DESPITE many press articles none have really understood the problem with Tony Blair’s purported apology over last weekend on CNN television in the US, on which he allegedly “apologised for the fact the intelligence we received [on Saddam’s WMDs] was wrong.”

The intelligence on Iraqi WMDs was not “wrong” or “overstated,” “doubtful” — as various commentators asserted. It was correct, but shamelessly cherry-picked by Blair and his political sidekick Jack Straw.

The now-retired MP Jack Straw, Blair’s foreign secretary at the time of the invasion of Iraq, made his own swansong parliamentary intervention on Iraq earlier in the year during a debate on the Chilcot report delay, asserting: “For the avoidance of doubt the whole [UN] security council judged in November 2002 that there was a threat to international peace and security from Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.”

The firebrand George Galloway — then a Respect MP — who had correctly predicted mass chaos in Iraq if the invasion went ahead bellowed back: “Because they believed you and Colin Powell.”

Wind back 12 years. The March 3 2003 edition of the US magazine Newsweek published an article entitled The Defector’s Secrets which went almost entirely unreported in Britain.

“Hussein Kamel, the highest ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and UN inspectors in the summer of 1995 that after the Gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them,” it reported.

“Kamel was Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law and had direct knowledge of what he claimed: for 10 years he had run Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programmes.”

In light of this, how did Tony Blair report to Parliament — in the debate and fateful vote that finally took us to war — what the British government knew of the Hussein Kamel claims?

“In August, it [Iraq] provided yet another full and final declaration [about WMDs]. Then, a week later, Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan.

“He disclosed a far more extensive biological weapons programme and, for the first time, said that Iraq had weaponised the programme — something that Saddam had always strenuously denied.

“All this had been happening while the inspectors were in Iraq. Kamel also revealed Iraq’s crash programme to produce a nuclear weapon in the 1990s.”

A week later Llew Smith MP, a Labour backbencher and opponent of the war for whom I then worked, asked the prime minister a follow-up this question: whether he would place in the Parliamentary Library the text of the interview, so the full context of Blair’s extract could be understood.

Blair responded: “Following his defection, Hussein Kamel was interviewed by UNSCOM and by a number of other agencies. Details concerning the interviews were made available to us on a confidential basis. The UK was not provided with transcripts of the interviews.”

But Blair inexplicably did not find time or room to share with Parliament the other key revelation made by Kamel in that notorious interview, viz: “All weapons — biological, chemical, missile, nuclear — were destroyed.”

It was a disgraceful deception of Parliament. But other MPs should have been less gullible, more inquisitive and have scrutinised government assertions with greater commitment by demanding evidence.

Pity they didn’t: if they had, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians — and 179 brave British soldiers — might still be alive today. And many more would not be maimed for life.

• Dr David Lowry is the former director, European Proliferation Information Centre (EPIC)