Lord Robin Butler, a former top civil servant, speaking in a House of Lords debate on the situation in Iraq, insisted that his July 14 report did not say "no one was to blame for the shortcomings" over the intelligence handling.

Butler and his five-strong inquiry team, in July, damned as unreliable most of the pre-war intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) but cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair of deliberate distortion.

"Although none of us on the committee doubted or doubt today the prime minister's and the government's good faith in concluding that Saddam Hussein had concealed stocks of chemical and biological weapons ... the government's dossier in September 2002 did not make clear that the intelligence underlying those conclusions was very thin," Butler told the House of Lords, Britain's upper house.

"How grave a fault that was in the context of the lead up to the war, is a matter on which people will and should reach their own conclusions."

"But we regard it as a serious weakness, a weakness which subsequently came home to roost as the conclusion about deployable stocks of chemical and biological weapons have turned out to be wrong," he said.

Butler, who headed Britain's civil service for a decade before his retirement in 2001, was widely criticised in the press for feeling it was not his place to produce a report so damning it could make Blair's position untenable.

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