Britain's Iraq Data Deemed 'Flawed'

After the war ended and MI6 sent analysts to Iraq to track down and confirm the material it had relied upon, the report said, doubts -- "and in some cases serious doubts" -- emerged about the reliability of at least three sources whose intelligence had helped to underpin British assessments.

Although the Joint Intelligence Committee's confidential assessments to Blair before the war emphasized that sources were thin and questionable, the dossier prepared for the public omitted those caveats. "Warnings were lost about the limited intelligence base on which some aspects of these assessments were being made," the panel concluded. This was "a serious weakness."

When new intelligence from an untested source arrived in September, two weeks before the dossier was published, MI6 used it in the dossier but refused to share it with weapons experts at the Defense Ministry's intelligence service who might have cast doubts on its validity, the inquiry said. That intelligence was withdrawn in July 2003 because it was found to be unreliable.

With publication of the dossier in the name of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the inquiry concluded, "more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear."

But the report defended as "well founded" the dossier's claim that Iraq had sought to obtain enriched uranium from African countries. The CIA has questioned the claim, saying it was based on forged papers, but the Butler panel said there were other sources for the assertion.

The inquiry expressed surprise that British policymakers and analysts did not reevaluate their findings in early 2003 after U.N. inspectors failed to find weapons in Iraq.

The inquiry also criticized Blair's leadership style. Although there were 24 separate discussions of the war in Blair's cabinet, the inquiry said, ministers were given no warning of most of the sessions or given copies of the detailed papers that some departments had prepared. Instead, most of the discussions were held on the basis of oral presentations, "reducing the scope for informed collective political judgment."

Blair has been President Bush's strongest international ally on Iraq, a stance that has seriously damaged his popularity with voters here. He said Wednesday that he hoped the new report -- the fourth inquiry to have focused on the war and cleared the government of falsifying or exaggerating intelligence -- would finally convince critics that he had acted in good faith.

"No one lied, no one made up intelligence, no one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services," he told lawmakers.

But Robin Cook, a former cabinet minister who resigned to protest the war, said that "the unavoidable conclusion" of the report's content is "that we committed British troops to action on the basis of false intelligence, overheated analysis and unreliable sources."