Washington ? Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein rejected pleas for assistance from Osama bin Laden and tried to capture terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi when he was in Iraq, a Senate Intelligence Committee report released Friday found, casting further doubt on the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq.

President Bush and other administration officials repeatedly cited Saddam’s alleged ties to radical Islamic terrorists before the March 2003 invasion as one reason to take military action against Iraq.

The 150-page report said the administration’s claims were untrue.

“Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaida to provide material or operational support,” the report said.

The report was released along with a second one that said false information from the exile group Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, was widely distributed in prewar intelligence reports and used to support intelligence assessments about Iraq’s weapons and links to terrorism. Intelligence officials repeatedly warned that the INC was unreliable, but White House and Pentagon officials ignored the warnings.

The reports are part of a five-report study that the Senate Intelligence Committee has undertaken into the Bush administration’s use of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq.

The study has left the committee badly divided. Three reports remain classified, including one comparing prewar statements by Bush administration officials with intelligence available at the time. Democrats have accused Republicans of delaying the reports’ release until after the November congressional elections.

On Friday, Democrats charged that the reports showed the White House had manipulated intelligence to make the case for war to the American people.

“The administration ignored warnings prior to the war about the veracity of the intelligence it trumpeted publicly to support its case that Iraq was an imminent threat to the security of the United States,” said panel Vice Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

Republicans rejected that allegation and said the reports added little to what was already known.

“The long-known fact is that the prewar intelligence was wrong. That flawed intelligence was used by policymakers, both in the administration and in Congress, as one of numerous justifications to go to war in Iraq,” said committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.

In the run-up to the war, Bush and his advisers repeatedly sought to link Saddam and al-Qaida, stopping just short of accusing the Iraqi leader of a role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“You can’t distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” Bush said on Sept. 25, 2002.

Postwar information on Saddam’s relations with Islamic extremists came from numerous sources, the report suggests, including seized documents and interrogations of Saddam himself, former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and a senior Iraqi spy, Faruq Hijazi.

The report, quoting from an FBI debriefing of Hijazi, said that when an Iraqi operative met bin Laden in 1995 in Sudan, bin Laden asked that Saddam allow him to open an office in Iraq, give him Chinese-made sea mines and military training, and broadcast his speeches.

“According to Hijazi, Saddam immediately refused,” the FBI debriefing said.

Regarding al-Zarqawi, the Senate report cites information that has surfaced since the war indicating that Saddam “attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture” him and the Iraqi regime “did not have a relationship with, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi.”

Al-Zarqawi, who operated from a part of northern Iraq that Saddam didn’t control, was a key part of Bush’s case for war. After the invasion, he became the head of the group al-Qaida in Iraq. U.S. bombs killed him in June.