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)
