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Kelly: Campbell denies charges

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON AUG 19. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair's office came under close scrutiny today for its role in drawing up the controversial Iraq intelligence dossier when Mr. Blair's powerful communications chief, Alastair Campbell, made his long-awaited appearance before the Hutton inquiry into the death of the weapons expert David Kelly.

Mr. Campbell, who was mobbed by anti-war protesters as he walked into the inquiry, denied that there was any attempt to "sex up'' intelligence as alleged by the BBC in its contentious report on May 29, attributed to a briefing by Kelly. He specifically rejected the allegation that he had anything to do with the insertion of the claim that Iraq could deploy its weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

Mr. Campbell said he first saw the claim when it appeared in a draft of the dossier nearly two weeks before the document was published, and when asked by the counsel for the inquiry whether he knew its origin, he said: "I did not know where it came from.'' He said he did not know the raw source for the claim, which it may be recalled, became a key argument in Mr. Blair's justification for war on Iraq.

Strongly denying the persistent accusation that he was responsible for embellishing intelligence to make it sound more alarming, Mr. Campbell said that on the contrary his advice was to "cut rhetoric''.

It was agreed that the contents of the dossier would be "revelatory, new and informative'', and senior intelligence officials were fully involved with the process throughout.

He also denied that there was unease among top intelligence figures over what was being put into the dossier.

In a memo to the chief of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, he wrote: "It goes without saying that nothing should be published that you and they (the intelligence community) are not 100 per cent happy with.''

Mr. Campbell's testimony came a day after it emerged that a week before the publication of the dossier, his colleague and Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, said in an internal email that "the document does nothing to demonstrate a threat let alone an imminent threat from Saddam'' and suggested that "we will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he (Saddam) is an imminent threat''.

Yet, Mr. Blair in his foreword to the dossier insisted that "I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he (Saddam) has made progress on WMD, and that he has to be stopped.''

He also raised the spectre of Iraq being able to deploy some of its WMDs within 45 minutes of an order to use them.

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