US President George Bush is reportedly “open to ideas” as he meets a panel studying the war on Iraq today.

BUSH administration officials, trying to calm a political furore over allowing a United Arab Emirates company to take over six US seaports, told Congress yesterday they spent three months reviewing the deal and said all concerns about security were satisfied.

The disclosure of a top-secret US domestic spying programme has ignited a furious debate about presidential authority, civil liberties and whether President George Bush is acting above the law.

The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating claims that an office run by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s former policy chief engaged in illegal intelligence activities before the start of the Iraq war.

Senator Edward Kennedy and other Democrats assailed President George Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq today and declared they would oppose Condoleezza Rice’s nomination as Secretary of State as a principal architect of a failed policy.

CONTRADICTING the main argument for a war that has cost more than 1,000 American lives, the top US arms inspector reported yesterday that he found no evidence that Iraq produced any weapons of mass destruction after 1991.

Thirty-nine prisoners have died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since the autumn of 2001 and there have been 94 cases of proven or suspected abuse, the Army said in a broad new report giving a more precise and higher estimate of the scale of the abuse.

Americans are expecting more shocking photographs and searing public debate as the Bush administration works to calm the storm over US soldiers’ abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

US military commanders are studying options that could mean more troops in Iraq if violence there widens.