The Hindu : Report raps Blair on Iraq intelligence

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jul 08, 2003

International

International

Report raps Blair on Iraq intelligence

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON JULY 7. The British Government's case for going to war with Iraq was dealt an embarrassing blow today when a high-power cross-party committee of MPs raised serious questions about the accuracy of intelligence on which the case was built up.

In its eagerly-awaited report, the Commons' Foreign Affairs Committee also criticised the Government for the way it presented intelligence to Parliament and the country in the run-up to the war, though in a minor victory in its row with the BBC, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair's office was cleared of the allegation that it "sexed up" a key intelligence dossier last September in a bid to exaggerate the threat from the Saddam Hussein regime.

The committee was deeply divided over the role played Mr. Blair's influential aide, Alastair Campbell, in the preparation of the September dossier which greatly swung the opinion in favour of a war. But thanks to the casting vote of the committee chairman Donald Anderson, a Labour MP, Mr. Campbell was exonerated of the BBC's specific allegation that he defied the wishes of the intelligence community to include in the dossier a section saying that Iraq was capable of deploying its weapons of mass destruction at 45 minutes' notice.

The committee said he "did not play any role in the inclusion of the 45-minutes claim" and that "on the basis of the evidence available to us Mr. Campbell did not exert or seek to exert improper influence on the drafting of the September dossier." However, it raised questions about the veracity of the 45-minute claim which, it said, was given undue prominence in the intelligence dossier.

More crucially, the committee said that the "jury is still out" on the Government's critical claims relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which provided the trigger for the war. In the light of the fact that no weapons had been found so far, it called on the Government to set out whether it still considered its claims to be accurate.

A Tory member of the committee, John Stanley, said this was the first time that British troops were committed to a war simply on the basis of intelligence and it was a "fundamental issue" whether that intelligence, as set out in the September dossier, was accurate.

The 45-page report stopped short of accusing the Prime Minister of misleading Parliament but said that he `misrepresented' the status of what has come to be known as the "dodgy dossier" — a document produced by Downing Street this February claiming to contain new intelligence but which turned out to have been largely lifted from an old PhD thesis.

The report said the February document was "almost wholly counter-productive" and it was "fundamentally wrong" for Mr. Blair to have mentioned it in Parliament as it "inadvertently made a bad situation worse."

The Opposition seized on the report to demand a judicial inquiry into how intelligence was handled and presented, and there were calls for Mr. Blair to come to Parliament and clear the air with regard to the `dodgy' dossier.

The Tory shadow Foreign Secretary, Michael Ancram, said Mr. Blair might not have led Parliament intentionally but that was the end result of the way he talked up the dossier in the Commons.

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