1 Boring Old Man

UN’s Blix: UK, US relied on dubious intelligence
The Associated Press
Washington Post
By DAVID STRINGER
July 27, 2010

LONDON – The United Nations inspector who led a doomed hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq told Britain’s inquiry into the 2003 invasion Tuesday that the U.S. and U.K. relied on flawed intelligence and showed dubious judgment in the buildup to war…

At a London hearing, Blix said those who were "100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq turned out to have "less than zero percent knowledge" of where the purported hidden caches would be found…

He said he told Rice and Blair his "belief, faith in intelligence had been weakened"…

An earlier British investigation criticized U.K. spy agency officials for relying on seriously flawed or unreliable sources in drafting prewar dossiers on Iraq’s threat. Last week, Eliza Manningham-Buller, ex-director of Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5, told the inquiry that the prewar intelligence picture was "fragmentary," raising similar concerns to Blix…

Blix said he believed Blair – who testified to the inquiry in January – was genuine in his belief that Iraq has was concealing weapons, but ultimately mistaken. "I certainly felt that he was absolutely sincere in his belief," Blix said. "What I questioned was the good judgment, particularly with Bush, but also in Blair’s judgment." Blair told the five-member panel in January it was right to invade even if there was just a "possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction"…

The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.
—Iraq Intelligence Commission Report [US]

Its main conclusion was that key intelligence used to justify the war with Iraq has been shown to be unreliable. It claims that the Secret Intelligence Service did not check its sources well enough and sometimes relied on third hand reports. It criticises the use of the 45 minute claim in the 2002 dossier as "unsubstantiated", and says that there was an over-reliance on Iraqi dissident sources. It also comments that warnings from the Joint Intelligence Committee on the limitations of the intelligence were not made clear. Overall it said that "more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear", and that judgements had stretched available intelligence "to the outer limits".
—The Butler Review [UK]

"The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," Bush said.

But he declined to speculate on whether he would have gone to war if the intelligence had said Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

"That’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do," Bush said, according to excerpts from the recent ABC interview at Camp David.