Contrary to assertions of the Bush administration, a U.S. Senate report released Friday rejected the allegations that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaida.

Instead, Saddam did not trust al-Qaida and refused to aide them, according to the declassified report coming out of Senate Intelligence Committee.

The report is the second part of the committee's analysis of prewar intelligence. The first dealt with CIA failings in its assessment of Iraq's weapons program.

It also deals with the role played by inaccurate information supplied by Iraqi opposition groups in the run-up to the war.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the report contained " nothing new."

"In 2002 and 2003, members of both parties got a good look at the intelligence we had and they came to the very same conclusions about what was going on," he said.

But Democrat Senator Carl Levin described the report as a " devastating indictment" of the administration's attempts to link Saddam to al-Qaida.

U.S. President George W. Bush has said that the presence of late al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq before the war was evidence of such a link.

The report comes as Bush is making a series of speeches on the " war on terror" to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Source: Xinhua