LONDON (Sept. 18) - Former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix on Thursday
attacked the "spin and hype" behind U.S. and British allegations of banned
Iraqi weapons used to justify war against Saddam Hussein.

Blix, who said this week he believed Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass
destruction 10 years ago, told BBC radio that Washington and London
"over-interpreted" intelligence about Baghdad's weapons programs.

Comparing them to medieval witch-hunters, he said the two countries convinced
themselves on the basis of evidence which was later discredited, including
forged documents about alleged attempts to buy uranium for nuclear weapons.

"In the Middle Ages when people were convinced there were witches, they
certainly found them. This is a bit risky," said Blix, whose inspectors left Iraq
on the eve of war in March after just a few months of inspections.

Blix said a pre-war British dossier on Iraqi weapons "lead the reader to the
conclusions that are a little further reaching" than was the case.

"What in a way stands accused is the culture of spin, the culture of
hyping... Advertisers will advertise a refrigerator in terms that we don't quite
believe in, but we expect governments to be more serious and have more
credibility," he said.

Allegations in the British dossier that Iraq could deploy chemical and
biological weapons at 45 minutes notice have come under scrutiny at a judicial
inquiry, which has revealed that the claim referred only to short-range battlefield
munitions, not long-range missiles as was widely believed.

Before ordering the invasion that toppled Saddam, U.S. President George W.
Bush talked of an imminent threat posed by Iraqi weapons as a prime
justification for war.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair put Saddam's alleged weapons program at the
heart of his case for supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March.

But five months after Saddam's overthrow, no banned weapons have been found.

Bush and Blair have said the search will take time and that evidence will
eventually be uncovered.

"The patience that they require for themselves now was not anything that they
wanted to give to us," said Blix, whose inspectors were forced to pull out of
Iraq in March after just three and a half months' work.

He said the few "minor things" which his teams had uncovered in Iraq were
more likely to have been "debris from the past" than "tips of the iceberg" of an
existing weapons program.

Blix's comments have been echoed by his successor Demetrius Perricos, who
told Reuters it was becoming "more and more difficult to believe stocks (of WMD)
were there" in Iraq.

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