The report’s contents will add to the considerable pressure Tony Blair and President George Bush face as their pre-war claims come under intense scrutiny.”There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has – or will – establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities,” a summary page of the DIA report said The report does not suggest Iraq did not have WMD. Indeed, it concludes that Iraq “probably” has such stockpiles. But its language is far more circumspect than that of senior Bush administration officials and the President himself, who insisted Iraq not only had large stocks of WMD but it was capable of delivering them in weapons.On 19 September, for instance, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, told Congress that Iraq had “amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin and mustard gas”.Last summer, speaking to the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, Mr Rumsfeld was more explicit. “They have them, and they continue to develop them, and they have weaponised chemical weapons,” he said “They’ve had an active programme to develop nuclear weapons.

It’s clear they are a tively developing biological weapons.”The DIA report, entitled Iraq: Key Weapons Facilities – An Operational Support Study, suggests Iraq had developed biological weapons, though it made clear experts were uncertain of the nature of those weapons or how many had been developed. “Iraq is assessed to possess biological agent stockpiles that may be weaponised and ready for use,” it said. “The size of those stockpiles is uncertain and is subject to debate. The nature and condition of those stockpiles are unknown.”Yesterday, Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacoby, the DIA director, said the summary page – “a single sentence” – ought not to be interpreted that the DIA “doubted the existence of the WMD programme”. However, he confirmed the DIA had no hard information on weapons, stockpiles or locations.Analysts were quick to jump on the summary report, obtained by Bloomberg News, as evidence the US and Britain had overstated the case in regard to Iraq’s weapons capability.Jonathan Tucker, a former UN weapons inspector and senior research fellow at the US Institute for Peace, said: “The DIA report suggests that before the Iraq war, the US intelligence community did not have hard evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed large stocks of chemical and biological warfare agents that posed an imminent threat to US national security.”Two months after fighting in Iraq ended, US and British troops have failed to uncover any conclusive proof that Saddam had developed or stock-piled WMD.

Congress is currently reviewing the pre-war intelligence and the CIA has ordered its own internal review.. Hamas, the most powerful of the Palestinian militant groups, announced yesterday that it was walking out of talks with Abu Mazen, the Palestinian Prime Minister, on a temporary ceasefire. The announcement throws into doubt the tentative steps towards peace made in Aqaba earlier this week by Abu Mazen and Ariel Sharon, his Israeli counterpart. Resistance will continue.”Thousands of Hamas supporters marched in the West Bank, vowing to continue the suicide bombings. The group said that it would also try to persuade Islamic Jihad, a militant group with which it has links, to refuse a ceasefire.This puts Abu Mazen in a dilemma. At Aqaba in Jordan, he pledged to end suicide bombings and other militant attacks against Israelis, and to disarm the militants.

But he was relying on persuading Hamas and the other militant factions to agree to a temporary ceasefire; he had already had contacts with the Hamas leadership, which had indicated it would be amenable.Without one, Abu Mazen faces a choice between failing to fulfil his pledge at Aqaba – which would probably mean the peace process would collapse again – and taking on the militants by force, which would mean internal conflict that some Palestinians fear could lead to civil war. Palestinian commentators were hopeful yesterday that a confrontation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) could be avoided. Hamas is a radical Islamic group, but it has a history of pragmatism and its leaders are as eager as Abu Mazen to avoid a head-on collision with PA security forces.Hamas leaders said the talks had been broken off because Abu Mazen had given too much ground. Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, a senior leader of Hamas’ political wing, said: “We were shocked when we saw Abu Mazen and his new government giving up all the Palestinians’ rights.”Abu Mazen, through giving up the right of resistance and calling it terrorism, gave the green light to Sharon and his army.” There is also believed to be disappointment among militants that Abu Mazen said nothing on the right of return for Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced out of what is now Israel, in 1948.But Mr Rantisi and Sheikh Yassin also pointed to the killing of two Hamas militants by Israeli soldiers in a raid in the West Bank on Thursday. The Israeli army claimed the soldiers killed the men only after they refused to surrender; Hamas claimed the men were assassinated.