CIA chief contradicts Cheney, rejecting Iraq link to Al-Qaida
San Jose Mercury News -- March 10, 2004
By Jonathan S. Landay
WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet on Tuesday rejected recent assertions by Vice President Dick Cheney that Iraq cooperated with the Al-Qaida terrorist network and that the administration had proof of an illicit Iraqi biological warfare program.
IRAQ:
CIA Chief Clueless on Neo-Con Intelligence Channel
Inter Press Service News Agency -- March 10, 2004
Analysis - By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 10 (IPS) - Was Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet really the last person in Washington to find out that both the president and vice president were being fed phoney or ''sexed up'' intelligence about pre-war Iraq by a Pentagon office staffed by ideologically driven neo-conservatives?
McCain Says WMD Commission Needs Subpoena Power
Reuters -- March 7, 2004
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said on Sunday the commission created by President Bush to investigate intelligence failures in the buildup to the Iraq war needs subpoena power.
McCain, a member of the bipartisan panel, said such powers would give commission "certain credibility," and voiced hope an agreement would be reached to obtain it.
Asked on ABC's "This Week" if he would continue to serve on the commission if it did not get subpoena power, McCain, a maverick, said, "I'd hate to throw down a gauntlet like that."
"I am hopeful and somewhat optimistic that this could be worked out," McCain said.
Bush, under pressure from Democrats and Republicans, created the commission on Feb. 6 to determine why no weapons of mass destruction have been found in postwar Iraq. The Bush administration cited the threat of such weapons programs as a primary reason for the Iraqi war.
"It's clear that there were intelligence failures," McCain said. "But that does not in any way, in my view, remove the justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power."
Bush gave the commission until March 31, 2005, to report back, meaning results will not be known until after November when voters decide whether to give him a second term.
McCain said, "I think it needs subpoena power, and I think it needs to look at every aspect of the intelligence situation, including how intelligence was used."
"It's not because I don't trust the administration. There are other agencies outside government and other governments outside the United States that probably we need to have information from," McCain said.
© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.
Senators question intelligence chiefs on Iraq WMD
Reuters via The Daily Times -- March 6, 2004
WASHINGTON: The Senate Intelligence Committee questioned the heads of the major US intelligence agencies behind closed doors on Thursday about prewar estimates on Iraqi weapons programs, which critics say showed a stronger threat than what was discovered after the US-led invasion.
The directors of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, flanked by staff, met with the Senate panel that is drafting a report expected to criticize the prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Blair wants more pre-emptive military strikes
ABC News Online -- March 6, 2004
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, battling to shake off the damaging controversy of the Iraq war, has called for a shake-up of the United Nations and suggested international law may needed changing to allow pre-emptive military strikes.
Blair lacked critical thinking, says Blix
The Guardian -- March 6, 2004
Richard Norton-Taylor and David Leigh
Hans Blix, the UN's former chief weapons inspector, last night delivered a robust critique of Tony Blair's defence of the invasion of Iraq, questioning the prime minister's judgment, especially his response to claims made by the intelligence agencies.
Kennedy says Bush deceived U.S. into Iraq
Accusation of 'fear mongering' signals new wave of criticism by Democrats
New York Times via San Francisco Chronicle -- March 6, 2004
Douglas Jehl
Washington -- Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered a blistering indictment Friday of President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, accusing Bush of deliberately exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime.
U.S., Certain That Iraq Had Illicit Arms, Reportedly Ignored Contrary Reports
New York Times -- March 6, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON — In the two years before the war in Iraq, American intelligence agencies reviewed but ultimately dismissed reports from Iraqi scientists, defectors and other informants who said Saddam Hussein's government did not possess illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The reports, which ran contrary to the conclusions of the intelligence agencies and the Bush administration, were not acknowledged publicly by top government officials before the invasion last March. In public statements, the agencies and the administration cited only reports from informants who supported the view that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction, which the administration cited as a main justification for going to war.
The first public hint of those reports came in a speech on Friday by Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, she said "indications" were emerging from the panel's inquiry into prewar intelligence that "potential sources may have been dismissed because they were telling us something we didn't want to believe: that Iraq had no active W.M.D. programs."
