Sir Richard Dearlove, 68 provided intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMD
Had previously said he would keep his account of events leading up to Iraq War secret until after his death

Revelations: in a bombshell email to the MoS Sir Richard Dearlove threatened to reveal new details behind the ‘dodgy dossier’ scandal

A former head of MI6 has threatened to reveal explosive new details behind the ‘dodgy dossier’ scandal if he objects to the long-awaited findings of the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq War.

Sir Richard Dearlove, 68, who provided intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) that was apparently ‘sexed up’ by Tony Blair’s Government, has spent the last year writing a detailed account of events leading up to the war.

He had intended to keep his work under lock and key and made available only to historians after his death.

But now Sir Richard has revealed to The Mail on Sunday that he could go public after the Chilcot Inquiry publishes its findings.

Sir Richard is expected to face censure from the inquiry’s chairman, Sir John Chilcot, over the accuracy of intelligence provided by MI6 agents inside Iraq – which was used in the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’.

In a bombshell email to the Mail on Sunday, Sir Richard, who is Master at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, disclosed: ‘What I have written (am writing) is a record of events surrounding the invasion of Iraq from my then professional perspective.

‘My intention is that this should be a resource available to scholars, but after my decease (may be sooner depending on what Chilcot publishes). I have no intention, however, of violating my vows of official secrecy by publishing any memoir.’

Sources close to Sir Richard say that while he accepts that some of MI6’s information on the WMDs was inaccurate, he insists that Chilcot should recognise the role played by Tony Blair and the Prime Minister’s chief spokesman Alastair Campbell in informing media reports which suggested Saddam could use chemical weapons to target British troops based in Cyprus – a claim which put Britain on a path to war in Iraq.

Mr Blair and Mr Campbell have repeatedly denied making misleading statements about WMD.

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But Sir Richard is said to remain extremely aggrieved that this piece of intelligence, which his agents stressed only referred to battlefield munitions which had a much shorter range, led to media reports that UK bases were under threat.

Last week it was revealed that Sir John had written to Prime Minister David Cameron informing him of his intention to write personally to those individuals he intends to criticise, with reports suggesting that Tony Blair is among those on Sir John’s list.

Sir Richard has taken a sabbatical from his duties at Cambridge University to research and write his record of events.

With his account nearing completion, he is expected to resume his Master’s role at the start of the new academic year.

A security source told The Mail on Sunday: ‘This is Sir Richard’s time-bomb. He wants to set the record straight and defend the integrity of MI6.

‘And Sir Richard has taken a lot of personal criticism over MI6’s performance and his supposedly too-cosy relationship with Mr Blair.

In flames: British soldiers under attack in the Iraqi town of Basra in 2004

‘No Chief of MI6 has done anything like this before, but the events in question were unprecedented.

‘If Chilcot doesn’t put the record straight, Sir Richard will strike back.’

After graduating from Cambridge, Sir Richard began his MI6 career in 1966 and was posted to Nairobi, Prague, Paris and Geneva before becoming head of station in Washington DC in 1991.

He returned to the UK two years later and became director of operations in 1994. He was appointed Chief, or ‘C’, in 1999.

In his first year, the IRA fired a rocket at the agency’s headquarters on the South Bank of the River Thames. This was followed in September 2001 by Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States.

The Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee subsequently accused MI6 of failing to respond with sufficient urgency to warnings that Islamic fundamentalists were planning such a major terrorist attack.

But last night the committee’s chairman, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who was appointed in 2010, offered Sir Richard his support.

Sir Malcolm told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I have never heard of a former MI6 chief putting something out there in these terms but I would be interested in what Sir Richard has to say in response to the Chilcot Inquiry which is clearly going to have some meat in it.

‘I know Sir Richard and worked with him in the Foreign Office many years ago. He is a very able man of the highest character and a man of his own opinions. We shall have to wait to see what he says.’

Sir Richard, who was elected Master at Pembroke just weeks after leaving MI6, lives in an idyllic £1.2 million property in the college’s grounds.

Last night, Alastair Campbell and the office for Tony Blair declined to comment on Sir Richard’s account.

