Tim Crook, a media studies lecturer at the University of London, told AFP: "The British propaganda operation has been a litany of blunders, it's been lamentable."

A week into the war, which broke out on March 20, the British authorities "reached what is known as credibility fatigue, in other words there is non-consistency, their distortions and exaggerations are too obvious," said Crook.

The manipulation starts from the vocabulary used, like the word "coalition", according to the academic.

"Close analysis reveals it's primarily a military alliance of the United Kingdom and the United States. The idea is that they want to pretend that the wider world is supporting" the conflict.

According to Crook, propaganda techniques employed by Britain include the use of strong statements based on information from a vague origin such as unnamed intelligence sources.

When inconsistencies appear, the authorities can then say they had never made a direct claim themselves.

On Saturday, Downing Street said that many Iraqi surface-to-air missiles had malfunctioned and had fallen on Baghdad, adding that this might offer a "possible explanation" for recent bombings of civilian sites in Baghdad which the Iraqi regime blames on US-British air attacks.

"We are not saying definitively that these explosions were caused by Iraqi missiles. But people should approach this (Iraqi claim) with due scepticism," Downing Street said.

For Crook, this style of response lacks credibility and has a "boomerang" effect, reflecting a "decay in trust and authority" of the government.

Britain's junior defense minister Adam Ingram on Monday described protective suits found Saturday in a building held by Iraqi forces in Nassiriyah, 350 kilometers (215 miles) from Baghdad, as chemical weapons.

Disbelieving MPs reacted with boos in parliament.

Meanwhile, claims that there was some sort of popular uprising in the strategic southern Iraqi city of Basra, and that there were Al-Qaeda fighters present in Iraq, have also been met with scepticism, according to Crook.

In another case cited by Crook, Blair said last week at a press conference in Camp David, near Washington, where he has been holding a summit with US President George W. Bush, that two dead British soldiers had been "executed" in southern Iraq.

But the relatives of one of the servicemen dismissed that as a lie, saying officials had told them the man was killed in action.

Crook said Blair was guilty of "a dangerous high-risk distortion and exaggeration. He went too far. (It was) a significant mistake."

In another high-profile case of manipulating information, even before the war started, Britain produced a report which insisted that Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction. The report was praised at the UN Security Council by US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

But it later emerged that a large section of the report was lifted word for word from a old doctoral thesis written by an American academic a decade ago.

SPACE.WIRE