Other government officials said they knew of several occasions from 2001 to 2003 when Iraqi scientists, defectors and others had told American intelligence officers, their foreign partners or other intelligence agents that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons.
The officials said they believed that intelligence agencies had dismissed the reports because they did not conform to a view, held widely within the administration and among intelligence analysts, that Iraq was hiding an illicit arsenal.
The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment directly on Ms. Harman's remarks. But an intelligence official said: "Human intelligence offering different views was by no means discounted or ignored. It was considered and weighed against all the other information available, and analysts made their best judgments."
The government officials who described the contradictory reports have detailed knowledge of prewar intelligence on Iraq and were critical of the C.I.A.'s handling of the information. Because the information remains classified, the officials declined to discuss the identity of the sources in any detail, but said they believed the informants' views had been dismissed because they challenged the widely held consensus on Iraq's weapons.
"It appears that the human intelligence wasn't deemed interesting or useful if it was exculpatory of Iraq," said one senior government official with detailed knowledge of the prewar intelligence.
A second senior government official, who confirmed that account, said the view that Iraq possessed illicit weapons had been "treated like a religion" within American intelligence agencies, with alternative views never given serious attention. The officials said they could not quantify the reports.
In a speech at Georgetown University last month, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, acknowledged for the first time that intelligence agencies might have been mistaken about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons. None have been found yet.
Mr. Tenet said it was too soon to make final judgments. But he also defended intelligence analysts' performance, saying that they had not been swayed by political pressure and that "as intelligence professionals, we go where the information takes us."
He met Friday morning in a closed session with members of the House intelligence committee, as part of its inquiry into the prewar intelligence. In another closed session on the subject on Thursday, he spent more than four hours with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, issued a statement describing "a frank and useful exchange."
Senator Roberts said the committee hoped "sometime in the next several weeks" to issue an "initial report" based on its inquiry, which has focused on whether findings by intelligence agencies were supported by adequate evidence.
Among the reports that were discounted, the senior government officials said, was at least one account from an Iraqi scientist who said mysterious trailers described by other Iraqi defectors as part of a biological weapons program were for another, benign purpose, which the officials would not describe.
In prewar presentations and documents, including the unclassified version of a National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the Security Council in February 2003, the intelligence agencies and the administration cited only human intelligence reports supporting the view that the trailers were for biological weapons.
An unclassified report issued in May by the C.I.A., which is still on the agency's Web site, concluded that the trailers had indeed been for biological weapons. But in the months since the war, most American intelligence analysts have come to believe that the trailers were not for that purpose, and were probably for making hydrogen for weather balloons, according to senior government officials. In testimony before Congress late last month, Mr. Tenet said the intelligence community was divided on the issue.
In the past month, some senior intelligence officials have acknowledged that some information from human sources on Iraq was mishandled, including reports based on interviews in early 2002 with an Iraqi defector who later that year was labeled a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The information the defector provided was nevertheless included in the administration's statements, including the October 2002 intelligence assessment and Mr. Powell's speech. Intelligence officials have described the inclusion as a mistake.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Kennedy Says Bush Exaggerated Threat Posed by Saddam Hussein
VOA -- 6 Mar 2004
Nick Simeone
Washington --
One of the U.S. Senate's most senior Democrats is accusing President Bush of exaggerating the threat that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed to the world. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy used a speech Friday to question why CIA Director George Tenet waited until last month to say that Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction did not pose an imminent danger.
[Pre-war Trailers of Mass Desctruction claims based on hearsay.
Post-war TMD claims based on specious assessment.]
Experts Say U.S. Never Spoke to Source of Tip On Bioweapons
Information From Iraqi Relayed By Foreign Agency, CIA Notes
Washington Post -- March 5, 2004
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
The Bush administration's prewar assertion that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers, according to current and former senior intelligence officials and congressional experts who have studied classified documents.
In his presentation before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said "firsthand descriptions" of the mobile bioweapons fleet had come from an Iraqi chemical engineer who had defected and is "currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him."
The claims about the mobile facilities remain unverified, however, and now U.S. officials are trying to get access to the Iraqi engineer to verify his story, the sources said, particularly because intelligence officials have discovered that he is related to a senior official in Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who actively encouraged the United States to invade Iraq.