By Mark Nicol Defence Correspondent
PUBLISHED: 01:05 GMT, 21 July 2013 | UPDATED: 13:50 GMT, 21 July 2013

Find this story at 21 July 2013

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Ironically, those calling for an inquest into David Kelly’s death – ten years on today – base their arguments on precisely the values held so dear by professional journalists: the need for a full, impartial appraisal of the facts without fear or favour.

Ten years after the death of intelligence analyst David Kelly, the campaign for a formal inquest wages on. Shortly before his unnatural death in 2003, Kelly was outed as the BBC news source for a controversial report suggesting the government had lied in building its case for war with Iraq earlier that year. The fact that key questions remain unasked about an official investigation into a controversial death is nothing unheard of in British politics. But the Kelly case is unique because the most vociferous opponents of due process are not officials or politicians, but journalists.

This is even more odd because the journalists who are most outspoken against campaigners hail not from the predominantly conservative red tops, but from the so-called “liberal” media comprised of the broadsheets and broadcast newsrooms. It is respected columnists and opinion editorialists – not government spokespeople – who are routinely called on to make the case against campaigners. These are not journalists who tend to shy away from attacking the government or challenging established viewpoints. Indeed, they are journalists who predicate their life’s work on the unfettered scrutiny of power; who place the utmost professional value on evidence, impartiality and accuracy.

Yet in relation to the cause of Kelly’s death, even the evidence presented at the widely discredited Hutton Inquiry was, by the most conservative measure, conflicting. According to the official verdict, Kelly bled to death after cutting the ulnar artery in his left wrist. Yet paramedic Vanessa Hunt, the first medically trained professional to examine his body, told Hutton that

the amount of blood that was around the scene seemed relatively minimal and there was a small patch on his right knee, but no obvious arterial bleeding. There was no spraying of blood or huge blood loss or any obvious loss on the clothing […] His jacket was pulled to sort of mid forearm area and from that area down towards the hand there was dried blood, but no obvious sign of a wound or anything, it was just dried blood.

A secondary cause of death, according to the official verdict, was that Kelly had died from a lethal overdose of painkillers. But the toxicology report showed that the level of coproximal in Kelly’s blood was less than a third of what would normally be considered fatal and less than one pill was actually found in his stomach contents. Yet this kind of evidence remains elusive to journalists who continue to circulate assumptions disguised as facts: namely that Kelly swallowed 29 tablets based solely on a blister pack of 30 found on his person with only one tablet left (and incidentally, none of Kelly’s fingerprints).

What about Kelly’s state of mind? At the Hutton Inquiry, we heard expert witness testimony that he was acutely depressed over a supposed life’s work in ruins and ravaged by the shame of having breached the civil service code. But that testimony was provided by a consultant psychiatrist who had never actually met Kelly, let alone interacted with him during his final days and hours. It was based in large part on that of other witnesses, including Kelly’s close family. While they had spoken of him as “withdrawn” and “subdued”, this was primarily in the context of the period leading up to his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on 14 July 2003. Following that, Kelly’s daughter and son-in-law, with whom he was staying at the time, described his demeanour repeatedly as “normal”, “calm”, “relaxed”, “relieved”, and eating and sleeping “very well” right up to the day of his disappearance. According to his sister (pdf), Sarah Pape, who spoke to Kelly by telephone two days before his death:

In my line of work I do deal with people who may have suicidal thoughts and I ought to be able to spot those, even on a telephone conversation. But I have gone over and over in my mind the two conversations we had and he certainly did not betray to me any impression that he was anything other than tired. He certainly did not convey to me that he was feeling depressed; and absolutely nothing that would have alerted me to the fact that he might have been considering suicide.

Of course, such testimony does not prove that Kelly did not commit suicide, any more than conflicting testimony proves that he did. But in the week following Hutton’s report, BBC and ITN journalists cited evidence that Kelly was suicidal no less than seven times in news reports without any qualification or caveat and without once mentioning evidence to the contrary.

