Iraq weapons dossier 'rewritten'
A dossier compiled by the
government on Saddam
Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction was rewritten to
make it "sexier", a senior
British official has told the BBC.
The claim - hotly denied by Downing
Street - came as Prime Minister Tony
Blair became the first Western
leader to visit post-conflict Iraq.
Published last September, the
dossier warned that Saddam Hussein
had the capacity to activate his biological and chemical weapons in just
45 minutes.
But the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has suggested that the
weapons might have been destroyed before the fighting began.
The intelligence official told the BBC the dossier had been "transformed"
a week before it was published on the orders of Downing Street.
He said: "The classic example was the statement that weapons of mass
destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes.
"That information was not in the
original draft. It was included in the
dossier against our wishes because it
wasn't reliable.
"Most things in the dossier were
double source but that was single
source and we believe that the
source was wrong."
He said "most people in intelligence" were unhappy about the changes
because they "didn't reflect the considered view they were putting
forward".
But the official said he was convinced that Iraq had programme to
produce weapons of mass destruction, and felt it was 30% likely there
was a biological weapons programme.
He said some evidence had been "downplayed" by chief UN weapons
inspector Hans Blix.
But Iraqi scientists captured during the war had not provided much
information as yet, he added.
Responding to the BBC report,
Defence Minister Adam Ingram
rejected suggestions that the US-led
coalition had effectively gone to war
on a false pretext.
He said the allegation that Downing
Street had demanded changes to the
dossier was untrue.
He told BBC Radio 4's Today
programme: "The war was fought on
the basis of all of the allegations,
much of which was substantiated,
not just by a security document produced by our security services, not
concocted by Number 10 or under pressure from Number 10 to produce
it in a particular way...
"[It came from] their best knowledge and their best assessment of what
they could declare into the public domain, based upon the knowledge of
what was out there.
"The whole world knew what
Saddam Hussein was up to in terms
of the weapons of mass destruction
and that's why we prosecuted the
war and that's why we were right."
This was echoed by senior sources
inside the British intelligence
community, who told the BBC on
Thursday night that the heads of
every agency that contributed to the dossier were satisfied with its
contents.
They were nervous, however, that this was the first time secret material
had been used in this way to support the government's case so publicly,
the sources added.
Mr Ingram accepted that the suggestion that Saddam had weapons
which could be used within 45 minutes was based on a single source.
But he said the "jigsaw was beginning to come into place" as the search
for weapons goes on.
Mr Blair has said he is still absolutely sure that weapons of mass
destruction will be found.
"Rather than speculating, let's just wait until we get the full report back
from our people who are interviewing the Iraqi scientists," he said on
Wednesday.
Propaganda
Downing Street said: "Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the
work of the intelligence agencies."
The BBC report said the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security
Committee is to conduct an inquiry into the UK Government's claims
about Saddam Hussein's regime.
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said the
report added weight to rumours that the intelligence services were
unhappy about the way their evidence was being used.
Labour MP Tam Dalyell, who opposed the war with Iraq, called for a
Commons statement on the claims.
The new questions over the dossier came as CBS reported that the
bunker that the US attacked in the hope of killing Saddam Hussein at
the beginning of the war never existed.
The American network quoted US Army Tim Madere, who is in charge of
inspecting key sites in Baghdad, as saying there was no trace of a
bunker or of any bodies at the Dora Farms. |
