LORD HUTTON said Tony Blair acted entirely in good faith in presenting his dossier of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons in September 2002.

He cleared Downing Street emphatically of Andrew Gilligan’s central charge: that it included information in its case for war which it knew to be wrong, or had reason to think was unreliable. But given that no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found, what should we now make of the quality of that intelligence?

Yesterday, as Lord Hutton was concluding his presentation, David Kay, head of the United States Iraq Survey Group until he resigned on Friday, was preparing to testify to Congress that he did not believe such weapons had existed. In the past two days, President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney have backed away from their earlier assertions that weapons would be found, while Democratic presidential contenders have seized on the issue as a promising line of attack on the President.

Lord Hutton, let us be clear, does not set out to answer this question. He acknowledges the controversy as legitimate but concluded that “a question of such wide import, which would involve the consideration of a wide range of evidence, is not one which falls within my terms of reference”.

He does consider how the dossier was put together. But he also exonerates — almost — intelligence chiefs such as John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, from the charge of inappropriately strengthening the presentation of intelligence.

In criticism whose mildness would be hard to surpass, he says: “I consider that the possibility cannot be completely ruled out that the desire of the Prime Minister to have a dossier which, whilst consistent with the available intelligence, was as strong as possible in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, may have subconsciously influenced Mr Scarlett and the other members of the JIC to make the wording of the dossier somewhat stronger than it would have been if it had been contained in a normal JIC assessment.”

However, he adds that “although this possibility cannot be completely ruled out”, he is satisfied that all the intelligence staff involved made sure that the dossier was consistent with JIC intelligence.

Lord Hutton also notes, without judgment, that part of the Defence Intelligence Staff thought the assertion that weapons were ready to launch in 45 minutes should have been preceded by the words “intelligence suggests”, rather than the more emphatic “we judge”.

So in his view, the intelligence chiefs did not “sex up” the dossier any more than did the politicians. But that simply moves the question on to the agents in the field. Did they get it wrong, and if so, how?

Lord Hutton does not address this, but David Kay does. It is hard to consider the Hutton report — and the Blair dossier — without reference to Mr Kay’s remarks in the past week. Although he is not well known in Britain, his assessment is front-page news across America. The question of the accuracy of the British-American case for war is now rising rapidly up the US political agenda as Congress prepares to scrutinise it with at least the thoroughness that Lord Hutton applied to Mr Gilligan.

“We had found no actual large weapons stockpiles and no indication of a production process that would have produced such stockpiles," Mr Kay said when he resigned.

No one has questioned that Saddam remained malevolent towards the West and Israel, and that Iraq, which continued to run sophisticated oil refineries and to develop its missiles, was capable of producing such weapons. A case for war based on potential threat remains entirely intact.

But a case based on an actual threat, as the Blair dossier claimed, now looks shaky. Mr Kay, using the evidence of physical searches in Iraq and interviews with captured members of the regime, concludes that there was no sustained effort to produce WMD after the end of the 1991 war, although there were intermittent flickers of interest.

Burgeoning corruption and Saddam’s loss of control was the main reason for the programmes’ dissolution, he believes. Senior Iraqis have told him that money which Saddam thought he was authorising for the programme was siphoned off by individuals.

But the CIA failed to detect this. While UN inspectors were allowed into the country, the CIA became “spoiled”, he says. Agents looked at satellite pictures, and asked the team on the ground to investigate. But when the UN was kicked out in 1998, the CIA failed to plug the gap — or to acknowledge that there was one.

Mr Kay’s conclusion is entirely relevant to the Hutton report. Intelligence is often unreliable, usually incomplete, and rarely decisive, he argues. Agents should certainly reflect that — but their bosses, and in turn their political masters, should not escape the responsibility of asking whether those weaknesses exist.

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