For any journalist genuinely concerned with ‘the facts’, it would have been clear from the outset that the only thing we know in relation to this case is that we don’t know how Kelly died. It is possible that he did die in the way Hutton said he died (albeit extremely unlikely according to mainstream medical opinion), and that conflicting evidence was the result of random anomalies; just as it is possible that Kelly was murdered, with or without the connivance of elements within the British state. The point is that no cause of death has been established on the basis of likely probability, let alone beyond reasonable doubt.

But there is something else we know which is that there has been unprecedented misinformation, obstruction of justice and on-going suppression of information in relation to this case. Only around a quarter of the police documents submitted to Hutton have been published and much of the remaining evidence has been sealed under an extraordinarily high level of classification for 70 years. It includes medical reports, photographs of the body and supplementary witness statements. The justification for this enduring secrecy is to prevent undue distress to the bereaved. But David Kelly was a public servant who suffered an unnatural death in extremely controversial circumstances. In far less controversial cases, the interests of the bereaved never outweigh that of the public interest in having a formal coroner’s inquest into an unnatural death.

With occasional and notable exceptions, journalists’ persistent refusal to engage with the substance of this controversy reveals a blind spot in our system of democratic accountability, encapsulated by the label of “conspiracy theory”. This taboo, which operates within journalist and academic circles alike, has some sound basis. It discriminates against conjecture often associated with tabloid sensationalism or internet subcultures that respond to secrecy or uncertainty with unfounded reasoning. This kind of theorising has also provided the foundation for racist and extremist ideology upon which acts of terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing have been predicated.

Such a cautionary approach, however, has led to an outright rejection of the idea that particular groups of powerful people might make, in the words of terrorism expert Jeffrey Bale, “a concerted effort to keep an illegal or unethical act or situation from being made public”. Yet both historical precedent and contemporary events suggest that such instances are a regular feature of real-world politics. The Chilcott Inquiry into the Iraq War, for instance, has surfaced considerable evidence that the decision to invade Iraq was taken in secret and long before it was publicly announced and justified on what turned out to be false intelligence. The problem amounts to an “intellectual resistance” with the result that “an entire dimension of political history and contemporary politics has been consistently neglected” (Bale 1995).

Ironically, those calling for an inquest into David Kelly’s death – ten years on today – base their arguments on precisely the values held so dear by professional journalists: the need for a full, impartial appraisal of the facts without fear or favour. The baseless conjecture associated with conspiracy theory, on the other hand, characterises precisely the way in which most journalists have approached this case. Above all, it is the enduring silence of newsrooms which has shielded successive governments from pressure for an inquest or from challenge to their persistent refusals to hold one.

The fires of injustice rage unabated. It took a lot longer than ten years for the relatives of Stephen Lawrence, Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough victims to get some semblance of accountability from the state. For the relatives of Daniel Morgan, the victims of the Iraq War, Lockerbie, secret rendition and torture, the struggle continues. If nothing else, campaigners for an inquest into David Kelly’s death have succeeded in drawing some attention to yet another spectacular failure of British justice.

Justin Schlosberg is a media activist, researcher and lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Power Beyond Scrutiny: Media, Justice and Accountability

By Justin Schlosberg Published 17 July 2013 8:59

Find this story at 17 July 2013

© New Statesman 1913 – 2013

Death of WMD dossier scientist contributed to erosion of trust in politics

Dr David Kelly during questioning by a Commons select committee in 2003. Photograph: PA

It was a case of the political becoming personal, only so overwhelmingly, that it crushed a man. A decade ago on Wednesday, just after 3.20pm, Dr David Kelly began a walk from his Oxfordshire home that ended the next morning with the discovery of his body, slumped in a wood.

The Kelly family lost a loved one and a chain of events was set off that damaged trust in the Blair government and decapitated the leadership of the BBC.

Kelly was the distinguished government scientist who hunted down weapons of mass destruction of the kind used by the Blair government to justify the 2003 war with Iraq. The problem was the Saddam Hussein regime did not have them.

A BBC Today programme report claimed the government had embellished or “sexed up” the intelligence it presented to the public in 2003 to justify the war.

A furore erupted between the government, led by chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell, and the BBC, which refused to back down, having failed to spot the flaws in its reporting.

