Evening Times: Blair on the rack as spy chiefs attack Iraq claims

"BRITAIN's intelligence community united today in a series of astonishing attacks on Tony Blair and his handling of the run-up to war in Iraq.
Firstly, spy chiefs retracted information that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce weapons of mass destruction.
Then the former Chief of Defence Intelligence accused the government of allowing policy to drive intelligence – rather than the other way about.
And he is expected to come under fire in the Butler report on the handling of intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The report will be handed to No 10 tomorrow followed by its publication on Wednesday.
The Prime Minister's evidence to the Hutton inquiry and claims about Iraqi WMD were also questioned last night by the BBC1 Panorama programme.
His September 2002 dossier stated that: "Iraq has continued to produce chemical and biological agents."
This was a central plank of Mr Blair's case that the action was needed to counter the "current and serious" threat from Saddam. But in a rare move MI6 has now withdrawn it, a senior intelligence source told Panorama.
Mr Blair has already admitted that Iraqi WMD may never be found ahead of Lord Butler's report on intelligence failings.
However, he insisted it would have been wrong to suggest that Saddam did not pose a WMD threat.
Former senior secret service figures have gone on the record with their criticisms of Mr Blair in the Panorama programme.
Dr Brian Jones, a retired Defence Intelligence Staff branch head, called for the retracted intelligence to be published, which would show "what exactly it was and what was going on."
Dr Jones also said he was "confused" by Mr Blair's evidence to the Hutton inquiry which cleared No. 10 of "sexing-up" intelligence.
The PM told the Hutton inquiry that a "tremendous amount" of information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had crossed his desk. But Dr Jones, a long-standing critic of the Government's Iraq dossier, said he "couldn't relate" to that account.
"Certainly no one on my staff had any visibility of large quantities of intelligence of that sort," he told the programme.
The attack was intensified when John Morrison, the former Deputy Chief of DIS, questioned Mr Blair's claim that the threat from Iraq was serious and current.
When the PM told that to MPs he could "almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall", he said.
Mr Blair's public statements in the run-up to war went beyond what a professional analyst would have concluded from the evidence, he said.
Today Mr Blair came under further pressure when former deputy chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee Sir John Walker said it would be "quite customary" for intelligence organisations to issue corrections if their assessments were shown to be faulty by new information.
Asked if it would be normal for Mr Blair to issue such a correction, Sir John replied: "I would doubt that that would have happened, would it?"
Sir John raised serious concerns about the relations between the Government and the intelligence community in the run-up to the Iraq War.
He said: "I have never in my experience come across the JIC being used in this way before.
"It was clearly way outside the normal way in which the JIC operates.
"The normal run of the system should be that intelligence produces the information that it can from the information that it has and produces that information to Government and policy-makers. It is intelligence into policy.
"The thing that does worry me about this, because of the dire results of it – let's face it, the nation went to war – is that that was reversed.
"It seems to me that policy was driving intelligence and that is an extremely dangerous thing to do as a nation-state."
Fresh speculation about Mr Blair's future was triggered by news that he had been on the verge of quitting last month and Cabinet ministers had appealed to him to soldier on.
Sources said the PM was now determined to stay after telling friends there was no deal to hand power to Chancellor Gordon Brown.
But Cabinet tensions were said to be "as bad as at any stage in recent years" at the start of a crucial week.
Opponents said the Government was "losing the plot" and either the PM or Chancellor must go.
The criticism came as Mr Brown prepared to set the scene for the coming General Election in today's three-year spending review.
Tory leader Michael Howard said: "Tensions at the top of Government have now got so great they are interfering in the good government we all want to see.
"So I think it is becoming increasingly clear that one or other of them has to go."
Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy added: "This Government is losing the plot."
Cabinet colleagues who rallied round Mr Blair after it emerged he suffered a "long dark night of the soul" are said to have included John Reid, Charles Clarke, Tessa Jowell and Patricia Hewitt."