Former M15 spy agency chief says there was no link between Iraq and 2001 attacks on USAP: The war in Iraq led to a loss of focus on the threat from al-Qaida, emboldened al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and helped to breed a generation of homegrown terrorists, Britain's former domestic spy chief told a U.K. inquiry...
Eliza Manningham-Butler, director of the MI5 agency between 2002 and 2007, said Britain's government paid little attention to warnings that the war would fuel domestic terrorism. [She] also said Iraq had posed little threat before the 2003 invasion, and insisted there was no evidence of a link between former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
'There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might way, of the CIA,' she told the inquiry. 'It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine.'... 'It is why [then-U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld] started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment.'...
MI5 disagreed with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair over a key justification for the war -- Iraq's purported harbouring of weapons of mass destruction. She said the belief that Iraq might use such weapons against the West 'wasn't a concern in either the short term or the medium term to either my colleagues or myself.'...
'Our involvement in Iraq radicalized... a whole generation of young people... who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam,' she said... Video messages left by the four suicide bombers who killed 52 commuters in the 2005 attacks on London's subway and bus network had referred to Britain's role in Iraq... 'Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad.'...
The ex-spy chief, giving evidence in a public session, said she had been asked by the British government after the invasion to persuade deputy U.S. Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to ditch his plan to disband Iraq's army. She said she found she had 'not a hope' of changing Wolfowitz's mind.
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