LONDON, England - Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush found themselves at odds today over conflicting probes into the faulty intelligence used to justify the Iraq war. While probes conducted on both sides of the Atlantic vowed to be fully independent, they have come to opposite conclusions, each pointing to the other country's faulty intelligence on Iraq.

"Our American friends, without malice or ill intent, provided intelligence on the Iraq situation which was found to be without merit," Blair read from the commission's report. "They reported to us that Saddam had several ICBM's located at his Palace on the Tigris, ready to be deployed with two hours' notice. This has been proven false. In addition, we were warned that he was using hypnosis on his people to convince them of his infallibility. With the exception of his Information Minister, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, this has also been shown to be a fantasy." The report goes on to list five categories of failure detailing thirty-seven separate instances of intelligence failures.

"We stand behind the decisions we made with the information provided to us by our own services and from our trusted allies," Bush stated, reading from the report by his own commission's probe. "However these decisions were driven by some data that we must now concede was incorrectly gathered by the British." The report outlines a series of failures starting with a British-provided fact about Saddam's orbiting missile batteries in a geo-synchronous orbit over the Vatican.

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric, has called for a third independent probe headed by himself, "and American journalist Matt Drudge, to get to the real truth of the matter." There has been no response to the demand from American or British officials.
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