Monday, July 12, 2004
Had a touch of deja vu last night, as the BBC's Panorama program was on the misuse of intelligence by the British Government to justify going to war in Iraq. We'd heard it all before, as most of the information had come out in the Hutton Inquiry and Panorama had done a few programs on it back in those heady days before Dame Hutton set his big tin o' whitewash on his desk and told us it was his report.
What was different this time was that they had a former Intelligence agent who, until last year worked in the upper echelons of MI6 where they would have dealt with the intelligence coming out from Iraq. He pretty much said what critics of the Government had said for ages, Tony Blair was wrong when he said there was evidence of WMD programs and that Saddam Hussein was ready and willing to use them for no reason at all. This official, Brian Jones, said the information that MI6 passed on said that if Hussein had weapons he'd only use them if attacked first, in the final report it came out as if he'd launch them with no provocation any day now. (I have to say, the fact that Hussein didn't launch any missiles is another proof for me that he didn't have WMD, he had a year or more of Bush and Blair saying they were coming to get him, he was crazy not stupid, and if that didn't make him feel threatened I don't know what would.)
And this didn't start with the War Against Terror. As far back as 1998 the Government were telling the Intelligence services to lie about Iraq.
Brian Jones writes in the Independent today. He says that there was no proof of WMDs in Iraq, just an assumption that there might be and that Blair said there'd been lots of information passing over his desk when Jones knew that if true none of it was from any intelligence source he knew of. He rewrites the final dossier from the JIC to be closer to what MI6 knew at the time to be the truth. Give it a read.
What was different this time was that they had a former Intelligence agent who, until last year worked in the upper echelons of MI6 where they would have dealt with the intelligence coming out from Iraq. He pretty much said what critics of the Government had said for ages, Tony Blair was wrong when he said there was evidence of WMD programs and that Saddam Hussein was ready and willing to use them for no reason at all. This official, Brian Jones, said the information that MI6 passed on said that if Hussein had weapons he'd only use them if attacked first, in the final report it came out as if he'd launch them with no provocation any day now. (I have to say, the fact that Hussein didn't launch any missiles is another proof for me that he didn't have WMD, he had a year or more of Bush and Blair saying they were coming to get him, he was crazy not stupid, and if that didn't make him feel threatened I don't know what would.)
And this didn't start with the War Against Terror. As far back as 1998 the Government were telling the Intelligence services to lie about Iraq.
Brian Jones writes in the Independent today. He says that there was no proof of WMDs in Iraq, just an assumption that there might be and that Blair said there'd been lots of information passing over his desk when Jones knew that if true none of it was from any intelligence source he knew of. He rewrites the final dossier from the JIC to be closer to what MI6 knew at the time to be the truth. Give it a read.
