Dossier not 'sexed up'

2003-06-25 18:33

London - Tony Blair's chief spin doctor Alistair Campbell has admitted there was a mistake in the so-called "dodgy dossier" on Iraq.

But he has insisted that Britain did not go to war based on a lie and strongly denies "sexing-up" the evidence on weapons of mass destruction, Sky News reports.

He said he believed the information that Saddam could deploy his weapons within 45 minutes and the threat had not been exaggerated.

Campbell is giving evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, which is investigating whether the public was misled before the war in Iraq.

The spin doctor told the committee that information had been included in the dossier on Saddam Hussein's security structures that had not been attributed to any source.

He was referring to the thesis written by Dr Ibrahim Al-Marashi, who was a student when he wrote it.

Campbell said there was no question about Dr Al-Marashi's expertise and there was nothing wrong with using his work. But the mistake came in not naming the source of the information.

Campbell said: "The care that should have been taken... was not sufficient."

He added that he had never spoken to Dr Al-Marashi and it "should not have happened in the way that it did".

The spin doctor told the committee that changes had been made to the dossier by intelligence workers, but the workers did not know the dossier was already flawed.

Campbell said as soon as the mistake came to light, procedures were put in place to make sure a similar thing could never happen again.

He said the relevant people had apologised immediately and there is nothing more they can do. Now he is demanding an apology from the BBC that had said the 45-minute threat had been "sexed-up".

The BBC was defending a "very, very serious" allegation they knew to be untrue, Campbell said. And he added: "We have apologised in relation to Dr Al-Marashi and I think it's about time the BBC apologised to us in relation to the 45-minute point."

Earlier, Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted the dossier was "entirely accurate".

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