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[nicknameless]

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said the report will confirm that "the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq was fundamentally misleading."

The report to be released by the committee Friday focuses on two much-studied issues: the influence of the anti-Saddam exile group Iraqi National Congress in shaping U.S. intelligence estimates, and a comparison of prewar estimates and postwar findings about Iraq's weapons programs and links to terrorism.

But its release comes at a time when President Bush is speaking out on the importance of victory in Iraq to the war on terrorism, and Democrats are trying to recapture control of Congress by emphasizing the failings of the president's Iraq policy.

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The 400-page report to be released Friday covers only two of the five topics outlined under Phase II. Much of the information — on the intelligence supplied by the INC and Chalabi and the overestimation of Saddam's WMD threat — has been documented in numerous studies.

But Rockefeller said the report would show how the "administration pursued a deceptive strategy, abusing intelligence reporting that the intelligence community had already warned was uncorroborated, unreliable and in some critical circumstances fabricated."