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Britain denies spin job
29/05/2003 13:08 - (SA)
London - Britain fought off claims on Thursday that it embellished its dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, released last September in the run-up to war, to make it more exciting.
Quoting a "senior official," BBC radio said intelligence agencies had opposed the inclusion of a claim - based on a single source - that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons in just 45 minutes.
"That information was not in the original draft" prepared by British intelligence agencies, the source said. "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 stated that the transformation took place on the orders from the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who on Thursday became the first western leader of the US-led coalition to visit Iraq.
There was no immediate reaction from Blair himself, though he insisted on his flight to the Gulf on Wednesday that evidence of Iraq's development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons would yet be found.
But his office in London put out a statement rejecting the BBC report, saying: "Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies."
The dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction was a key part of Blair's case for joining the United States in going to war.
The 50-page document outlined Iraq's attempts to acquire nuclear weapons and to develop long-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel or British military bases in Cyprus.
It argued that then-president Saddam Hussein did not regard his weapons of mass destruction as "weapons of last resort," but was ready use them, including against his own population.
- AFX
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