Blair treads Bush's WMD path

2004-02-03 12:06

London - The British government will hold an inquiry into the intelligence used in deciding to go to war with Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Tuesday.

Blair told a parliamentary committee that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw would make an announcement about the inquiry later on Tuesday.

"I think there are issues" about intelligence that need to be looked at, Blair said. But he insisted Saddam Hussein had had "weapons of mass destruction capability" when Britain and the United States went to war.

The announcement comes less than a week after a senior judge cleared the British government of allegations it distorted what it knew about Iraq's weapons programmes to build a case for war, and a day after US President George W Bush announced he would name an "independent, bipartisan" inquiry into faulty intelligence in Iraq.

The threat posed by Iraq's alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons was Blair's main argument for war. No such weapons have been found, and David Kay, the former head of the US-led Iraq Survey Group, has said he doesn't believe they ever will be.

Kay, who quit last month, told the US Congress last week that "it turns out we were all wrong, probably", about the Iraqi threat.

"What is true about David Kay's evidence, and this is something I have to accept as one of the reasons why I think we now need a further inquiry ... we have not found stockpiles of actual weapons," Blair told the lawmakers.

"What is untrue is to say that he is saying that there was no weapons of mass destruction programme or capability, and that Saddam was not a threat."

- AP