"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," Reuters reports. "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.'"
John Scarlett, chairman of the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee, told the inquiry into the suicide of Iraq weapons expert David Kelly that the phrase was dropped from the September 2002 dossier on Iraq at the suggestion of Jonathan Powell, chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair. "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," Reuters reports.