Powell also cited another defector in his speech, an Iraqi major who was made available to U.S. officials by the INC, as supporting the engineer's story. The major, however, had already been "red-flagged" by the Defense Intelligence Agency as having provided questionable information about Iraq's mobile biological program. But DIA analysts did not pass along that cautionary note, and the major was cited in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and was mentioned in Powell's speech, officials said.
The administration's handling of intelligence alleging the existence of mobile bioweapons facilities has become part of several broad investigations now underway into the intelligence community's faulty prewar conclusions that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Senate and House intelligence committees are conducting probes, as are the CIA and a commission appointed by President Bush.
The investigation of claims about mobile weapons labs, however, does not just cover prewar intelligence, but also includes the performance of the intelligence community well after the invasion.
U.S. intelligence officials now describe as hasty and premature the May 28 public claim by the CIA and the DIA that two semitrailers discovered in Iraq in April were most likely part of the bioweapons fleet. [ed. Ya think?!]
The highly publicized claim, one official said, was triggered by a May 11 NBC News broadcast featuring David Kay, then a network analyst in Iraq, who would later become the chief U.S. weapons inspector there. Kay was shown next to one of the found vehicles with a chemical officer from the Army's 101st Airborne Division who, on camera, agreed that the semitrailer was equipped to make biological weapons.
Days later in Washington, the CIA and the DIA put out an unclassified white paper that said the production of biological agents "is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles." The next day, Bush said the trailers showed that the United States had found former Iraqi president Hussein's prohibited weapons. "For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong," Bush said. "We found them."
Since then, intelligence analysts and Kay, a nuclear-weapons expert with little experience with biological weapons, have said the trailers were probably not used in a bioweapons program. Kay has said he believes the trailers were likely used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons.
CIA Director George J. Tenet is expected to face questions today about the alleged mobile bioweapons fleet and other elements of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs when he appears in a closed session of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He appeared before the Senate intelligence committee in closed session yesterday.
The Senate committee has drafted a highly critical report on the prewar intelligence of the CIA and other agencies. The problems uncovered in the mobile-bioweapons area illustrate what the panel has found in the collection and analysis of information about Iraq's chemical and nuclear programs.
Tenet has already disclosed that the agency has changed some procedures as a result of the problems discovered by its reviews. For example, there are new procedures on how to handle material flagged as coming from questionable sources, such as the Iraqi major. CIA analysts are now to be given more information from the CIA's operations division to help them assess the reliability of those who provide information.
CIA officials reviewing the bioweapons intelligence say that the engineer who provided the original tip never dealt directly with U.S. intelligence agencies, and that he passed along the information through a foreign intelligence service, which they refuse to name. U.S. intelligence analysts did not know his name before the war, relying entirely on foreign officials to vouch for his credibility, according to a former CIA employee as well as administration and congressional sources.
U.S. officials are trying to interview him, sources said, but the foreign intelligence service that originally forwarded his information has declined to produce him for questioning.
The May 28 white paper on the semitrailers is also under scrutiny. A retired senior intelligence official said recently that the unclassified paper was hastily put together before a full, classified analysis was written and circulated within the intelligence community.
The paper was produced so quickly, one senior administration official said, because of Kay's May appearance on NBC, in which he pointed to one semitrailer and said: "This is where the biological process took place . . . literally, there's nothing else you would do this way in a mobile facility."
Kay said he returned to Iraq as a U.S. weapons inspector a month after his television appearances and found that the DIA analysts who had inspected the trailers disagreed that they were part of mobile biological-agent production plants. By January, Kay had reassessed the matter, saying publicly that the "intelligence consensus" was that the semitrailers probably were for making hydrogen, not biological agents.
Administration officials continued to describe the threat posed by Hussein's mobile biological-weapons facilities.
On Jan. 22, Vice President Cheney told National Public Radio that Hussein had "spent time and effort acquiring biological weapons labs" and that the semitrailers "were, in fact, part of that program." He called the trailers "conclusive evidence, if you will, that he [Hussein] did in fact have programs of mass destruction."
