Parliament Committee Clears Blair Government of Misleading Country on Iraq
VOA News
07 Jul 2003, 10:58 UTC
A British parliamentary committee has cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair's government of allegations it misled the country to justify war against Iraq.
The Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons said Monday that Mr. Blair's director of communications, Alastair Campbell, did not use "improper influence," to affect the drafting of a controversial intelligence report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Lawmakers said Mr. Campbell played no role in including the section of the report that warned Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could deploy biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes.
However, the panel sharply criticized the British government for including questionable intelligence on Iraqi weapons in its report which was published last September. Lawmakers also said a later intelligence report, which was published in February, contained plagiarized material from a graduate school thesis posted on the Internet.
The warning about an imminent Iraqi threat sparked a dispute between the Blair government and the British Broadcasting Corporation. A BBC report quoted an unidentified intelligence source as saying aides to the prime minister added the reference to strengthen the case for war. Mr. Blair has called assertion "absurd."
Some information for this report provided by Reuters, AP and AFP.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
