Bush credibility rests in probe: Senators

Investigations under way by the committee's staff, the CIA and the FBI marked a good beginning, Sens. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition."

"Ultimately, the public needs to be reassured that, in fact, the intelligence the president was given....(and) was used, and how he framed the debate and the decision to go into Iraq, was intelligence that they can have confidence in," Hagel said.

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"And that's, by the way, important for the world to have that same confidence in our word."

A crucial question will be to determine how Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28 came to include a reference to what US intelligence had determined was an incorrect British report that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Africa.

"There are plenty of investigations, and the question is, what's the point of them?" said Rockefeller, the intelligence committee's vice chairman. "The point of them is to find out if we were being misled, if somebody inserted that in" despite earlier objections by CIA Director George Tenet.

On "Fox News Sunday," Rockefeller said Bush could make the controversy go away by coming clean whether the justification for war was exaggerated. "It's just a question of was it right, or was it wrong?" he said.

Rockefeller said the argument should not be personalised or politicised. Because of Bush's policy of maintaining the right of pre-emptive attacks against potentially dangerous governments, he said, "intelligence is the basis now of war-fighting."

Therefore, Rockefeller said, "it's very important to intelligence to say that facts really do matter, they count, they have to be accurate."