By Marie Woolf and David Usborne

Downing Street is to come under fresh pressure this week to explain why an intelligence report, which said there was no proof that deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein posed a growing threat to the West, was suppressed.

MPs on Sunday said British Prime Minister Tony Blair and communications and strategy chief Alastair Campbell should be forced to appear before a committee of MPs to explain why the intelligence dossier produced last March was shelved.

The six-page report, produced by staff working for the Joint Intelligence Committee, said there was no evidence that Saddam posed a significantly greater threat to the West than in 1991.

British MP's demand answers on why dossiers on Saddam was shelved

It was written in the same month Campbell told journalists in America that the government would produce evidence within a fortnight proving that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction.

The report was delayed, but six months later Blair claimed that Saddam was continuing to produce chemical and biological weapons.

It emerged this weekend that Campbell has written a personal apology to Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, for discrediting the service.

He apologised for the release to the media last January of the so-called "dodgy dossier" on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The dossier "had not met the required standards of accuracy", he said.

David Blunkett, home secretary, told BBC1's The Politics Show that he thought the dossier was "just an honest appraisal by Alastair Campbell".

'This is a programme that was built for concealment'

"I think it would be better if we hadn't published that dossier because it was about the background to Iraq, it wasn't about the identification of weapons of mass destruction," he said.

The apology will fuel claims that Downing Street quoted selectively from intelligence reports and missed out crucial qualifying facts, such as the number and reliability of sources, to make the case for war against Iraq.

On Sunday, Downing Street did not deny the existence of the six-page March intelligence dossier which said Saddam was not a growing threat. A spokesperson said its content was reflected in the longer September dossier on Iraq which is alleged to have been "sexed up" by Downing Street.

On Sunday Frank Dobson, the former health secretary, was among MPs to call for Campbell to be forced to appear before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to answer questions on the Iraq dossiers.

The United States government was also on the defensive on Sunday, vigorously denying the contention that it exaggerated the danger of Iraq's purported arsenal of weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion.

Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, said that "if you join the dots" of all that was known about Iraq in the 1990s, there could be no doubt that the arms existed and "that this was an active programme, that this was a dangerous programme and this was a programme that was being effectively concealed".

Both Rice and the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, appeared on Sunday on news magazine programmes to try to answer claims that the administration hyped the case for invading Iraq.

The weapons controversy has been intensifying in the US in recent days, just as it has become a major political problem for Blair.

Powell notably denied that US Vice-President Dick Cheney had visited CIA headquarters in order to ensure that intelligence reports reflected Bush administration policy objectives. He also insisted that evidence of the weapons - if not the weapons themselves - will soon be unearthed. "I think all the documents that are now coming forward and people who are being interviewed will tell us more about what they have hidden and where they have hidden it," he added.

When asked where the weapons were, Rice said: "This is a programme that was built for concealment. We've always known that. We've always known that it would take some time to put together a full picture of his weapons of mass destruction programmes."

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), meanwhile, surveyed a looted storage facility at the main Tuwaitha nuclear facility south of Baghdad on Sunday, where widespread looting occurred in the wake of the war.

After weeks of trying, the IAEA finally won permission from the US to inspect the plant last week.

The team, under escort from the US military, began work on Friday. - Independent Foreign Service

• This article was originally published on page 2 of The Daily News on June 09, 2003