Kelly was outed as the BBC’s source, felt publicly humiliated and was reprimanded by his bosses. A proud man felt let down by them, and that his reputation built up over a lifetime was being irreparably tarnished.

In the days before that final walk Kelly’s family said they had never seen him so low. As news of his death spread, the normally self-assured Blair seemed stunned when a reporter cried: “Do you have blood on your hands?”

Kelly’s death led not to an inquest, but a public inquiry by Lord Hutton, which brought a rare glimpse into the secret worlds of Whitehall, British intelligence, the low arts of high politics, and the workings of the BBC.

Its conclusion largely absolved the government of blame, and surprised observers.

Its criticism of the BBC led to the demise at the corporation of then chairman Gavyn Davies, correspondent Andrew Gilligan and director general Greg Dyke, who on Tuesday said history has proven the broadcaster was right: “Ten years on, it is very difficult to find anyone who believes they did not ‘sex up’ that document.”

Debate still surrounds Hutton’s conclusion that Kelly committed suicide. The inquiry found that Kelly died after cutting an artery, had taken an overdose of painkillers and had heart disease which left his arteries “significantly narrowed”. Thus, said experts, less blood loss may have killed the scientist than that needed to kill a healthy man.

Among those who have called for an inquest or have doubts it was a suicide are former Tory leader Michael Howard, and Liberal Democrat minister Norman Baker, who wrote a book saying Kelly was most likely murdered.

A group of doctors say Hutton’s findings should be discarded and a new inquest held. Dr Stephen Frost said: “We have lots of evidence … No coroner in the land would reach a verdict of suicide as Lord Hutton did.”

Experts in forensic pathology point out the sceptics may be expert in their own fields, but not in the science of establishing the cause of death.

Hutton has kept silent since his report, breaking it only to write a letter denouncing the conspiracy theorists. Hutton’s conclusion is supported by the available facts and experts: “At no time … was there any suggestion from any counsel for the interested parties or in any of the extensive media coverage that any of the police officers engaged in investigating Dr Kelly’s death or any of the medical or scientific witnesses was involved in any sort of cover-up or plot to make a murder appear like a suicide.”

Dyke claimed that: “Some of Dr Kelly’s wider family don’t believe it’s suicide.”

But the Conservative-led government has said the evidence for suicide is so compelling there is no need for a fresh hearing.

Ben Page, chief executive of pollsters Ipsos Mori said the row over the 2003 Iraq war was part of a continued lack of trust in government and politicians: “It was part of the continuum of declining trust.”

“It is clear that Dr Kelly and anger over the reason Britain joined in with the Iraq war are intertwined.”

Later this year the Chilcot report is expected, but for ex-BBC boss Dyke, a one-time supporter of Tony Blair, the verdict is in: “History tells us Blair was destroyed by Iraq. Blair will be only remembered for that, just as Sir Anthony Eden will be remembered for Suez.”

Vikram Dodd
The Guardian, Tuesday 16 July 2013 23.07 BST

Find this story at 16 July 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

Veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn of The Independent joins us to discuss the Obama administration’s decision to begin directly arming Syrian rebels after concluding the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons. “There must be some doubts about this,” Cockburn says, adding that it “reminds me of what they were saying in 2002 and 2003 about Saddam [Hussein]’s weapons of mass destruction.” Cockburn warns U.S. involvement could escalate regional conflicts that could “go on for years,” and critiques the media’s lack of skepticism about White House claims.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin the news that the Obama administration has decided to begin arming Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad after concluding Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons. The White House said Thursday it has firmer evidence the Assad government has used the weapons multiple times on a “small scale” and that up 150 people have died. Unnamed officials told the Times the CIA would coordinate the transfers of small arms and ammunition. The United Nations says roughly 93,000 people have died in the two-year-old civil war.

AMY GOODMAN: A U.N. panel recently accused both sides of carrying out war crimes. In a conference phone call with reporters Thursday, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes declined to say exactly what type of aid the U.S. would give the rebels’ Supreme Military Council.

