Washington —- A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq's weapons programs and Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaida.

The report released Thursday marks the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Bush and other officials, was the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policy-makers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by available intelligence.

The 170-page report accuses Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

In a statement accompanying the report, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), chairman of the intelligence panel, said, "The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against al-Qaida as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein."

White House press secretary Dana Perino called the report a "selective view," and said the administration's public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by foreign intelligence services.

Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri, the committee's top Republican, called the report a "waste of committee time and resources."

Committee member Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) agreed, saying, "Unfortunately, the committee has wasted countless hours only to show what we already knew four years ago, that policy-makers' statements turned out to be wrong after the war because the statements were based on flawed intelligence."

The report found that on some key issues, most notably Iraq's alleged nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the public statements from Bush, Cheney and other officials were generally "substantiated" by the best estimates at the time from U.S. intelligence agencies. But it found that the administration officials' statements usually did not reflect the intelligence agencies' uncertainties or the disputes among them.

In a separate report on Iran, the Intelligence Committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran and were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about internal rivalries inside Iran and an alleged Iranian "hit" team targeting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, according to the report.

The report concluded that Stephen Hadley, now the national security adviser, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, "acted within their authorities" to dispatch the Pentagon officials to Rome. At the same time, the report criticized the meetings as ill advised, and it accused Hadley and Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings, which it portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation.

IRAQ DEVELOPMENTS

> The United Arab Emirates said it will name an ambassador to Baghdad, the first Arab country to restore full diplomatic ties to Iraq since Saddam Hussein's regime fell in 2003.

> A top Turkish general said Turkey and Iran have been carrying out coordinated strikes on Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq, the first military confirmation of such Iranian-Turkish cooperation.

> The U.S. military announced an American soldier was killed Wednesday in action south of Baghdad.

> Iraq's Industry and Minerals Ministry said it would open 22 state-run companies to outside investment.

> Ambassador Ryan Crocker insisted the U.S. is not trying to set up permanent military bases in Iraq, even surreptitiously, rejecting suspicions what he wants this year are blueprints for an everlasting American military presence.

> The U.S. government filed a lawsuit Thursday against Honeywell International, accusing it of selling material used in bulletproof vests that the company knew was defective.

—- Associated Press