A third of respondents to the poll said they would be less inclined to trust Blair in future over his mishandling of Iraq

LONDON, June 14 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – British Prime Minister Tony Blair lost the confidence of voters after a new poll showed Saturday, June 14, that most Britons believe  London and Washington deliberately exaggerated evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in order to garner support for the war.

The poll indicated that the row over government claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has damaged Blair.

Nearly three fifths of the public believe the Bush and Blair governments deliberately exaggerated so-called evidence that Iraq had prohibited weapons.

A third of respondents to the Populus poll conducted for The Times said they would be less inclined to trust Blair in future because of his mishandling of the Iraqi issue.

However, 70 percent said the war was justified because it removed Saddam Hussein from power, according to the survey.

Populus interviewed 1,003 adults on Tuesday and Wednesday, the day Blair said he would not appear before a parliamentary foreign affairs committee probing claims that the government embellished intelligence on Iraq's WMD.

Blair told parliament that "in relation to the allegations that have been made, there is not a shred of truth" in them, adding that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw would appear before the committee.

The failure to uncover WMDs in Iraq has cost Blair political support among Labor and Conservative MPs who backed the war but are angry at the possibility that they have been misled.

Clare Short, an outgoing British minister who resigned over Iraq war, said on June 1 that Blair had duped the public over the threat posed by the ousted Iraqi regime in order to ensure the invasion.

"Deep Exile"

In a related development, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has reassigned two senior officials who oversaw its analysis of Iraq and its suspected weapons of mass destruction, The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

The newspaper said the officials, whose names have not been revealed, had served in senior positions, in which they were deeply involved in assembling and assessing the intelligence on Iraq's alleged stocks of chemical and biological arms.

More than two months after the fall of Baghdad, the Pentagon and CIA failed to discover the suspected Iraqi arsenal that President George W. Bush used as his primary rationale for invading Iraq.

One of the officials was reassigned last week to the CIA's personnel department after spending the last several months heading the Iraq Task Force, a special unit set up to provide 24-hour support to military commanders during the war, The Times reported.

The other, a longtime analyst who had led the agency's Iraq Issue Group that is responsible for analysis of all U.S. intelligence on the country, was dispatched on an extended mission to Iraq, the paper said.

The Times quotes CIA spokesman Bill Harlow as saying the changes were routine, and that it was "absolutely wrong to think this is somehow punitive or negative or indicative of anything other than a normal rotation."

But other intelligence sources offered a different account, the report said.

"Two of the key players on this problem have essentially been sent into deep exile," the paper quotes an unnamed CIA official as saying.

The official added that the changes seemed designed to show the administration that "we're being responsive to charges that we did not perform well."