Press Association: Butler report: key findings

· In March 2002 the intelligence available was "insufficiently robust" to prove Iraq was in breach of the United Nations' resolutions.
· Validation of intelligence sources since the war has "thrown doubt" on a high proportion of these sources.
· Some of the human intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "seriously flawed" and "open to doubt".
· The Joint Intelligence Committee should not have included the "45 minute" claim in the Iraq dossier without stating what exactly it referred to.
· But the Butler report found no evidence of "deliberate distortion" of the intelligence material or of "culpable negligence".
· The language of the Government's dossier on Iraq's weapons may have left readers with the impression that there was "fuller and firmer" intelligence behind its judgments than was the case.
· Tony Blair's statement to MPs on the day the dossier was published may have reinforced this impression.
· The judgments in the dossier went to the "outer limits", although not beyond the intelligence available.
· Making public that the Joint Intelligence Committee had authorship of the Iraq dossier was a "mistaken judgment".
· This resulted in more weight being placed on the intelligence than it could bear, the report found.
· John Scarlet, the head of the JIC in the run up to the Iraq war should not resign.
· The Butler report said it would be a "rash person" who claimed that stocks of biological or chemical weapons would never be found in Iraq.
· The report found no evidence that the motive of the British Government for initiating military action in Iraq was securing continued access to oil supplies.
· The report raised concern about the "informality and circumscribed character" of the Government's policy-making procedures towards Iraq.