"Today, we know these assessments were wrong, and as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the panel, said at a briefing on the 511-page report.

The report zeroed in on the crucial October 2002 national intelligence estimate in which analysts concluded that Iraq already had chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program.

"Now, these are very emphatic statements," Mr. Roberts said. "Simply put, they were not supported by the intelligence which the community supplied to the committee."

Mr. Roberts said the committee had found no evidence that intelligence analysts were subjected to overt political pressure to tailor their findings — a conclusion that was not embraced totally by committee Democrats, who offered their own statements asserting that that issue had not been satisfactory resolved.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, for example, said, "In my view, this remains an open question and needs more scrutiny." And Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, another Democratic committee member, said that while "nobody came before the committee and said, `Look, I had my brains beaten in to change my analysis,' " it was nevertheless true that "policymakers made it very clear what information they were looking for."

On one important point, the committee found the C.I.A.'s conclusions reasonable — that there had been no significant ties between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda terrorists.

"There is simply no question that mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq rank among the most devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history of the nation," Mr. Rockefeller said. "The fact is that the administration at all levels, and to some extent us, used bad information to bolster its case for war. And we in Congress would not have authorized that war — we would NOT have authorized that war — with 75 votes if we knew what we know now."

The West Virginian went so far as to assert that in some ways the intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq were worse than those that preceded the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "Leading up to Sept. 11, our government didn't connect the dots," he said. "In Iraq, we are even more culpable because the dots themselves never existed."

Although the report summary found no evidence that Mr. Cheney's visits had been intended to exert pressure, Mr. Rockefeller signaled that the question of who, if anyone, might have brought pressure to bear has not been answered to his satisfaction.

"I felt the definition of `pressure' was very narrowly drawn in the final report," Mr. Rockefeller said, noting that the C.I.A.'s ombudsman, who hears employees' complaints, had found more "hammering on analysts" than ever before in his 32 years at the C.I.A.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/national/09CND-INTEL.html?pagewanted=print&position=