Allies defiant over Iraq weapons evidence

Britain, the US and their supporters were continuing to back their intelligence services today, after Tony Blair rejected charges that the British government had doctored evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, in Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency said its team of nuclear safety experts would arrive in Baghdad by Friday to investigate whether remaining nuclear material stored at the Tuwaitha nuclear complex – looted after the US-led war on Iraq – was secure.

Agency inspectors left Iraq before the war began in March after a mission to verify Saddam’s claims that the country had eliminated programmes to create weapons of mass destruction. Other inspectors looked for evidence of biological and chemical weapons programmes. The United Nations had ordered Iraq to end such programmes after the 1991 Gulf War.

The United States and Britain, which used Iraq’s alleged weapons programmes as justification for the war, have faced rising criticism recently because no evidence has yet been found. Some have suggested evidence was doctored or intelligence spun ahead of the war.

In Evian, France, where he was attending the Group of Eight summit, Blair rejected those charges.

“I stand absolutely, 100% behind the evidence, based on intelligence, that we presented people,” he said at a news conference.

In Rome, US Secretary of State Colin Powell defended US intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programmes.

“There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It wasn’t a figment of anyone’s imagination,” Powell said, citing Baghdad’s use of the weapons in the war against Iran and against Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s, and the discovery of such weapons after the 1991 Gulf War.

He said the United States was putting in place the “most extensive regime imaginable” of weapons experts to locate them.

Earlier, Powell discussed Iraq’s reconstruction with Pope John Paul II in Vatican City.

The reconstruction of Iraq “must be able to count on the co-operation of the international community, and give particular attention to fundamental rights, such as the right to religious freedom,” the Vatican said after the meeting.

In Penang, Malaysia, the Australian defence minister also defended the pre-war intelligence.

Robert Hill said there was a ”mass of evidence” about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction that was “publicly acknowledged across the world”.

He admitted the coalition did not know “the full extent” of the weapons programmes’ development or dismantling but said: “We will establish that full picture in the full course of time.”

* In Baghdad, hundreds of cash-strapped former Iraqi soldiers protested to demand their salaries as a US civilian administrator promised that recruitment for the New Iraqi Corps to replace Saddam Hussein’s military would begin later this month.

At a news conference, Paul Bremer said recruitment for the corps would begin by the end of June and that thousands of demobilised enlisted men from Saddam’s army would be hired next week to clean up sites that would be used for the training of the new military.

The moves come more than a week after Bremer dissolved Saddam’s military and, in the process, threw thousands of career soldiers out of work. Yesterday’s protest by up to 2,000 former soldiers was at least the second by former military members demanding pay and benefits.

Bremer said he was “fully aware” of the difficulties facing former members of Saddam’s army who were now unemployed.

* In Basra, the British military reopened the first functioning prison in post-war southern Iraq, sending a message to an occupied country angered by a wave of crime since Saddam was overthrown.

The first inmates will be the 70 people British forces picked up after the war for a variety of crimes, such as murder, major theft or looting that damages the infrastructure the occupiers are trying to repair.