30 September 2004	Thursday	14 Shaban 1425

LONDON, Sept 29: Britain started to plan the invasion of Iraq months before the conflict, even as Prime Minister Tony Blair was denying he was on a course for war, according to a report Wednesday quoting a leaked Pentagon document.

Senior British and US commanders met at a war-planning session in June 2002 and orders to prepare actual military operations were given on October 7, 2002, more than a month before a UN resolution giving a final warning to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the London Evening Standard reported.

Full battle plans were issued on October 31, 2002, eight days before UN Resolution 1441 called for the resumption of arms inspections in Iraq and warned Saddam of "serious consequences" if he were still seeking weapons of mass destruction, the paper said.

The document quoted in the report is a Pentagon chronology used by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in an August 2003 presentation on the "strategic lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom".

The chronology lists a "UK and Australia planning conference" on June 28, 2002. But three weeks later, on July 16, the prime minister rejected the notion that Britain was gearing up for an invasion.

When asked by a lawmaker whether Britain was "preparing for possible military action in Iraq", Blair responded, according to the paper: "No, there are no decisions which have been taken about military action."

The newspaper report was written by defense and security journalist Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC radio reporter whose claim that Blair had "sexed up" his pre-war dossier with a claim about Iraqi weapons capability led to his ouster and a showdown between the government and public broadcaster.

Britain's defense ministry refused to confirm or deny the report, Gilligan wrote. "The latest disclosures sit uneasily with Mr. Blair's denials that the government was following a course toward war," he said. -AFP