The British intelligence chief responsible for a pre-war dossier on Iraq’s weapons dropped a key sentence from it days before publication after prompting from Downing Street, an inquiry heard on Tuesday.He did it at the suggestion of Jonathan Powell, Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair, the inquiry heard.The offending sentence stated that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was prepared to use chemical and biological weapons ‘‘if he believes his regime is under threat’’. Powell argued that phrase suggested Iraq was only a threat if attacked.The revelation that Powell ordered the sentence to be omitted raises fresh doubts over the intervention of Blair’s office in the compilation of the September dossier.The justification Blair gave for war — Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction — has come under intense scrutiny at the inquiry into the suicide of Iraq weapons expert David Kelly.Kelly killed himself in July shortly after being named as the source of a BBC radio report that claimed the dossier had been ‘‘sexed up’’ at the last minute at the behest of Blair’s Downing Street office. Kelly’s death and the inquiry has plunged Blair into the worst political crisis of his six-year tenure.In an e-mail to John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Powell noted that the sentence ‘‘backs up the argument that there is no CBW (chemical, biological weapons) threat and we will only create one if we attack him. I think you should redraft that para’’.Scarlett agreed to the change to what would have been the dossier’s final draft before publication. —Reuters
