BRITAIN: A powerful committee of MPs has warned the Blair government that "the jury is still out" on the accuracy of the intelligence assessment on which it took Britain to war with Iraq.
While Downing Street seized upon its headline findings to renew its battle with the BBC yesterday, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee concluded "that continuing disquiet and unease" about the claims made in the government's controversial September dossier "are unlikely to be dispelled unless more evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes comes to light".
On the casting vote of its chairman, the committee cleared the Prime Minister's communications director, Mr Alastair Campbell, of "sexing up" intelligence and of insisting that the now notorious claim - that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons at 45 minutes' notice - be included in the September dossier against the wishes of the intelligence services and knowing it probably to be wrong.
The BBC first reported the claim, attributed to a senior intelligence source in May.
At the same time, the committee concluded that the 45-minute claim did not warrant the prominence given to it in the dossier because it was based on intelligence from a single, uncorroborated source, and that "the language used in the September dossier was in places more assertive than that traditionally used in intelligence documents".
And Mr Campbell remained in the firing line as the MPs delivered a scathing verdict on the second so-called "dodgy dossier" produced in February. This contained an unattributed academic thesis downloaded from the internet in an act of plagiarism the committee declared "wholly unacceptable".
The MPs said the effect of this document was "almost wholly counter-productive", and that by producing it "the government undermined the credibility of their case for war and of the other documents which were part of it".
Extending the criticism to Mr Blair, the MPs said that, by referring to the document on the floor of the Commons as further intelligence, "the Prime Minister - who had not been informed of its provenance, doubts about which only came to light several days later - misrepresented its status, and thus inadvertently made a bad situation worse".
That was dismissed out-of-hand by the Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, Mr Michael Ancram, who said in his book "misrepresenting is misleading", and demanded that Mr Blair make an urgent statement to MPs about how this situation could have occurred.
While clearing Mr Campbell of any abuse of power, yesterday's report surprised MPs with its revelation of the extent of that power. It concluded that "it was wrong for Alastair Campbell or any other special adviser to have chaired a meeting on an intelligence matter".
It also found it "fundamentally wrong to allow such a document to be presented to parliament and made widely available without ministerial oversight", and suggested that any paper presented to parliament for the purpose of explaining the government's foreign policy should be signed-off by a Foreign Office minister.
Downing Street launched a renewed offensive against the BBC after the committee's majority report that Mr Campbell played no part in the inclusion of the 45-minute claim and that "allegations of politically-inspired meddling" by him or ministers could not credibly be established.
The Foreign Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, demanded that the BBC acknowledge "that it got it wrong" and apologise.
Speaking outside Number 10, he said: "The central and most damaging allegation against the government, that we inserted the 45-minutes intelligence into the dossier while knowing it to be untrue and against the wishes of the intelligence agencies, has been shown to be false."
The BBC insisted the committee's findings justified its decision to broadcast the stories it did and showed them to have been in the public interest.
"In particular we believe the decision to highlight the circumstances surrounding the 45-minute claim has been vindicated. It is because of BBC journalism that the problems surrounding the 45-minute claim have come to light and been given proper public attention," declared a statement.
Former Commons leader Mr Robin Cook insisted the key issue arising from the report was that failure to discover Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction would mean the war had been fought on a false premise.