Iraq War Was Based On ‘Highly Suggestible’ Info

This conviction, he added, had led to intelligence material being carefully selected to back up their case for war – rather than being used as a basis for assessing whether or not the Iraqi regime posed a threat.

But he said that a controversial dossier published in September on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was "highly suggestible" and contained no fresh evidence that Baghdad had such firepower in its arsenal, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.

"The dossier is a spectacular own goal… There is very little in that document to suggest a new or alarming threat," said Cook.

Asked by the BBC if intelligence had been embellished to back the decision to go to war, Cook said: "I think there was a selection of evidence to support the conclusion."

He asserted he was "disappointed" by the quality of the intelligence in the September dossier.

Britain went to war against Iraq with information on Iraq’s alleged WMDs that was "highly suggestible," Cook charged.

The former minister restated his belief that Iraq probably had no weapons of mass destruction.

"Such weapons require substantial industrial plant and a large workforce. It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq.

"I have never ruled out the possibility that we may unearth some old stock of biological toxins or chemical agents and it is possible that we may yet find some battlefield shells," the BBC quoted him as saying.

"Nevertheless, this would not constitute weapons of mass destruction and would not justify the claim before the war that Iraq posed what the prime minister described as a ‘current and serious threat’," Cook said.

‘Honorable Deception’

Fellow ex-minister Clare Short followed, accusing Blair of a "series of half truths, exaggerations, reassurances that weren’t the case" in the run-up to war, the BBC said.

Short testified that the prime minister was guilty of "honorable deception" in the run-up to the war.

She recalling being informed by MI6, Britain’s external intelligence agency, that while Iraq was hiding the work of its weapons scientists, "the risk of use (of such weapons) was less."

MI6 believed Iraqi scientists were still working on chemical and biological weapons programs, but that the public was led to believe that Saddam had weapons ready to use, Short added.

"I think that is where the falsity lies….The exaggeration of immediacy means you cannot do things properly and action has to be immediate," AFP quoted Short as saying.

Referring to Saddam, the ex-minister said: "I still don’t think he was an immediate threat."

Short recalled that the U.S. and U.K. decided in summer 2002 that there should be a war against Iraq in early 2003.

She said this timetable prompted the exaggeration of the threat allegedly posed by Iraq and "false" links with al-Qaeda.

It also, added the ex-minister, led to abandoning efforts for a second U.N. resolution with the blame wrongly placed on France and curtailing the mission of the U.N. inspection regime.

Cook and Short were the first to testify in the foreign affairs committee probe.

Both Blair and his director of communications, Alastair Campbell, have refused to appear before the committee, which takes evidence in public and publishes its reports.

Campbell had written a personal letter apologizing to Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, for discrediting the service with the release to journalists last January of the so-called "dodgy dossier" on Iraq and WMDs.

For his part, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is to testify twice — once in public next Tuesday, June 24, and later behind closed doors.

Cook, who was Britain’s foreign secretary during NATO’s 1999 war in Kosovo, quit Blair’s government on March 17 protesting the unleashing of the war without a U.N. mandate.

So too was Short, who stepped down last month as international development minister.

The London inquiry comes ahead of a similar probe by Congress in Washington into whether the Bush administration misread or inflated threats posed by Iraq before going to war.

Since the war was declared over, there have been no significant finds in the search for Iraq’s alleged WMDs, placing the credibility of the United States and Britain on the line.