BEN RHODES: The president has made a decision about providing more support to the opposition. That will involve providing direct support to the SMC. That includes military support. I cannot detail for you all of the types of that support, for a variety of reasons, but, again, suffice to say this is going to be different in both scope and scale in terms of what we are providing to the SMC than what we have provided before.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined on the telephone by Patrick Cockburn, foreign correspondent for The Independent of London who has reported extensively on Syria.

Your response to what the United States is saying and going to do in Syria, Patrick?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, I think it’s probably bad news for the Syrian people. It means there’s going to be an escalation of the war. What isn’t clear yet is whether the administration, as it hints, is going to just trying to redress the balance between the rebels and Assad’s forces, after the rebels have suffered some defeat, or whether they’re going right down the road to try and overthrow Assad, rather like Libya in 2011, and this is the beginning of an all-out offensive against Assad, which will grow incrementally.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Patrick Cockburn, the potential here for the United States intervening not only in the situation in Syria but also in the growing sort of divide and conflict between Shia and Sunni throughout that region of the world?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Yeah, so this is extraordinarily dangerous. I mean, the—what’s happening in Syria may have begun as an uprising against a dictatorial government, but now it’s Sunni against Shia within the country, it’s Sunni against Shia outside the country. The allies of the U.S. in this conflict are extremely sectarian Sunni monarchies, very little interest in democracy. So, I think once you get entangled in this, rather like Iraq, it’s very different to—difficult to disentangle yourself, and this could go on for years.

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, the evidence that the U.S. says it has that the Assad forces used chemical weapons?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, there must be, you know, some doubts about this. You know, they say this in a sure voice, but it’s a sure voice which reminds me of what they were saying in 2002 and 2003 about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. You know, you would need the evidence to be laid out in front of you to really be convinced by this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the concerns in some circles that this is really developing into a proxy war with Iran and Hezbollah, rather than actually trying to deal with the situation internally within Syria?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Yeah, it already has turned into a proxy war. You can see that with—Hezbollah and Iran were involved, but also the U.S. was—had already combined with Qatar to send weapons. Qatar has sent up to $3 billion to the rebels, 70 loads of flights of weapons, organized by—with the CIA. So, that was already happening. I think one of the—you know, what ought to happen would be to go down the diplomatic road to try and have a ceasefire. I don’t think you can have any solution at this moment in time, because you people are too involved in the war, they hate each other. But they should push for a ceasefire, and then there might be the basis for some talks afterwards. But the decision by the U.S. looks as though it’s going to push this into an all-out and long-running conflict.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Patrick Cockburn, your assessment of the media coverage of what’s happening in Syria and the U.S.’s decision?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, I was rather amazed and depressed by some of it that I have seen, particularly CNN, that was an—seemed to be an immediate acceptance that whatever was said about Syria employing chemical weapons was accepted as if it was written in stone, despite all of what happened in Iraq in the past, and an almost total lack of skepticism about the claims now being made.

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, I want to thank you for being with us—of course, we’ll continue to follow what’s happening in Syria—foreign correspondent for The Independent, speaking to us from London. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll speak with James Bamford about the NSA’s secret war. Stay with us.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Fin this story at 14 June 2013

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Like characters from The Great Gatsby, Britain and the US have arrogantly turned their backs and left a country in ruins

Iraq’s ministry of social affairs estimates 4.5 million children have lost one or both parents. This means 14% of the population are orphans. Photograph: Reuters

The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert’s fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, “the seeds of our death”. An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. “Before the Gulf war,” he said, “we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years’ time to begin with, then long after. That’s almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can’t be eaten.”

Along the corridor, Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was trying to save. Many had neuroblastoma. “Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years,” she said. “Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital malformations is the same.”

Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf war were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf war battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, “Each round fired by an A-10 Warthog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare.”

Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that “the epidemic speaks for itself”. The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation’s cancer programme in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: “Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq sanctions committee].” He told me, “We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics.”

Recently, Hans von Sponeck, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: “The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers.” A WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted with the Iraqi ministry of health, has been “delayed”. Covering 10,800 households, it contains “damning evidence”, says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains “top secret”. The report says birth defects have risen to a “crisis” right across Iraqi society where depleted uranium and other toxic heavy metals were used by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports “phenomenal” multiple cancers in entire families.

Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, “smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess”.

The “mess” left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse “presidential library and museum” and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.

Their “mess” is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi ministry of social affairs’ estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost one or both parents. “This means a horrific 14% of Iraq’s population are orphans,” he wrote. “An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows”. Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.

In her book Dispatches from the Dark Side, Gareth Peirce, Britain’s greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, “human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently … in Blair’s language a ‘virus’ to be ‘eliminated’ and requiring ‘a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.’ The very concept of war was mutated to ‘our values versus theirs’.” And yet, says Peirce, “the threads of emails, internal government communiques, reveal no dissent”. For foreign secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to Guantánamo was “the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objective”.

These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of “our values” is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?

www.johnpilger.com

• This article was amended on 27 May 2013. The original referred to the A-10 Warthog aircraft as the A-10 Warhog.

John Pilger
The Guardian, Sunday 26 May 2013 18.00 BST

Find this story at 26 May 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

BBC’s Panorama reveals fresh evidence that agencies dismissed intelligence from Iraqi foreign minister and spy chief

Tony Blair’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are challenged again in Monday’s Panorama. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Fresh evidence has been revealed about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was “active”, “growing” and “up and running”.

A special BBC Panorama programme aired on Monday night details how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.

It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, told the CIA’s station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had “virtually nothing” in terms of WMD.

Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was “totally fabricated”.

However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq’s head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002.

Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri’s comments, and that he should have been.

Butler says of the use of intelligence: “There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages.”

When it was suggested to him that the body that probably felt most misled of all was the British public, Butler replied: “Yes, I think they’re, they’re, they got every reason think that.”

The programme shows how the then chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, responded to information from Iraqi sources later acknowledged to be unreliable.

…

• The Spies Who Fooled the World, BBC Panorama Special, BBC1, Monday, 18 March, 10.35pm

Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 March 2013 06.00 GMT

Find this story at 18 March 2013 
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The lies of two Iraqi spies were central to the claim – at the heart of the UK and US decision to go to war in Iraq – that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But even before the fighting started, intelligence from highly-placed sources was available suggesting he did not, Panorama has learned.

Six months before the invasion, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair warned the country about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

“The programme is not shut down,” he said. “It is up and running now.” Mr Blair used the intelligence on WMD to justify the war.

That same day, 24 September 2002, the government published its controversial dossier on the former Iraqi leader’s WMD.

The BBC has learned that two key pieces of intelligence, which could have prevented the Iraq war, were either dismissed or used selectively

Designed for public consumption, it had a personal foreword by Mr Blair, who assured readers Saddam Hussein had continued to produce WMD “beyond doubt”.

But, while it was never mentioned in the dossier, there was doubt. The original intelligence from MI6 and other agencies, on which the dossier was based, was clearly qualified.

The intelligence was, as the Joint Intelligence Committee noted in its original assessments, “sporadic and patchy” and “remains limited”.

The exclusion of these qualifications gave the dossier a certainty that was never warranted.
Intelligence failure

Much of the key intelligence used by Downing Street and the White House was based on fabrication, wishful thinking and lies.

Lord Butler says he was unaware of some intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD

As Gen Sir Mike Jackson, then head of the British Army, says, “what appeared to be gold in terms of intelligence turned out to be fool’s gold, because it looked like gold, but it wasn’t”.

There was other intelligence, but it was less alarming.

Lord Butler, who after the war, conducted the first government inquiry into WMD intelligence, says Mr Blair and the intelligence community “misled themselves”.

Lord Butler and Sir Mike agree Mr Blair did not lie, because they say he genuinely believed Saddam Hussein had WMD.

The most notorious spy who fooled the world was the Iraqi defector, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi.

His fabrications and lies were a crucial part of the intelligence used to justify one of the most divisive wars in recent history. And they contributed to one of the biggest intelligence failures in living memory.

