US: President Bush sidestepped demands for outside review of pre-war intelligence on Iraq yesterday. But he said it was important to know all the facts surrounding White House assertions that Iraq's illicit weapons justified the US decision to invade.
"I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts," Mr Bush told reporters. "I want to be able to compare what the Iraq Survey Group has found with what we thought prior to going into Iraq," he said, when asked whether he would support an independent review.
Arizona Republican Senator John McCain has broken party ranks to join Democratic demands for an independent investigation into how US intelligence got it wrong, given the failure by searchers to find weapons of mass destruction which, Mr Bush insisted, were in Iraq. - (Reuters)