LONDON, July 7: A parliamentary probe on Monday criticized British Prime Minister Tony Blair for the way he presented the case for war against Iraq, but cleared the government of misleading the country over the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee investigated two dossiers published by the government in the run-up to war, one of which included the headline-grabbing claim that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were deployable within 45 minutes.

Deputies also probed a BBC report quoting an intelligence source who said that an official file published in September had been “sexed up” by inserting the 45-minute claim, despite the reservations of Britain’s intelligence services.

A report by the parliamentary committee said the 45-minute claim was given undue prominence and said the language used in the dossier was “more assertive than that traditionally used in intelligence documents”.

“We conclude 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. We recommend that the government explain why the claim was given such prominence,” the deputies said in their report.

The committee pointed out that without access to the original intelligence it could not know if it had been “faulty or misrepresented”.

The BBC’s story that Blair’s office beefed up information from intelligence services to persuade a sceptical public of the case for war has prompted a bitter row between the public broadcaster and the Labour government.

Meanwhile Blair has been under fire for weeks over his handling of the Iraq conflict, with polls finding that voters are losing trust in him.

But the parliamentary inquiry, on which deputies from Blair’s ruling Labour party have a majority, cleared any minister of misleading parliament.

The committee concluded that “in the absence of reliable evidence that intelligence personnel have either complained about or sought to distance themselves from the contents of the (September) dossier, allegations of politically-inspired meddling cannot credibly be established”.—AFP