ktlight
14th August 2011, 09:26
FYI:
For U.S. readers, If this happened in America the headline would read “The CIA produced bogus Iraq war evidence under pressure from the White House”.
Coming up on the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks the truth surrounding the event and following invasions of several nations continues to surface.
The latest revelations come out of the U.K. were an ongoing investigation reveals that not only was the Weapons of Mass Destruction intelligence fabricated but most of the Iraq war evidence was bogus as well and it was fabricated under pressure from Downing Street — England’s equivalent of the White House.
But make no mistake about it, the White House and Downing Street conspired together to fabricate the evidence to justify the Iraq war invasion.
For some related background information related see:
Declassified! WMD Intel Fabricated To Justify Iraq Invasion For “Prize” Of Oil
General Wesley Clark Reveals US Plan To Invade Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Lybia, Somalia, Sudan, And Iran
The Patriot Act: When Truth Becomes Treason
Corporate News Reporters Reveal Mainstream News Is Censored, Controlled, And Paid For By The Government
Shaming of our spooks: MI6 produced bogus Iraq war evidence under pressure from Downing Street
The exhausted secret intelligence officer was heading home after a heavy session analysing reports from Iraq. As he stepped out through the high-security air-lock exit from MI6’s grand headquarters beside the Thames in London, a newspaper-seller’s placard caught his eye — ‘45 minutes from attack,’ it proclaimed.
Alarm bells rang in his head. It was September 2002, and Prime Minister Tony Blair had that day unveiled with great fanfare the government’s dossier detailing Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as a justification for going to war.
He knew, in a way the public did not, the precise background to that headline. His first thought was that this was not what the original intelligence report had said. ‘If this goes wrong, we’re all screwed,’ he muttered to himself.
Mopping up: British soldier prepares to jump from a burning tank which was set ablaze in Basra
It did go wrong, spectacularly so, as a new history of MI6 by the BBC’s well-informed security correspondent Gordon Corera recounts. It’s a disturbing story of how tiny sparks of dubious information picked up in the backstreets of Baghdad and elsewhere were fanned into giant flames.
The result was a firecracker of a dossier which was pivotal in the run-up to the deeply divisive British and American invasion of Iraq. For many people, the scary information it disclosed — that Saddam was so advanced with his chemical and biological weapons that he could fire them with a mere 45 minutes notice — was a tipping point.
Millions who had been sceptical about the reality of the Iraq threat were brought up short by the Prime Minister’s assurance that the evidence of Saddam’s evil intentions was ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’. The case for confronting him was cut and dried.
Only later would it emerge how dodgy that dossier actually was.
Victim: David Kelly, 59, after giving evidence in a Commons Select committee
Yet disastrous consequences flowed from its false and exaggerated claims. They were cited as a pretext for the conquest of Iraq, which led to tens of thousands of deaths.
They also caused a damaging clash between the government and the BBC over suggestions that the dossier had been ‘sexed-up’ and the mysterious death of a respected weapons inspector, Dr David Kelly.
For MI6, the dossier brought the biggest crisis of confidence since the infamous Cambridge spy ring and the defection of one of its top men, Kim Philby, to the Soviet Union in 1963.
What happened was a lesson in the distortion that can arise when the painstaking craft of intelligence-gathering — MI6’s pride and joy since its inception in 1909 — was over-ridden by the wishful thinking and unrelenting ambition of politicians.
From the start, Blair had put his weight and his reputation behind U.S. plans to topple Saddam, believing in his heart that the world would be a better place without the Iraqi dictator. But selling a war to a sceptical public would be very difficult. Regime change on its own was not accepted in Britain in the way it was in post-9/11 America.
So the decision was taken to base the case for war entirely on Iraq’s possession of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. This meant leaning heavily on intelligence. From his spymasters Blair sought material to make a public case for armed intervention.
source to read more
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/08/13/mi6-produced-bogus-iraq-war-evidence-pressure-downing-street-55281/
For U.S. readers, If this happened in America the headline would read “The CIA produced bogus Iraq war evidence under pressure from the White House”.
