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With British lawmakers on Wednesday set to debate the Hutton Report on arms expert David Kelly's death, a former senior intelligence official has again voiced his concerns over the government's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Brian Jones, a former section head at the Defense Intelligence Staff (DIS) but now retired, told the Independent newspaper Wednesday the DIS' "unified view" on assessments of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons was over-ruled by other intelligence agency chiefs and the dossier they produced was consequently misleading.
Jones' remarks came in the wake of publication of the Hutton Report last week which concluded that Downing Street had not inserted material in the dossier against the wishes of the intelligence services.
The Hutton report exonerated the government of the charge of inserting material in the dossier against the wishes of the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, but criticized the BBC, resulting in the resignation of its chairman and director general.
Jones said: "In my view, the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier ... resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."
"There was no indication that the Iraqi military had practiced the use of CW (chemical warfare) or BW (biological warfare) weapons for more than a decade," he added.
Jones was the head of the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons section of the DIS, a military assessment service inside the Ministry of Defense, until January 2003.
He blamed the heads of the intelligence agencies for "over-ruling" his team -- despite the fact that his staff were, in his opinion, the "foremost group of analysts in the West" on chemical and biological weapons intelligence.
"On balance the DIS experts felt it should be recorded that a CW or BW capability level was a probability, but argued against its statement in stronger terms" in the dossier, he said.
Jones' views echo the concerns he expressed to the Hutton inquiry last summer, when he said parts of the dossier were over-egged.
In response, opposition Conservative Party leader Michael Howard backed Jones' call for the secret intelligence to be published.
Such a move could alter his decision to accept Lord Hutton's conclusions, he suggested.
"Of course, if new evidence becomes available which casts doubt on the Hutton findings then it would be foolish not to take that new evidence into account," Howard told BBC Radio 4's Today program.
On behalf of Britain's second largest opposition party, the Liberal Democrats, foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said Jones was amongst those set to dash the government's determination that the new inquiry should not be a re-run of the Hutton hearings.
"The government hopes this story will lie down. Every time it tries to drive a stake into it, the story just jumps up again," he told the Today program.
The Liberal Democrats are refusing to take part in the latest inquiry on the grounds that it will not consider the political judgments that were made on the intelligence.
On Tuesday British Prime Minister Tony Blair set up an independent inquiry to examine the intelligence on Iraq's WMD in the light of the failure to find any since former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's fall.
Pressure has been growing on both sides of the Atlantic since David Kay, the man heading the weapons hunt in Iraq, quit his post.
Kay said intelligence suggesting Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons was wrong.
(Xinhua News Agency February 5, 2004)
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