US President George W. Bush was expected to name Senator John McCain, a Republican, to a bipartisan commission that will investigate flaws in US intelligence used to justify the Iraq war, Republican sources said on Thursday.
Bush was expected to announce the creation of the commission yesterday. The panel would report back next year, after the November election.
No announcement was included on the president's official schedule for the day, although last-minute additions are typical of this administration.
Claims that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were the main reason cited by Bush for the war, in which more than 500 US troops have died.
McCain is a maverick who opposed Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 and is known for speaking his mind and taking on the administration.
He broke party ranks to insist that Bush needed to have an independent commission look into prewar intelligence.
He would lend a streak of independence to a commission that Democrats doubted would be non-partisan since its nine members are being picked by Bush rather than by Congress.
Republican sources said McCain was offered the post by the White House on Thursday and accepted.
Aides said he would be in Germany attending a security conference yesterday, so he would not be present for the announcement.
Names that have been circulating as possible commission members included Robert Gates, a former CIA director under the president's father; Nebraska Representative Doug Bereuter; and former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, among others.
The White House was also drafting an executive order to set out the scope of the investigation.
The administration was giving the panel a broad mandate to look beyond Iraq and at other intelligence matters like the nuclear programs of Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Democrats complained that they were locked out of the selection process.
"I don't know if it will pass the smell test," said a senior Democratic congressional aide.
"If they're all Republicans or seem to be friendly to this administration, then people will say it is not independent," the aide said.
Bush, initially cool to the idea, agreed to an independent investigation last weekend under pressure from Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill after David Kay, former chief US weapons hunter in Iraq, said he found no evidence of stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq and that prewar intelligence was almost all wrong.
"We have not yet found the stockpiles of weapons that we thought were there," Bush said in a speech at the port of Charleston, South Carolina, in his clearest acknowledgment of problems with prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons.
However, he said, "Knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq."
Kay was at the White House on Thursday for talks with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about Iraq. He had lunch with Bush on Monday.
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