In a statement, Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said a months-long probe conducted by his staff of prewar intelligence showed that the US Defense Department tailored its analysis to the George W. Bush administration's liking, after "assessments of the intelligence community did not make a sufficiently compelling case" for invasion.

Levin, who began his inquiry in June 2003, concluded that defense officials had found only "a relatively weak" relationship between Saddam and the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, rather than the substantial one that the Bush administration cited as a justification for invading Iraq.

Levin said the Pentagon analysis presented to the White House -- and in particular intelligence supplied by the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith -- inflated the risks "to support the policy goal of removing Saddam Hussein."

Levin called for tougher congressional legislation and better legislative oversight of intelligence assessments, the reliability of which he said have been undermined.

The Pentagon released a statement noting findings of previous bipartisan reports by the September 11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The Senate report, it said, "found no evidence that administration officials tried to coerce, influence or pressure intelligence analysts to change their judgments about Iraq's WMD capabilities or links to terrorism."

It also cited the Senate report as saying that Feith's staff "played by IC (intelligence community) rules" in participating in an August 2002 meeting to coordinate a report on "Iraqi support for terrorism" and that their participation "did not result in changes to (the intelligence community's) analytical judgements."

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