With the 2004 vote looming in their rearview mirror, two congressional committees launched hearings last week into whether US President George W. Bush hyped intelligence regarding Iraq's alleged nuclear and biological weapons program.

But the probe is not likely to be quick: 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 White House hyped intelligence regarding Iraq's alleged nuclear and biological weapons program, which could prove damaging to Republicans in the 2004 election campaign.

The political sensitivity of the issue has become increasingly clear over the past several days, with leading Democratic presidential becoming more vocal in criticizing the White House over the matter.

Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean on Sunday accused Bush of misleading the country about Iraq's possession of unconventional weapons.

"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.

Dean now has also questioned Bush's credibility.

"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 Sunday.

"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."

His remarks echoed comments made last week by Democratic frontrunner John Kerry.

"He misled every one of us," Kerry said last week while campaigning in New Hampshire.

"I will not let him off the hook throughout this campaign with respect to America's credibility and credibility to me because if he lied, he lied to me personally," Kerry said.

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