Before the start of the closed-door briefing, lawmakers said they hoped to get closer to the truth of how the statement made its way into Bush's State of the Union address last January.

The panel's top Democrat, Senator John Rockefeller, said the major issue was not just the accuracy or inaccuracy of the allegation that Iraq tried to acquire nuclear material from Niger -- a claim long refuted by US intelligence -- but the intention of those in the administration who repeated it, and cleared the president to repeat it, in the key speech to the nation.

"Was there any attempt to take what was either accurate or inaccurate intelligence and shape it in a way which helped the president makes his case that he wanted to go into Iraq?" Rockefeller asked.

"It's an integrated investigation. We're looking not just at the intelligence but also the way it made its way up to the policymakers," the West Virginia Democrat said.

"There has to be an accountability on this," he said before the briefing.

Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine told reporters that lawmakers were keen to hear Tenet's side of the story.

"It's absolutely vital that we ascertain the truth," she said.

"It's inconceivable to me that we cannot retrace the steps in this whole process and put all the pieces of the puzzle together," she said, adding it is "in the vital interest of our national security and the credibility of America."

"Many questions will need to be answered," Snowe said. "We're going to have to evaluate all the inconsistencies and the contradictions to make sure we understand exactly how confident in our intelligence we can be in the future, based on what we did in the past."

Senator Ron Wyden said voters in his home state of Oregon had expressed concern that the administration exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to justify the US-led invasion.

"What my constituents are concerned about is, in effect, making political decision,s and then in effect, looking to find facts that would support those political decisions. That's what I want to explore today," he said.

He also hoped to determine whether the flawed information was an isolated incident or part of a broader intelligence problem.

I'm certainly troubled at this point about the pattern that seems to be emerging," Wyden said, "but that's whay Im going to the hearing, to make an effort to see if we can look at that in some detail."

"We want to have detailed how these decisions were made," the Oregon Democrat continued.

"It shapes up to me as something of a battle between the CIA staff and the White House staff with respect to how decisions were made initially, but that's what we're going to inquire into," Wyden said.

North Carolina Democrat John Edwards, said that in his view, the hearing was less about establishing Tenet's culpability, and rather about "the credibility of the president of the United States."

"When the president speaks, he speaks on behalf of the American people," said Edwards, who is one of nine Democrats seeking to replace Bush in the White House.

"George Tenet has accepted his responsibility, and that's good, but at the end of the day, the president when he speaks, has to take responsibility for what he says," Edwards said.

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