Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Declassified U.S. Senate reports said that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein didn't trust al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and refused to support it.

``Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaeda and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime,'' one of the reports said. Hussein refused all requests from al-Qaeda to provide material or operational support, said the report issued in Washington today by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

A second committee report said that Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress told U.S. officials that Iraq possessed nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, information that later proved inaccurate.

Democrats said the reports show that statements by Bush administration officials before the Iraq war began in 2003 weren't supported by U.S. intelligence known at the time they spoke.

They include statements by Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, linking Iraq to al-Qaeda, said Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee.

Cheney's statement that an Iraqi intelligence officer met in Prague with Mohammed Atta, a leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was ``not substantiated by the intelligence assessments at the time this statement was made by the vice president,'' Rockefeller said.

No Meetings

Rice's statement that ``there are lot of tantalizing meetings between Iraq'' and ``people who were involved in 9/11'' was ``clearly false based upon what was known prior to the war,'' Rockefeller said.

``The intelligence assessments contained in the Intelligence Committee's unclassified report are an indictment of the administration's unrelenting and misleading attempts to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11,'' Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said in remarks to the Senate after the reports were released.

When George Tenet, then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told President George W. Bush that intelligence showing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a ``slam dunk'' and Tenet complied with administration efforts to gloss over contradictory information, ``you have here a corruption of the intelligence process,'' Levin said. Tenet should be held accountable, he said.

Snow Comments

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the White House hadn't seen the report and wasn't briefed on it.

``Based on the characterizations we've seen, it's nothing new,'' he told reporters at the daily White House briefing. ``So, it's, again, kind of re-litigating things that happened three years ago.''

``It's worth noting,'' Snow added, ``that in 2002 and 2003 members of both parties got a good look at the intelligence we had, and they came to the very same conclusions.''

Among the reports' conclusions:

-- ``Postwar findings do not support the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.''

-- ``False information from the Iraqi National Congress - affiliated sources, was used to support key intelligence community assessments on Iraq and was widely distributed in intelligence products prior to the war. The Iraqi National Congress attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.''

Years of Review

The Senate committee reports are the result of two and half years of investigative review by the panel's staff, and each finding was the subject of intense partisan debate and negotiation among senators behind closed doors.

The committee voted 11-1 to adopt the conclusions about pre- war intelligence, said Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Rockefeller. The panel voted 11-4 to approve conclusions that the Iraqi National Congress tried to influence administration policy, she said.

The committee determined that Hussein sought weapons of mass destruction as deterrents against Israel and Iran, and not for use against the U.S. Intelligence agencies overestimated Saddam's ability and desire to obtain weapons material while United Nations sanctions were in place, the reports said.

On two occasions, Saddam rebuffed al-Qaeda emissaries seeking to establish a relationship with his regime, information that was not reported to U.S. intelligence agencies prior to the war, the reports said.

Allegations that Hussein provided chemical and biological weapons training to al-Qaeda operatives also turned out to be false. And while Bin Laden's al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu Musab al- Zarqawi was in Iraq in 2002, he was traveling under cover and eluded efforts by Hussein to capture him, the reports said.

To contact the reporters on this story: William Roberts in Washington wroberts@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 8, 2006 13:50 EDT