Mar 19, 2013

Breaking: Iraq Spies Lies Exposed! & Tony Blair Ignores His Own Spy Agencies!

1.BBC News Report: Iraq: The spies who fooled the world...




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



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.

“Start Quote

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.


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.


BBC News Report:

Blair: Iraq uprising would have been 'worse than Syria'


Former UK PM Tony Blair has told the BBC he has no regrets over Iraq on the 10th anniversary of the country's invasion - and said the situation otherwise would have been "a lot worse than Syria".

The UK lost 179 servicemen and women, while at least 100,000 Iraqis died in the invasion and ensuing violence.

However, speaking about former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Mr Blair said, "How can you regret removing a monster who created enormous carnage?"

He told Norman Smith, "If you examine what's happening in Syria - just reflect on what Bashar al-Assad, who is a 20th as bad as Saddam, is doing to his people today and the number of lives already lost."




From The Gaurdian: Greenspan admits Iraq was about oil, as deaths put at 1.2m

Greenspan's damning comments about the war come as a survey of Iraqis, which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.

More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials. The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1,461 adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency, ORB, which asked a random selection of Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.

Previous estimates gave a range between 390,000 and 940,000, the most prominent of which - collected by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and reported in the Lancet in October 2006 - suggested 654,965 deaths

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