Coming up on the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks the truth surrounding the event and following invasions of several nations continues to surface.
The latest revelations come out of the U.K. were an ongoing investigation reveals that not only was the Weapons of Mass Destruction intelligence fabricated but most of the Iraq war evidence was bogus as well and it was fabricated under pressure from Downing Street — England’s equivalent of the White House.
But make no mistake about it, the White House and Downing Street conspired together to fabricate the evidence to justify the Iraq war invasion.
For some related background information related see:
Declassified! WMD Intel Fabricated To Justify Iraq Invasion For “Prize” Of Oil
General Wesley Clark Reveals US Plan To Invade Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Lybia, Somalia, Sudan, And Iran
The Patriot Act: When Truth Becomes Treason
Corporate News Reporters Reveal Mainstream News Is Censored, Controlled, And Paid For By The Government
Shaming of our spooks: MI6 produced bogus Iraq war evidence under pressure from Downing Street
The exhausted secret intelligence officer was heading home after a heavy session analysing reports from Iraq. As he stepped out through the high-security air-lock exit from MI6’s grand headquarters beside the Thames in London, a newspaper-seller’s placard caught his eye — ‘45 minutes from attack,’ it proclaimed.
Alarm bells rang in his head. It was September 2002, and Prime Minister Tony Blair had that day unveiled with great fanfare the government’s dossier detailing Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as a justification for going to war.
He knew, in a way the public did not, the precise background to that headline. His first thought was that this was not what the original intelligence report had said. ‘If this goes wrong, we’re all screwed,’ he muttered to himself.
Mopping up: British soldier prepares to jump from a burning tank which was set ablaze in Basra
It did go wrong, spectacularly so, as a new history of MI6 by the BBC’s well-informed security correspondent Gordon Corera recounts. It’s a disturbing story of how tiny sparks of dubious information picked up in the backstreets of Baghdad and elsewhere were fanned into giant flames.
The result was a firecracker of a dossier which was pivotal in the run-up to the deeply divisive British and American invasion of Iraq. For many people, the scary information it disclosed — that Saddam was so advanced with his chemical and biological weapons that he could fire them with a mere 45 minutes notice — was a tipping point.
Millions who had been sceptical about the reality of the Iraq threat were brought up short by the Prime Minister’s assurance that the evidence of Saddam’s evil intentions was ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’. The case for confronting him was cut and dried.
Only later would it emerge how dodgy that dossier actually was.
Victim: David Kelly, 59, after giving evidence in a Commons Select committee
Yet disastrous consequences flowed from its false and exaggerated claims. They were cited as a pretext for the conquest of Iraq, which led to tens of thousands of deaths.
They also caused a damaging clash between the government and the BBC over suggestions that the dossier had been ‘sexed-up’ and the mysterious death of a respected weapons inspector, Dr David Kelly.
For MI6, the dossier brought the biggest crisis of confidence since the infamous Cambridge spy ring and the defection of one of its top men, Kim Philby, to the Soviet Union in 1963.
What happened was a lesson in the distortion that can arise when the painstaking craft of intelligence-gathering — MI6’s pride and joy since its inception in 1909 — was over-ridden by the wishful thinking and unrelenting ambition of politicians.
From the start, Blair had put his weight and his reputation behind U.S. plans to topple Saddam, believing in his heart that the world would be a better place without the Iraqi dictator. But selling a war to a sceptical public would be very difficult. Regime change on its own was not accepted in Britain in the way it was in post-9/11 America.
So the decision was taken to base the case for war entirely on Iraq’s possession of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. This meant leaning heavily on intelligence. From his spymasters Blair sought material to make a public case for armed intervention.
source to read more
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/08/13/mi6-produced-bogus-iraq-war-evidence-pressure-downing-street-55281/