Carl Levin, senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, refuted White House claims that now-discredited reports that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear material from Africa was an isolated case of Washington using dodgy pre-war intelligence.

"The misleading statement about African uranium is not an isolated incident. There is a significant amount of troubling evidence that it was part of a pattern of exaggerations and misleading statements," he said.

US President George W. Bush has defended pre-war US intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons, amid charges that he inflated the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein in his annual "State of the Union" address to the nation.

Democrats, most of whom voted in favor of going to war, have seized on the Bush administration's admission that the president should not have used the information in his speech to demand a an independent inquiry, and Levin renewed those calls Tuesday, saying that what is now needed is " a thorough and accurate and bipartisan investigation."

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