Blair stands by use of Iraq intelligence

Tony Blair says that he totally stands by the use made of intelligence reports in the case put to parliament to carry out military action to remove Saddam Hussein.

In replies to questions from a House of Commons liaison committee on whether parliament had been misled, Mr Blair said: "I refute that entirely… I stand by that case totally. I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein. I am quite sure we did the right thing because not merely was it a threat to the region and the wider world, but it was an appalling regime which the world is well rid of”.

Mr Blair faced questioning over the use of intelligence reports in the build-up to the Iraq war. The committee’s line of inquiry followed on from a report published yesterday by the foreign affairs committee that was highly critical of certain aspects of the handling of intelligence material.

While the report cleared up some of the controversy over how the intelligence material had been used as it was too soon to draw accurate conclusions on whether treat assessments were accurate, it was nonetheless a surprisingly candid assessment of the process by which the government had sought to use the material to prosecute the war.

In relation to the issue of weapons of mass destruction, Mr Blair was adamant that for him the jury was “not out at all” and said that he had “absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes”.

However, the prime minister said that he regretted the use of an academic thesis as a part of the February document, the so-called “dodgy dossier”.

This dossier effectively led to the basis for the war against Iraq being seriously questioned at the highest levels and the controversial nature of the gathering and manipulation of the source material, in part obtained from a 12-year-old Phd thesis. It resulted in the setting up of a committee to investigate the allegations.

The prime minister said that the government had apologised for this mistake, and that it formed only a part of the assessment presented at the time. He said that the information contained in it was correct, but should have been attributed to the author.

Asked if the suggestion made in an earlier document produced in September 2002 that Iraq could launch chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes was given undue prominence, Mr Blair, in a heated exchange with foreign affairs committee chair Donald Anderson, said he did not concede that the intelligence at the time was wrong. He pointed out that the foreign affairs committee had cleared Downing Street press chief Alastair Campbell of inserting the 45 minute claim into the document and that it been “sexed up”.

He also said allegations made by former minister Clare Short that a timetable for the war had been drawn up with President Bush during a visit to the US in September as “completely and totally untrue” and that it had been agreed to use UN pressure to avoid a conflict.

(SP)