On Feb. 24, Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee that there was "a big debate" about the trailers among CIA analysts "who still believe that they were for" bioweapons, and CIA and DIA analysts "who have posited another theory . . . and we haven't wrestled it to the ground yet."
Tenet said he had talked to Cheney and learned that his January statement was based on "an older judgment."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
[The 11th of September justifies anything.]
Blair warns of WMD terror threat
CNN International -- March 5, 2004
LONDON, England (CNN) -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned of the "real" threat of international terrorism and how it has to be confronted at all costs.
["It ain't on me. Those shmucks shouldn't have believed our lies."]
Iraq's Chalabi Says 'Blame CIA, Not Me' About WMD
Reuters -- March 5, 2004
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi says he is tired of being blamed for misleading the United States about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and points the finger instead at the CIA in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" to be aired on Sunday.
Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress exile group and has close ties to the Bush administration, says the CIA should have done a better job analyzing information received from defectors he steered their way.
"This is a ridiculous situation," says Chalabi, who still maintains that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq.
Chalabi said the CIA knew defectors can be biased and that even the press was saying "'defectors have an ax to grind, don't believe them."'
"Now you're telling me that despite all this public evidence, the United States government took our word without checking out the people?" Chalabi said incredulously .
"Intelligence people who are supposed to do a better job for their country and their government did not do such a good job."
Chalabi, who was born into a prominent Iraqi family but spent 45 years outside Iraq before returning in April, denies coaching defectors, something the CIA believe he's done for years, according to a former CIA analyst interviewed on the show.
The analyst, Ken Pollack, who now works for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and for CNN, said the Bush administration used the information to label Iraq an imminent threat.
Pollack said they were looking "to simply confirm a preconceived notion of an extremely threatening Iraq ... on the cusp of acquiring the most advanced ... dangerous weapons."
Pollack blames senior U.S. officials, not Chalabi.
"This is one of those ... 'fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me,"' said Pollack. "Chalabi has a track record. We knew this guy wasn't telling us the truth."
A defiant Chalabi said he was eager to further defend himself.
"I want to be asked to testify in the United States Senate in the Intelligence Committee. I want to do this in an open session," he says.
© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.
Seeking subpoenas
McCain and Bush clash on powers, scope of intel probe
The Hill -- March 4, 2004
By Alexander Bolton
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is pushing the White House to give subpoena power to the independent commission President Bush created last month to investigate intelligence operations.
The administration has turned him down, but the senator is refusing to take no for an answer
Admit WMD mistake, survey chief tells Bush
The Guardian -- March 3, 2004
Julian Borger in Washington
David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.
In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Kay said the administration's reluctance to make that admission was delaying essential reforms of US intelligence agencies, and further undermining its credibility at home and abroad.
[Seen at Cursor.]
Doubts cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida
Knight Ridder Washington Bureau -- March 2, 2004
By Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida - one of the administration's central arguments for a pre-emptive war - appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons.
[White House abandons War on Terror to focus on Invasion of Iraq. Seen at Buzzflash.]
Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind
MSNBC -- March 2, 2004
Abu Musab Zarqawi blamed for more than 700 killings in Iraq
By Jim Miklaszewski, Correspondent, NBC News
Updated: 7:14 p.m. ET March 02, 2004
With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.
But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.
Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.
The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.
The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late — Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. “Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq,” Cressey added.
And despite the Bush administration’s tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they strike, Zarqawi’s killing streak continues today.
A Tale of Two Intelligence Estimates
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- March 2004
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq is frequently portrayed as the result of either intelligence failures or misrepresentation of the intelligence by others. In fact, both were involved. It appears that a third factor was involved as well: misrepresentation of intelligence by the intelligence community itself.
The Editorial Pages and the Case for War
Did Our Leading Newspapers Set Too Low a Bar for a Preemptive Attack?
Columbia Journalism Review -- March/April 2004
BY CHRIS MOONEY
On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now infamous presentation to the United Nations concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and its ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network. At the time, many journalists, members of Congress, and key Security Council nations remained unconvinced of the necessity of invading Iraq. Laced with declassified satellite imagery, communications intercepts, and information gleaned from Iraqi defectors, Powell’s speech sought to bolster the Bush administration’s case for war by demonstrating an “accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior” on Iraq’s part. And it enjoyed a strikingly warm reception from one key U.S. audience: the editorial page writers of major newspapers.
