Cheney's assertions came as Congress released the full declassified version of a Pentagon report that sharply criticises a special office in its own building for writing intelligence reports alleging such contacts.

Those claims flatly contradicted the considered judgement of other US agencies . . . including the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's official in-house intelligence unit . . . that no such links existed.

The new report, whose broad conclusions were released earlier this year, gives the clearest picture yet of how Bush-administration hawks manipulated intelligence to advance the case that Saddam was working with al-Qaeda.

Before the invasion, President Bush and Cheney fostered that impression in speech after speech . . .

so successfully that at one point, polls showed, two-thirds of Americans believed the Iraqi dictator had a hand in the attacks of 11 September.

The report says that Saddam himself, as well as the former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz and the former intelligence chief Mani alRashid al-Tikriti, all confirmed under questioning that they had no significant pre-war dealings with the organisation headed by Osama bin Laden.

The under-fire Pentagon office was run by Douglas Feith, an advocate of the invasion. The office sent its reports to Cheney and his then chief-of-staff Lewis Libby . . . who was convicted last month of perjury and obstruction of justice in a case connected to pre-war intelligence. Feith has also been discredited, and resigned from the Pentagon in mid2005.

Interviewed by the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, Cheney said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda commander killed in 2006, was active in Iraq well before 2003. "He took up residence [in Baghdad] before we ever launched into Iraq [and] organised the al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene."

Another key element in the case for Iraq/al-Qaeda links was an alleged meeting in Prague in mid-2001 between an Iraqi official and Mohammed Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers. The CIA discounted the idea, producing evidence that Atta could not have been in Prague. In 2002, Feith's office wrote that the CIA's conclusions "ought to be ignored".

In 2004, the report of the 9/11 Commission . . . the most authoritative study of the attacks . . . was also deeply sceptical of any links.