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Britain accused of distorting UN weapons report

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Iraq crisis deepened on Thursday as ministers were accused of distorting the findings of the chief UN weapons inspector to support Britain's claims about former president Saddam Hussein's weapons program.

Amid growing anger among senior intelligence officials about Blair's use of their work for political ends, Hans Blix's office rejected claims by British ministers that he had provided unequivocal evidence of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program.

As the UK prime minister became the first western leader to visit Iraq since the end of the war, Blix's spokesman said the chief weapons inspector had "never asserted" that Iraq definitely had weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the conflict.

Ewen Buchanan, who said Blix had merely said there was a "strong presumption" that banned items such as anthrax still existed, was speaking after the UK armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, declared that the UN had provided "damning" evidence of illegal Iraqi weapons.

Buchanan's remarks will undermine the credibility of Blair's Downing Street office, which faced severe pressure over claims that it had doctored a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to strengthen the case for a war on Iraq.

An unnamed intelligence official told the BBC that the key claim in last September's dossier -- that Iraq could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes of an order -- had been inserted on the instructions of officials in Downing Street.

Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's director of communications, who played a key role in drawing up the dossier, said on Thursday in Basra that the BBC was "saying we forced the intelligence agencies to put things in the dossier that were untrue.

"That is wholly untrue; there is nothing in there that was not the work of the intelligence agencies."

As the prime minister insisted once again that banned weapons would be found, Downing Street faced renewed pressure when the hawkish deputy US defense secretary appeared to belittle the importance of such weapons.

Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair magazine that the decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main reason for invading Iraq was taken for "bureaucratic" reasons, indicating that Washington did not take the threat seriously.

Amid the furore, British intelligence sources expressed fury at Downing Street's behavior.

They were deeply reluctant to allow Downing Street to use their intelligence assessments because they feared it would be manipulated for political ends.

Widespread unease in the British intelligence community about Downing Street's use of their information in the September dossier was compounded by a second report in February containing sections that were plagiarized by Campbell's staff.

John Scarlett, chairman of Britain's joint intelligence committee, was reported to be furious at what a senior British official described as a "serious error."

Caveats about intelligence supplied by British intelligence and the British government's eavesdropping center at Cheltenham, were swept aside by Blair, egged on by Campbell, well-placed sources said.

A London source said on Thursday that, "It may take several months to decide what the Iraqis were doing."

He added that something had to be found, if only for political reasons, to support Blair.

Downing Street will also struggle to shrug off the remarks by Blix's office.
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