By Prins, Gwyn Salisbury, Robert This article expresses the consensus of a private seminar series which met at intervals between May 2006 and January 2008.

LONDON - An official inquiry into the quality of British intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction said Wednesday that some sources were "seriously flawed" or "unreliable" but found no evidence of "deliberate distortion or culpable negligence." The report contradicted a central claim made by Prime Minister Tony Blair and found that, before the outbreak of war in March 2003, Iraq "did not have significant, if any, stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment or developed plans for using them." Blair had said before the war that Saddam Hussein could have weapons of mass destruction ready for use within 45 minutes.

LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair, rocked for months by the fallout from the Iraq war, now faces a potentially scathing report on the quality of British intelligence used to justify the invasion.

The British government did not overstate Saddam Hussein's weapons capability in a key dossier before the Iraq war, but should have stressed that his regime was not an immediate threat to Britain, a parliamentary committee said Thursday.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's communications director denied Tuesday that he "sexed up" a government dossier on Iraqi weapons to boost the case for war, but rather advised colleagues "the drier the better, cut the rhetoric." Alastair Campbell told an inquiry into the death of a government weapons inspector that he had no input into the dossier's disputed claim that Iraq could deploy some weapons of mass destruction on 45-minutes' notice.