“Irrefutable,” declared The Washington Post. Powell “may not have produced a ‘smoking gun,’” added The New York Times, but his speech left “little question that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal one.” Similar assessments came from four other editorial pages that cjr chose to examine — the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. Many foreign papers viewed Powell’s presentation more skeptically, but the endorsements from these six leading domestic editorial boards — four of which would ultimately support the war — strengthened Bush’s hand considerably. “If and when the administration gets editorial support from the elite media, it’s just about a done deal, because the public will fall in line,” says David Domke, a professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle who has studied editorial page response to 9/11 and the Iraq war.
New Canberra probe into WMD intel
CNN -- March 1, 2004
By CNN's Grant Holloway
CANBERRA, Australia -- The Australian government has ordered an independent inquiry into the intelligence advice provided on the threat posed by Iraq to world security.
An Australian parliamentary inquiry report, released Monday, criticized the advice provided to the government on Iraq and recommended an independent assessment of the issue.
In a statement released Monday, Prime Minister John Howard said his government accepted the recommendation and also that the assessment should be carried out by an experienced former intelligence expert.
Howard said he would name the person to carry out the inquiry, and the terms of reference, shortly.
Australia staunchly supported the invasion of Iraq -- providing troops and equipment -- as a necessary pre-emptive strike to destroy Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program.
No WMD stockpiles have been discovered in Iraq, however, since the invasion began 11 months ago, creating pressure on the Australian government to justify its decision.
The parliamentary inquiry found that Australian intelligence agencies may have "overstated" the case for Iraq's WMD, but added that they were "more moderate and cautious than those of the partner agencies in the U.S. and the UK."
The committee said the government should review its intelligence agencies and in particular it should assess the capacity of the Office of National Assessments (ONA) which specifically provides advice to the prime minister.
The committee found that the ONA was "more ready to extrapolate a threatening scenario from historical experience" and more ready to accept "new and mostly untested intelligence" than other Australian agencies.
The ONA was thrown into the spotlight in March last year following the resignation of one of its officers Andrew Wilkie amid a blaze of publicity.
Wilkie quit in protest over what he described as the government's misuse of information provided by the agency.
And last August, Wilkie told a senate inquiry into the Iraq war that key words from ONA reports, which qualified the veracity of intelligence reports on Iraq's WMDs, had been removed by the prime minister's office.
They had been replaced by more emotive language which supported the government's position on the threat of Iraq, he said at the time.
But Monday's report largely absolves the government from any blame in the situation saying there was "no evidence that political pressure was applied to the (intelligence) agencies" and that is presentation of evidence had been "consistent, moderate and measured".
The report's findings matched those of the Hutton inquiry in Britain, which cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair's government of "sexing up" intelligence to justify the war.
"The government stands by its presentation of the case for disarming Iraq of its WMD capabilities," Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said in a statement Monday.
Evidence collected since the conflict began showed Saddam "was pursuing WMD programs and that his regime was concealing these activities from U.N. inspectors," Downer said.
Tories withdraw from WMD inquiry
The Scotsman -- 1 March 2004
Brendan O'Brien
Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, has announced his party has withdrawn from the Butler inquiry into intelligence failures in the assessment of Iraq’s WMD capability.
Mr Howard said his party withdrew their support because of the limited nature of the inquiry. Lord Butler’s committee will focus on structures and systems rather than individuals.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, Mr Howard expressed his dissatisfaction on what he regards as a narrower interpretation of the inquiry’s terms of references than the two leaders had agreed to. "Lord Butler has chosen to interpret his terms of reference in what I regard as an unacceptably restrictive fashion," he said.
The withdrawal of Conservative participation will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the inquiry which has now become a one party affair. The Liberal Democrats refused to support the inquiry from the outset.
However, when challenged a prime ministerial spokesman said the inquiry would continue regardless.
"This is an independent inquiry looking independently at the issues and it has a broad-based membership. Whether others choose to be a part of it or not is a matter for them, but this inquiry will continue," he said.