05 February 2004	Thursday	13 Zilhaj 1424

LONDON, Feb 4: British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday admitted in parliament that experts have not found the weapons of mass destruction that he cited as the reason to go to war in Iraq , but strongly defended the case for military action.

In a debate interrupted by anti-war protesters, Blair told deputies he accepted inspectors "have not found what I and many others confidently expected they would - actual weapons ready for immediate use."

But, passionately defending his decision to go to war alongside the United States, Blair said the Iraq Survey Group hunting for banned weapons had discovered laboratories and other material in breach of United Nations resolutions.

"What they have found are laboratories, technology, diagrams, documents, teams of scientists told to conceal their work on biological, nuclear and chemical weapons capabilities, that in sum amounts to breaches of UN resolutions many, many times over," Blair said.

During exchanges disrupted by protesters shouting "murderer", Blair, the staunchest international ally of US President George W. Bush in the Iraq conflict, insisted: "I am not ashamed of taking the decision to go to war.

"I think we did the right thing... I think this country and its armed forces should be proud of what we achieved."

Saddam's refusal to give up his alleged pursuit of weapons, as required by the United Nations, was cited by Blair as the main reason for taking Britain into the conflict in March.

Blair was speaking during a parliamentary debate about the Hutton judicial inquiry, which last week cleared his government of wrongdoing in events leading to the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly last July.

Instead, the probe by senior judge Brian Hutton blasted the BBC for a report which claimed the government "sexed up" a key intelligence dossier on Iraqi weapons.

The BBC story was "100 percent wrong", Blair told deputies.

Blair's critics were given new ammunition Wednesday when an ex-military intelligence official said Britain's spy chiefs ignored warnings from leading experts that it was not certain Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons before the war.

Brian Jones, who was in charge of the nuclear, chemical and biological branch of Britain's Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) until January 2003, claimed that an intelligence dossier produced by the government in September 2002 "was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."

The dossier was a key plank of Blair's case in persuading a sceptical British public to back the campaign which ousted Saddam Hussein as Iraqi president.

Jones told The Independent newspaper that he and other experts had formally complained about the drafting of the dossier because they feared being made "scapegoats" if no weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq.

"In my view, the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier back in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities," Jones said.

He added: "There was no indication that the Iraqi military had practised the use of CW (chemical warfare) or BW (biological warfare) weapons for more than a decade." But Blair swept aside Jones' claims, saying they were not of "earth-shattering significance", adding that his concerns had not reached Downing Street when the September dossier was being drawn up.

The prime minister also rejected demands to widen the scope of a fresh probe announced Tuesday into whether the intelligence he used to justify the Iraq war was faulty.

The smaller opposition Liberal Democrat Party has refused to be represented on the committee carrying out the investigation, claiming its remit is too narrow and that it will not examine the political use of intelligence by the government. -AFP