Spy Agencies in Britain Erred as Well
LONDON — British spy agencies used unreliable sources and exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq, but the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair did not deliberately mislead the public in making the case for war, an investigative commission concluded Wednesday.
The 196-page report by Robin Butler, a former head of the civil service, was less critical than a similar U.S. Senate document last week that scolded U.S. spy agencies for erroneously describing Iraq's weapons programs as active and dangerous.
Blair's critics said Wednesday that the prime minister had benefited from a "whitewash."
But Blair told Parliament that although he took full responsibility for intelligence failures, the report confirmed that his decision to go to war was justified, even if no weapons of mass destruction had been found and evidence of their existence looked increasingly weak.
"No one lied, no one made up intelligence
He added: "I cannot honestly say that I believe getting rid of Saddam was a mistake at all."
Despite the gentlemanly tone of Butler's report, he and the four other commission members nonetheless reached some damaging conclusions. The report found that Saddam Hussein's Iraq "did not have significant -- if any -- stocks of biological and chemical weapons in a state fit for deployment or developed plans for using them."
The report criticized the government for making allegations based on intelligence data without including vital caveats and doubts expressed by British spies. The pressure to provide an analysis that could help the government advocate its aggressive policy toward Iraq put a "strain" on the intelligence community, Butler said.
He singled out the government's unprecedented public presentation of intelligence data in September 2002, which gave the inaccurate impression that Hussein could unleash long-range chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes.
"We conclude that it was a serious weakness that
Recent inquiries by British officials have raised questions about the validity of the source behind the much-debated 45-minute claim, according to the report.
The U.S. Senate report last week found that the CIA and other agencies relied heavily on dubious information from exile groups. British and U.S. intelligence agencies have worked together on Iraq and other trouble spots.
