the issue as "in the eye of the beholder."

"What you would have to show is that there are direct links between Saddam and al Qaeda and therefore you've got to get rid of Saddam before he gives his chemical and biological weapons to al Qaeda," said Lawrence Korb, director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "They do not have that."

Korb added: "You don't have the murder weapon, you've got the circumstantial evidence and you're trying to get people to believe on the basis of the circumstantial evidence that you're justified in doing this," Korb said.

NUCLEAR PIECES

In his speech on Tuesday, Bush reiterated the U.S. contention that Iraq had tried to buy high-strength aluminum tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons production." There is also an allegation by Britain that Saddam recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

"Our primary indications are that they (the tubes) are intended to be used for conventional rockets but we are still investigating that issue, because with modifications they could in fact be used for enriching uranium," said Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

John Negroponte, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said intelligence agencies believed the tubes had workmanship "definitely consistent" with use for uranium enrichment.

Alistair Millar of the Fourth Freedom Forum, whose group has done a comparison of U.S. claims against Iraq and reports by U.N. officials, said the IAEA had found Iraq tried to import uranium in the 1980s, but since the 1990s had not found evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program.

"It is not difficult to see why other allies are skeptical and have reservations about joining the United States and (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair in an attack on Iraq," Millar said. "They do not find that the evidence presented so far represents a credible imminent threat that would justify the use of force."

Bush said information from three Iraqi defectors showed that in the late 1990's Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs that could be moved to evade inspectors. There was more recent intelligence on the mobile weapons labs, a U.S. official said.

But chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix said in a Reuters interview this week: "We haven't seen anything being moved."

Analysts believe the most compelling case can be made based on Iraq's suspected chemical and biological weapons program and that Baghdad should be forced to explain itself on that front.

Bush said Iraq has not accounted for about 30,000 chemical weapons, materials to produce as much as 500 tons of Sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, and more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin.

"Based on the historical record of how the Iraqis have operated there is a very high degree of confidence that they still have a program. And it's based on their historical record, it's not based on any intelligence," said John Parachini, a weapons proliferation specialist at the RAND think tank.

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