Senate Democrats lit into the Bush administration's Iraq policies yesterday, using an uncharacteristically contentious hearing on additional war spending to attack the Pentagon's number two official in personal and bitter terms.

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Warner seemed briefly to lose control of the committee yesterday, faced down by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) over whether Wolfowitz could be questioned on broad matters of Iraq policy or only the narrower issue of additional spending for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which together are costing about $4.5 billion a month.

When Warner admonished him to keep his questions to the budget issue, Kennedy erupted. "I've been on this committee for 24 years, I've been in the Senate 42 years, and I have never been denied the opportunity to question any person that's come before a committee, on what I wanted to ask," he said. "And I resent it and reject it on a matter of national importance."

Warner persisted, provoking a formal challenge from Kennedy. "Well, Mr. Chairman, then you're going to have to rule me out of order, and I'm going to ask for a roll call of whether the committee is going to rule me out of order," he snapped.

At that point, Warner backed down and said Wolfowitz's preliminary remarks had invited such broad questioning. "You have opened it up in your opening statement," Warner told Wolfowitz.

After listening to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz testify before the normally stately Armed Services Committee for several hours, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said, "What I've heard from you is dissembling and avoidance of answers, lack of knowledge, pleading process -- legal process."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) then hit Wolfowitz, who is seen as a major architect of the Bush administration's approach to Iraq, with a virtual indictment. "You come before this committee . . . having seriously undermined your credibility over a number of years now," she said. "When it comes to making estimates or predictions about what will occur in Iraq, and what will be the costs in lives and money, . . . you have made numerous predictions, time and time again, that have turned out to be untrue and were based on faulty assumptions."
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Wolfowitz ... told her that in disagreeing with Shinseki's estimates on the troop requirements for postwar Iraq, he was siding with another senior Army general closer to the action -- Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Iraq and the Middle East.

Wolfowitz did respond directly to Reed's attack, which followed a heated and confusing exchange on whether U.S. commanders permitted military interrogators to violate the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of military prisoners of war and civilian detainees.

"I'm not dissembling," he said. He tried to weave his way though the hypothetical questions Reed had posed about the rules of engagement for interrogations in Iraq, saying he had not been told that senior commanders in Iraq had approved questioning techniques that violate the Geneva accords.

Cutting him off, Reed said, "Well, I would suggest, Mr. Secretary, that you're not doing your job."