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Blair sought to boost Iraq threat, British media say

British Prime Minister Tony Blair sought to have Iraq's nuclear threat boosted in a dossier released last September to make the case for war, the press in Britain reported yesterday, citing documents published as part of an ongoing inquiry.

"The Prime minister ... was worried about the way you have expressed the nuclear issue," said his director of communications, Alastair Campbell in a memorandum to John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), dated Sept. 17.

On the following day Campbell returned to the question of the Iraqi nuclear threat in an e-mail to Scarlett: "Sorry to bombard on this point, but I do worry that the nuclear section will become the main focus and as currently drafted is not in a great shape."

At that stage the dossier on Iraq's military arsenal, which was eventually published on Sept. 24, last year, stated that if international sanctions against Iraq were lifted then Iraq would need five years to produce a nuclear weapon, but that "this timescale would shorten if Iraq succeeded in obtaining fissile material from abroad."

On the morning of Sept. 19, Campbell sent another message to the JIC chairman proposing a rewrite of the passage on the nuclear threat concluding with the words; "they could produce nuclear weapons in between one and two years."

That version appeared in the final version of the dossier.

Downing Street's desire to stress Iraq's nuclear threat was also revealed in an e-mail from Tom Kelly, an official Blair spokesman, in the week before the controversial dossier was published.

"The weakness, obviously, is our inability to say that he could pull the nuclear trigger any time soon," Kelly said.

The messages were posted on the Internet as part of the ongoing Hutton inquiry which is looking into the apparent suicide of British arms expert David Kelly.

David Kelly was named by the defense ministry as the likely source of a BBC story that the government "sexed up" the September dossier on Iraq.
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