Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and their staff members are poring over "thousands and thousands of pages" of classified documents delivered to the panel by the Central Intelligence Agency, said Senator Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the committee, speaking on the Fox News Sunday television show.

The task of reviewing the contents of those files will occupy the committee "for the next, I would assume, couple of months," said Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia.

The committee's chairman, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, said the senators face the daunting task of reviewing "voluminous material from the ceiling to the floor."

The panel has so far held one hearing, with three more planned, into the fate of alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and whether intelligence information about them had been manipulated to justify the war against the government of Saddam Hussein.

Intelligence committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives commenced hearings last week into the brewing controversy over whether the administration of President George W. Bush hyped intelligence regarding Iraq's alleged nuclear and biological weapons program, which could prove damaging to Republicans in the 2004 election campaign.

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