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London: A House of Commons Committee on July 7 issued a damning report over Prime Minister Tony Blair's justification for going to war in Iraq but it cleared his communication chief Alastair Campbell of exerting "improper influence" on the drafting of the first dossier, which is the centre of a standoff between the government and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Campbell's exoneration came only on the casting vote of the 11-member committee's Labour chairman, Donald Anderson.

The Commons Foreign Affairs Committee was highly critical of the two dossiers on Saddam's weapons capabilities published in September 2002 and February 2003.

Anderson told a Westminster news conference that the three Conservatives and the lone Liberal Democrat on the committee had voted against the report because they could not accept the findings on Campbell.

"Six members believed that there was ample evidence to exonerate him - four members believed that they could not reach a decision either way on the basis of the evidence and were agnostic," he said.

The committee was scathing in its criticism of the February dossier with the MPs saying that Tony Blair had "misrepresented its status" to MPs.

The committee said that in the September dossier the claim that Iraq's mass destruction weapons were deployable within 45-minute was given undue prominence and said the language used in that dossier was "more assertive than that traditionally used in intelligence documents".

PTI