Blix: US 'Acted Like Witch Hunter' in Making Case for War on Iraq

London, March 12: Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has said that the US administration acted like a witch hunter while making out a case to attack Iraq and the British Government replaced "question marks with exclamation marks" in intelligence dossiers.

"They wanted to see anything as evidence that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction," Blix said in an interview broadcast by Britain's Sky News today.

Blix, who led the UN search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until June 2003, said a later discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programme had deliberately embellished the case for war.

Tony Blair's government published a dossier before the invasion which claimed Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could deploy some within 45 minutes.

"I do think they exercised spin. They put exclamation marks instead of question marks," Blix said.

No weapons of mass destruction were found after the war, according to Lord Butler's 2004 official inquiry into intelligence on Iraq.

Blix said: "If they had allowed us to carry on the inspections a couple of months more then we would have been able to go to all the sites suspected of by intelligence-British, American or other."

Bureau Report