"We were misled. The question is, did the president do that on purpose or was he misled by his own intelligence people ... Or did he in fact know what the truth was and tell us something different," former Vermont governor Howard Dean told NBC's "Meet the Press" program.

"We essentially went to war ... based on facts that turned out not to be accurate. I think that's pretty serious, and I think the American people are entitled to know why that was," he said.

"This president told us that we were going into Iraq because they might have atomic weapons and that turned out not to be so," he said.

"The secretary of defense told us that he knew where there were weapons of mass destruction around Tikrit and around Baghdad. We've been in control of Iraq for 50 days and we haven't been able to find any such thing."

Bush has faced mounting criticism over the intelligence information he used to justify the war in Iraq.

Two congressional committees have launched closed-door hearings into whether 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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