The Brother-In-Law points out a very useful document describing, in detail, the access of the President and Congress to intelligence data. As he notes, the President has claimed several times that Congress has "access to" or "saw" the same intelligence on Iraqi WMDs before the war.

These are of course different words with very different meanings, so I'm curious to know which is the actual truth.

First of all, after reading the above-mentioned document, it appears that Congress has access to all "finished" intelligence. Regarding access to "raw" intelligence, source information and other data usually reserved for the Executive Branch, "it is noteworthy that Congress occasionally has sought and obtained such intelligence information from the executive branch."

What the real question is here is whether Congresspersons used the same or equivalent intelligence as the President did, not whether they had access to it or not. As the Robb-Silberman commission found, the summary information such as Presidential Daily Briefings (PDBs) and Senior Executive Intelligence Brief (SEIB) that Congress did not have access to were actually more alarmist and less nuanced than what Congress received. In other words, what Congress saw should have caused them to ask more questions about the intelligence, not less. Finally, as the Washington Post reported last year, "The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But . . . no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond
the five-page executive summary."

Factcheck.org, as usual, does a better job than Knight-Ridder (linked to above) and debunks the myth that the Congress did not have sufficient information to question Bush's decision to go to war. Major sections quoted below:

The intelligence to which Bush refers is contained in a top-secret document that was made available to all members of Congress in October 2002, days before the House and Senate
voted to authorize Bush to use force in Iraq. This so-called National Intelligence Estimate was supposed to be the combined US intelligence community's "most authoritative written judgment concerning a specific national security issue," according to the Senate Intelligence
Committee. The report was titled "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction....."

On the matter of the tubes, however, the report noted that there was some dissent within the intelligence community. Members of Congress could have read on page 6 of the report that the Department of Energy "assesses that the tubes are probably not" part of a nuclear program.

Some news reports have said this caveat was "buried" deeply in the 92-page report, but this is not so. The "Key Judgments" section begins on page 5, and disagreements by the Department of Energy and also the State Department are noted on pages 5,6,8 and 9, in addition to a reference on page 84.

Though much has been made recently of doubts about the tubes, it should be noted that even the Department of Energy's experts believed Iraq did have an active nuclear program, despite their conclusion that the tubes were not part of it. Even the DOE doubters thought Saddam was working on a nuclear bomb.....

On one important point the National Intelligence Estimate offered little support for Bush's case for war, however. That was the likelihood that Saddam would give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists for use against the US....The report assigned "low confidence" to this finding, however.