President George W. Bush and senior members of his administration deliberately "led the nation to war on false premises," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Thursday.

Rockefeller's committee released a report that examined statements by top Bush administration officials between October 2002 and March 2003, when the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began, about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

The report found that intelligence could be used to back up administration's statements about Iraq before the war, but the officials often did not mention the level of dissension or uncertainty in the intelligence agencies about the information.

According to the report, the officials erroneously linked Saddam to the Sept. 11 attacks and al-Qaida; claimed Iraq would give terrorist groups chemical, biological or nuclear weapons; and said Iraq was developing drones to spread chemical or biological agents over the United States.

Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, said the problem was flawed intelligence heading into the war. "We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. And we certainly regret that," she said.

Two Republicans, Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, endorsed the report.

The committee's five other Republicans, however, assailed it as a partisan exercise. They accused Democrats of covering for their own members, including Rockefeller and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who made similar statements about Iraq based on the same intelligence the Bush administration used.

The report is also in line with statements written by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who sharply criticized the administration for its handling of the run-up to the war.

The Bush White House made "a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed" when the nation was on the brink of war, McClellan said in "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

The way Bush managed the Iraq issue "almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," McClellan said. "In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage."

In a another Senate report, Pentagon officials are blamed with concealing from U.S. intelligence agencies potentially useful tips from Iranian agents in 2001 and 2002, including.

The Iranians told two Pentagon employees at a December 2001 meeting in Rome of a purported tunnel complex used to store weapons and covertly move personnel out of Iran after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the U.S., according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In addition, the Iranians told of a long-standing relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the growth of anti-government sentiment inside Iran.

The information was questionable, the report suggests, citing the sources: a discredited former arms dealer who was peddling a plan to overthrow the Iranian government and a former U.S. official whose leads had failed to yield any substance for the CIA.

But the report sheds new light on the mistrust and lack of cooperation by Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with the CIA and the State Department after 9/11.

Committee Republicans, in a dissent, said the report had nothing to do with the original scope of the review -- prewar intelligence on Iraq. They said it would be a "disappointment" to people looking for evidence of Pentagon wrongdoing.