British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Saturday night insisted he had secret proof that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) will be found in Iraq in his strongest signal yet that coalition forces believe they may have begun to uncover leads to Iraq's alleged deadly arms cache.
Stung by claims that the government exaggerated the threat from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Blair said he was waiting to publish a "complete picture" of both intelligence gained before the war and "what we've actually found."
PHOTO: AFPN
Asked if he knew things he could not yet reveal, he said: "I certainly do know some of the stuff that has been already accumulated as a result of interviews and others ... which is not yet public, but what we are going to do is assemble that evidence and present it properly."
His words, in an interview with Sky TV, came as Downing Street moved to halt damaging leaks over its handling of the evidence by heaping praise on the intelligence services.
"The prime minister hugely values the work of the intelligence agencies," his spokesman said in St. Petersburg, where heads of state were celebrating the Russian city's tercentenary on Saturday.
The pointed comment followed a week of furious rows over whether the intelligence dossier on Iraq published by the government last September was "sexed up" to convince a skeptical public that they were in danger from Saddam.
It will fuel speculation that private assurances have been given to the intelligence community that they will not be left to carry the can over the failure to find WMD after a week of briefing against senior Blair officials by intelligence officials over the alleged ramping up of intelligence.
Labour backbenchers, increasingly convinced they were misled, are unlikely to be impressed by Blair's argument that they must trust in proof they cannot see.
According to intelligence sources the new leads have been provided by Iraqi scientists and a member of the State Security Organization who are currently being debriefed by MI6 and the CIA. This follows a week in which government and intelligence sources appear to have changed their story on the likelihood of finding WMD on an almost daily basis.
One source claimed mid-week that British intelligence suggested Saddam had destroyed his WMD even before UN inspectors visited Iraq, a version of events that had changed by Saturday morning to the claim that chemical weapons may actually have been deployed in the field and then destroyed as American troops advanced.
On Saturday, the US announced that another 1,400 experts will join the hunt for banned weapons -- a signal that Washington has accepted the political significance of the issue.
In Britain it is thought that ministers want eventually to publish a checklist of claims made before the war alongside subsequent discoveries which they believe vindicate the warnings. So far the only publicly announced discovery has been that of two trailers thought to have been part of a mobile laboratory system.
Blair said in his interview that claims that the existence of WMD was "a great big fib got out by the security services" would be proved wrong. He said he had "absolutely no knowledge" of an alleged meeting between the foreign secretary, Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell, in a New York hotel to discuss concerns over whether the evidence on WMD would be strong enough. Leaked transcripts suggested Straw had warned the issue could "explode in our faces."
The Foreign Office insisted the two men had not met on the date given in February.
Downing Street has been hampered in its argument by repeated suggestions from the Bush administration that WMD may never be found. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, suggested last week that WMD were a bureaucratic pretext to start a war.
Blair told Sky that WMD were the basis in law for taking military action -- but "that's not the same as saying it's a bureaucratic pretext."
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