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Blair's office did not sex up intelligence report on Iraq
Jordan Times, 6/30/03
LONDON (AP) — Prime Minister Tony Blair's office did not doctor an
intelligence report to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, a
lawmaker involved in an official probe said Sunday.
Eric Illsley, a member of a parliamentary committee investigating the
government's use of intelligence material to justify a war in Iraq, said
he was satisfied Blair's all powerful communications chief Alastair
Campbell had not tampered with the dossier.
But fellow committee member John Maples said his colleague's remarks were premature, adding the official verdict would be announced next week.
“We haven't come to any conclusions at all yet,” he said.
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee is, in part, investigating a report by the British Broadcasting Corp. that Blair aides redrafted a dossier published in September last year to include claims that Saddam could launch chemical and biological weapons at 45 minutes' notice.
BBC defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan said that intelligence officials were unhappy with the `sexed up' report and believed the information about the 45-minute notice came from a single, unreliable source and was incorrect.
The story prompted accusations that the government had exaggerated the scale of the Iraqi weapons threat to convince sceptical lawmakers of the necessity of war.
Government relations with the BBC have slumped to their lowest level in years, with Campbell and the corporation's director of news Richard Sambrook firing venomous open letters at each other.
The government is demanding an apology and neither side is backing down.
In the latest twist in the political soap opera, Illsley said Sunday he and other committee members, who have cross examined ministers, were satisfied the dossier and the 45-minute detail were compiled by intelligence chiefs.
“The claim of the 45 minutes availability of weapons of mass destruction was inserted in the dossier by the intelligence services not by Mr Campbell,” Illsley, who is a member of Blair's governing Labour Party, told LBC radio.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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