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British lawmakers have demanded that the government should reveal all it knew about its controversial claim that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger, a British newspaper said on Wednesday.
The Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons wrote Tuesday night to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw with a detailed list of questions about the allegation, which was made in a dossier published last September on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Financial Times reported.
The committee has been investigating the government's handling of intelligence over Iraq's banned weapons during the run-up to the US-led war against Iraq, which Britain joined.
Although it said in a report published at the beginning of this month that Prime Minister Tony Blair's Office did not mislead the public and the parliament over intelligence on Iraq, the committee concluded that "jury is still out" on Iraq's banned weapons.
Blair, who has been grappling with claims that his office exaggerated threat from Iraq in order to make a stronger case for the Iraq war, is facing new embarrassment as US President George W. Bush and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have sought to distance themselves from the uranium claim.
CIA Director George Tenet has admitted that he made a mistake when he allowed Bush to make the allegation in his January speech against former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, which was proved to be based on forged documents.
However, as the row over whether Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger rumbles on, Straw still insisted that British officials were confident that the dossier's statement was based on reliable intelligence, which Britain had not shared with the United States "for good reasons."
The United States and Britain launched war against Iraq on the grounds that Iraq's banned weapons posed a serious threat, but the failure so far to find those weapons has caused turmoil over the case made for war.
Critics have accused the Bush administration and Blair's office of misleading the public by exaggerating the weapons of mass destruction threat posed by Iraq.
(Xinhua News Agency July 17, 2003)
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