MI6 rushed to back case for Iraq war

[peterh]

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373594015

The Butler report into intelligence on weapons of mass destruction will paint a picture of Britain's intelligence services rushing to try to justify a political decision to go to war in Iraq.


A central finding of the report, according to people familiar with its contents, will be that intelligence failings stemmed from Downing Street's decision first to be ready for war and later to publicly justify it by the threat seen posed by Iraq's WMD.

The report, due to be released on Wednesday, is expected to avoid criticism of government members or intelligence officials and to focus on ensuring appropriate procedures are followed in future. But it concludes that MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, delivered inadequate intelligence, that there were flaws in the way it was assessed and that, in some respects, the way it was publicly presented was misleading.

The inquiry says that while Tony Blair's government was genuinely concerned about the spread of WMD and the risk they could fall into the hands of terrorists, Iraq had not been seen as a primary threat.




Butler musta felt that if the yanks can get away with it, the brits can too….lets just throw this whole mess on to intel cause the thought that anyone outside of MI6 manipulating that data would just be too messy….:eyes:

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. It looks like it half-blames the government

"However, after Downing Street had decided to back the Bush administration's desire for regime change in Baghdad, the intelligence services rushed to refocus on Iraq. This appears to have driven MI6 to rely on sources inside Iraq that could not be tested for reliability."

"The inquiry found that the public dossier omitted important caveats contained in the original secret assessments by the Joint Intelligence Committee, which directs and evaluates the work of the intelligence services."

In other words, because of pressure from Bush and Blair, they ignored the real intelligence, and listened to any crap that Chalabi and other exiles came up with. The government then sexed up the dossier by removing the bits that said the evidence was unreliable.