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British opposition Conservative Party Leader Iain Duncan Smith Wednesday urged Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologize for the so-called "dodgy dossier" on Iraq that was published in February.
"Why is it for this prime minister, sorry seems to be the hardest word?" Duncan Smith challenged Blair at the House of Commons, lower house of the parliament.
"Until you accept that you misrepresented the status of the second dossier to Parliament and apologize, your trust will plummet and nobody will believe a word you say," Duncan Smith added amid mounting uproar in the Commons.
Blair, who Tuesday appeared before the Commons Liaison Committee to be grilled on two Iraq dossiers published by his office, has admitted that his office made a mistake when added public material on Iraq into the February dossier without indicating sources.
However, he responded to Duncan Smith's questions by saying that British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has already apologized on behalf of the government for the fact that on part of the document was not sourced to reference material and he believed the information in the dossier was correct.
Blair also insisted that parliament was not misled over the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the US-led war against the country.
He told lawmakers that Duncan Smith was privy to intelligence information about Iraq, saying that Duncan Smith was briefed by intelligence chiefs in September and last February, while the opposition leader said he was never shown the "dodgy dossier" before publication.
The quarrel over Iraq between Blair and Duncan Smith came two days after the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that Blair unintentionally misled lawmakers about the origins of material released in the February dossier, some parts of which were found to be plagiarized from a student thesis on the Internet.
Blair, the staunchest US ally, was accused of exaggerating threat from Iraq in order to make a stronger case for war and thus misleading the public and the parliament.
The Foreign Affairs Committee, which published its report over its inquiry into the government's handling of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons, concluded Monday that the claim that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes should not have been given such prominence by Blair's office when it published an Iraq dossier last September.
The all-party committee also said that Blair "misrepresented" the status of the February dossier in parliament and "thus inadvertently made a bad situation worse.
However, the committee, a majority of whom are from Blair's ruling Labor Party, said Blair's office did not mislead the parliament on Iraq, though it said "jury is still out" on intelligence about Iraq's banned weapons.
Yet pressure is still mounting on the government to hold an independent judicial inquiry into its Iraq dossiers, after the Ministry of Defense said an official had admitted meeting the BBC journalist, who quoted a senior British official as reporting in May that the government "sexed up" the September dossier, an allegation that prompted the Commons inquiry into whether the government misled the public over Iraq.
The United States and Britain launched war against Iraq on the grounds that Iraq's alleged banned weapons posed a serious threat, but the failure so far to find those weapons has caused a turmoil over the case made for war.
(Xinhua News Agency July 10, 2003)
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