Two former British intelligence officials said Sunday that Prime Minister Tony Blair overstated what Britain knew about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) inthe run-up to the war.

These remarks came as Blair is bracing for a possibly damaging report by Lord Butler into the quality of British intelligence, which is expected by local media to criticize Britain's spy masters and some government figures.

Brian Jones, who was a top official at the Defense Intelligence Staff (DIS) until last year, told BBC television that no one on his staff had seen evidence of the scale of weapons capability being touted by Downing Street.

"There was a reasonable assumption that there may have been some stocks left over from the first Gulf War... If there had been any other production then we had not identified that it had taken place," Jones said.

"Certainly no one on my staff had any visibility of large quantities of intelligence of that sort," Jones said.

Meanwhile, John Morrison, former deputy chief of DIS until 1999,told the BBC that he could "almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall," when Blair told lawmakers that the threat from Iraq was serious and current.

"In moving from what the dossier said Saddam had, which was a capability possibly, to asserting that Iraq presented a threat, then the prime minister was going way beyond anything any professional analyst would have agreed," Morrison said.

On Saturday, Pauline Neville-Jones, former head of Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which assesses intelligence for the government, said that Blair must take responsibility for any intelligence failings identified in the Butler report.

Local media expect that the Butler report will conclude the claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction(WMD) within 45 minutes was "vague and poorly founded."

The 45-minute claim, used by Blair to justify war on Iraq, was made four times in the British government's dossier on Iraq's WMD issued in September 2002, including in Blair's foreword.

The prime minister's ratings tumble in opinion polls since last year's war in Iraq and since no such banned weapons have been found in Iraq, the 45-minute claim has been discredited. Even Blair himself has admitted those weapons may be never discovered.

Blair is expected to respond to Butler's report with a statement to parliament later Wednesday.

Source: Xinhua