An inquiry report said Wednesday that some sources of the
British intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) were "seriously flawed," but no evidence of
"deliberate distortion or culpable negligence" has been found.
Lord Butler, who led the five-month inquiry, told a news
conference that Saddam probably had no WMD ready for use before the
war in 2003, saying that the government's claim of Saddam Hussein
being capable of deploying WMD within 45 minutes should not have
been asserted without qualification.
Saddam "did not have significant, if any, stocks of chemical or
biological weapons in a state it for deployment or developed plans
for using them," said Lord Butler in his 196-page report.
The report thus contradicted a central claim made by British
Prime Minister Tony Blair that Iraq possessed WMD and posed a
"serious and current" threat to the West during the run-up to war
with Iraq last year.
However, the report apportioned no blame for the quality of the
intelligence or how it was used in the government's case for
war.
There was "no deliberate attempt on the part of the government
to mislead," the report said.
"No single individual was to blame. This was a collective
operation," the report said, referring to the failures in the
intelligence-gathering on Iraqi banned weapons before the war.
The report criticized that the Joint Intelligence Committee
(JIC) should not have included in the dossier the claim that Iraq
could use WMD within 45 minutes without explaining what the claim
referred to.
Moreover, intelligence chiefs' warnings about the limits of
their information were not made clear enough in the government's
September 2002 key dossier on Iraq's WMD, the report said.
"We conclude that it was a serious weakness that the JIC's
warnings on the limitations of intelligence underlying its
judgments were not made sufficiently clear in the dossier," said
the report.
"The prime minister's description, in his statement to the House
of Commons on the day of the publication of the dossier, as
'extensive, detailed and authoritative' may have reinforced this
impression," it said.
"This was a serious flaw," the report concluded, adding that
Blair's following statement to British lawmakers at the time may
have reinforced the impression that there was "firmer and fuller
intelligence."
The report also criticized that MI6 did not check its sources
well enough, and sometimes relied on third hand reports.
"Validation of human intelligence sources after the war has
thrown doubt on a high proportion of those sources and of their
reports, and hence on the quality of the intelligence assessments
received by ministers and officials in the period from summer
2002to the outbreak of hostilities," it said.
Although being highly critical of British intelligence-gathering
in Iraq, the report said John Scarlett, the then head of JIC
drawing up the Iraq dossier and appointed as MI6 chief by Blair in
May, should not bear sole responsibility.
The report also called for greater divide between the British
government and intelligence services, citing that the informality
of the procedures within Blair's government for forming policies on
the risks posed by Iraq "reduced the scope for informed collective
political judgment."
The Butler inquiry was set up in February in the wake of the
failure to find any banned weapons in Iraq, amid suggestions that
the UK's prewar intelligence might have been wrong.
In the US, the Senate's intelligence committee has condemned the
CIA for wildly over-egging its tenuous evidence and even Blair
himself admitted last week that those weapons may never be
discovered.
Blair, whose public ratings have tumbled in opinion polls since
last year's war in Iraq, will address the House of Commons on the
Butler report at about 1330 BST (1230 GMT).
(Xinhua News Agency July 15, 2004)