Senate finds pre-war Bush claims exaggerated, false

Claims by US President George W. Bush and other top administration officials before the 2003 invasion of Iraq regarding Baghdad's ties to al-Qaeda and its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program were generally not supported by the evidence that the US intelligence community had at the time, according to a major new report by the Senate Intelligence Committee released Thursday.

The long-awaited report, the last in a series published over the past several years by the committee, found that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, frequently made assertions in the run-up to the war that key intelligence agencies could not substantiate or about which there was substantial disagreement within the intelligence community.

"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even nonexistent," the Committee chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, said on releasing the 172-page report.