US President George W. Bush today sidestepped demands for an outside review of pre-war intelligence on Iraq, but said it was important to know all the facts surrounding White House assertions Iraq's illicit weapons justified the US decision to invade.
"I want to American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts," Mr Bush told reporters at the White House.
Arizona Republican Senator John McCain has broken party ranks to join Democratic demands for an independent investigation into how US intelligence apparently got it wrong given the failure by searchers to find weapons of mass destruction Mr Bush insisted were in Iraq.
The president, seeking re-election this year, gave no sign he planned to yield to the demands. He stuck to a position that the US government will compare in an internal CIA probe the pre-war intelligence with what the weapons hunters have found.
"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 probe.
Former chief US weapons hunter Mr David Kay said on Capitol Hill on Wednesday "we were almost all wrong" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that his search there found no evidence of biological or chemical arms.