Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

bulldzr -- here's a post of your article, sourced directly from Reuters, in case the Yahoo! link you provided becomes inactive:

Bush Sidesteps Call for Outside Probe on Iraq WMD
Fri January 30, 2004 06:32 PM ET

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush on Friday sidestepped demands for 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 U.S. decision to invade.

"I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts," Bush told reporters at the White House.

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain has broken party ranks to join Democratic demands for an independent probe into how U.S. intelligence got it wrong given the failure by searchers to find weapons of mass destruction Bush insisted were in Iraq.

"McCain is the guiding light on this," said a Republican insider who predicted that the Bush administration may shift its view and accept an investigation.

"Clearly, this has been a bad hair week for the administration," the source said, while noting that a probe does carry plenty of risks for the administration in an election year.

The source noted that it was pressure from McCain that helped to persuade the administration to accept an independent commission to study the events leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Meanwhile, the president gave no public sign yet he planned to yield to the demands for a probe, though he did not completely shut the door on the idea. Instead, Bush stuck to a position that the U.S. 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.

Condoleeza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, on Thursday acknowledged that there may have been some flaws in the intelligence.

"I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground," she told CBS.

Former chief U.S. weapons hunter 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.

Kay and a number of leading Democrats on Capitol Hill have also called for an investigation, but Republicans say they fear an election-year political witchhunt.
Bush said Kay had made clear in his congressional testimony that Saddam Hussein was a "growing danger" who had to be dealt with given the post-Sept. 11 world.

"He was defiant, he ignored the request of the international community and this country led a coalition to remove him. We dealt with the danger," Bush said. But critics emphasize that was not the main justification given for the war, in which more than 500 U.S. troops have so far died.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California added her voice to those calling for a probe of the Iraq intelligence.

"An independent investigation is the only way that we can uncover the truth," Feinstein said in a statement.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4253702