He became known as Curveball, the codename given to him by US intelligence that turned out to be all too appropriate.
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I thought we’d produced probably the best intelligence that anybody produced in the pre-war period”
Bill Murray
Former CIA Paris station head

Mr Janabi arrived as an Iraqi asylum seeker at a German refugee centre in 1999 and said he was a chemical engineer, thus attracting the attention of the German intelligence service, the BND.

He told them he had seen mobile biological laboratories mounted on trucks to evade detection.

The Germans had doubts about Mr Janabi which they shared with the Americans and the British.

MI6 had doubts too, which they expressed in a secret cable to the CIA: “Elements of [his] behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators [but we are] inclined to believe that a significant part of [Curveball’s] reporting is true.”

The British decided to stick with Curveball, as did the Americans. He later admitted being a fabricator and liar.

There appeared to be corroborative intelligence from another spy who fooled the world.
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He was an Iraqi former intelligence officer, called Maj Muhammad Harith, who said it had been his idea to develop mobile biological laboratories and claimed he had ordered seven Renault trucks to put them on.

He made his way to Jordan and then talked to the Americans.

Muhammad Harith apparently made up his story because he wanted a new home. His intelligence was dismissed as fabrication 10 months before the war.

MI6 also thought they had further corroboration of Curveball’s story, when a trusted source – codenamed Red River – revealed he had been in touch with a secondary source who said he had seen fermenters on trucks. But he never claimed the fermenters had anything to do with biological agents.

After the war, MI6 decided that Red River was unreliable as a source.
Handmade suit

But not all the intelligence was wrong. Information from two highly-placed sources close to Saddam Hussein was correct.

Both said Iraq did not have any active WMD.

The CIA’s source was Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri.

Tahir Jalil Habbush Al-Tikriti said Saddam Hussein had no active WMD

Former CIA man Bill Murray – then head of the agency’s station in Paris – dealt with him via an intermediary, an Arab journalist, to whom he gave $200,000 (£132,000) in cash as a down payment.

He said Naji Sabri “looked like a person of real interest – someone who we really should be talking to”.

Murray put together a list of questions to put to the minister, with WMD at the top.

The intermediary met Naji Sabri in New York in September 2002 when he was about to address the UN – six months before the start of the war and just a week before the British dossier was published.

The intermediary bought the minister a handmade suit which the minister wore at the UN, a sign Mr Murray took to mean that Naji Sabri was on board.

Mr Murray says the upshot was intelligence that Saddam Hussein “had some chemical weapons left over from the early 90s, [and] had taken the stocks and given them to various tribes that were loyal to him. [He] had intentions to have weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological and nuclear – but at that point in time he virtually had nothing”.

The CIA insists the intelligence report from the “source” indicated the former Iraqi president did have WMD programmes because, the agency says, it mentioned that, “Iraq was currently producing and stockpiling chemical weapons” and “as a last resort had mobile launchers armed with chemical weapons”.

Mr Murray disputes this account.

The second highly-placed source was Iraq’s head of intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush Al-Tikriti – the jack of diamonds in America’s “most wanted” deck of cards which rated members of Saddam Hussein’s government.

A senior MI6 officer met him in Jordan in January 2003 – two months before the war.

Bill Murray says the “best intelligence” was not used

It was thought Habbush wanted to negotiate a deal that would stop the imminent invasion. He also said Saddam Hussein had no active WMD.

Surprisingly, Lord Butler – who says Britons have “every right” to feel misled by their prime minister – only became aware of the information from Habbush after his report was published.

“I can’t explain that,” says Lord Butler.

“This was something which I think our review did miss. But when we asked about it, we were told that it wasn’t a very significant fact, because SIS [MI6] discounted it as something designed by Saddam to mislead.”

Lord Butler says he also knew nothing about the intelligence from Naji Sabri.

Ex-CIA man Bill Murray was not happy with the way the intelligence from these two highly-placed sources had been used.

“I thought we’d produced probably the best intelligence that anybody produced in the pre-war period, all of which came out – in the long run – to be accurate. The information was discarded and not used.”

Panorama: The Spies Who Fooled the World, BBC One, Monday 18 March at 22:35 GMT and then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.

18 March 2013 Last updated at 00:43 GMT
By Peter Taylor
BBC News

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