ianstone
07-20-2010, 05:05 PM
Iraq war radicalised generation in UK and raised terror threat, ex-MI5 boss tells Chilcot inquiry
By Daily Mail Reporter (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=y&authornamef=Daily+Mail+Reporter)
Last updated at 5:06 PM on 20th July 2010
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Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was warned repeatedly by MI5 that going to war with Iraq would lead to a huge surge in the terrorist threat to the UK, the former head of MI5 said today.
Giving evidence to the official inquiry into the war, Baroness Manningham-Buller said that the service had struggled to cope with the number of plots emerging in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003.
Baroness Manningham-Buller said she explicitly warned former home secretary David Blunkett that terrorist plots would increase after any conflict in Iraq.
Mr Blair was also given her blunt prediction in a series of Joint intelligence Committee assessments.
After Saddam Hussein was toppled, Mi5 stopped 12 terrorist plots on British soil but failed to prevent the July 7 bombings in 2005 and had no warning of the failed suicide attacks on July 21 that year.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/20/article-1296204-0A82AC46000005DC-438_468x286.jpg War raised terror threat: Baroness Manningham-Buller gives evidence to the Iraq Inquiry today
'Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people - not a whole generation, a few among a generation - who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam,' she said.
'We were pretty well swamped - that's possibly an exaggeration - but we were very overburdened with intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with in terms of plots, leads to plots and things that we needed to pursue,' she said.
She said that many British-born individuals found themselves attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
She also said that the toppling of Saddam Hussein had enabled al Qaida to establish a foothold in Iraq which it had never managed before.
'Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before,' she said.
Lady Manningham-Buller said that in March 2002 - a year before the invasion - MI5 had advised the Home Office that Iraqi intelligence agents in the UK would pose little threat in the event of war.
'We regarded the direct threat from Iraq as low,' she said.
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'We did think that Saddam Hussein might resort to terrorism in the theatre if he thought his regime was toppled but we didn't believe he had the capability to do anything in the UK.
'That turned out to be the right judgment. That is partly as a result of the action we took.'
However she said that, even before the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, MI5 had been concerned about the threat from Al Qaeda.
She rejected any suggestion that Iraq had been involved in the attack on the Twin Towers.
'There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection. That was the judgment of the CIA. It was not a judgment that found favour in some parts of the American machine,' she said.
'It is why (former US defence secretary) Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment.'
Lady Manningham-Buller said the number of Britons who became involved in terrorist plots against the UK after the Iraq invasion took MI5 by surprise.
Enlarge http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/20/article-1296204-0A81A017000005DC-620_468x349.jpg (http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/20/article-1296204-0A81A017000005DC-620_468x349_popup.jpg)Top secret: This newly released memo, sent to John Gieve, then permanent secretary at the Home Office by Baroness Manningham-Buller, then deputy director-general of the Security Service, in 2002, summarised the terrorist threat to the UK in response to an attack on Iraq
She told the inquiry: 'It is fair to say that we did not foresee the degree to which British citizens would become involved...
'During 2003-04 we realised that the focus was not foreigners. The rising and increasing threat was a threat from British citizens and that was a very different scenario to, as it were, stopping people coming in.
'It was what has now become called home-grown.'
The ex-spy chief referred to a speech in which former home secretary Jacqui Smith said there were 16 substantial terrorist plots against the UK between 2001 and 2009, of which 12 were stopped.
'Of those, many did involve other countries and people in other countries, but in most of them British citizens predominated,' she said.
Lady Manningham-Buller added: 'Al Qaeda had not focused on the UK.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/20/article-1296204-05D512760000044D-674_233x346.jpg On trial: Saddam Hussein in court in December 2006
'It attacked us abroad in 2003 but it became clear that its ambition was to attack us in the United Kingdom.'
Inquiry panel member Sir Roderic Lyne asked her: 'To what extent did the conflict in Iraq exacerbate the overall threat your service and your fellow services were having to deal with from international terrorism?'
She replied simply: 'Substantially.'
Asked about the picture since she retired from MI5 in 2007, she said: 'The threat is still severe as I read it, and it has mutated and developed in different ways, but I cannot speak with authority on the threat today.'
Lady Manningham-Buller said there was clear evidence that Britain's involvement in the Iraq war was a motivating factor in terrorist attacks on the UK.
'If you take the video wills that we retrieved on various occasions after various plots where terrorists who had expected to be dead explained why they had done what they did, it features,' she said.
'It's part of what we call the single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the West was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to the Muslim world and to Islam, of which manifestations were Iraq and Afghanistan.'
She added: 'What Iraq did was produce a fresh impetus to people prepared to engage in terrorism.'
Lady Manningham-Buller said MI5 was given a budget increase after the September 11 2001 attacks on the US and again in 2002, but still needed far greater resources as a result of the Iraq invasion.
'By 2003 I found it necessary to ask the Prime Minister for a doubling of our budget,' she said.
'This is unheard of, certainly unheard of today, but he and the Treasury and the Chancellor accepted that because I was able to demonstrate the scale of the problem that we were confronted by.'
She suggested that the threat to the UK might have been reduced if there had been better plans for post-invasion Iraq.
'If it had been possible to resolve things in a more constructive and better way than it turned out to be, it is possible the degree to which threats arose might have faded,' she said.
'But this again is hypothetical.'
Lady Manningham-Buller said the Iraq invasion had not eliminated the risk of terrorist attacks using chemical and biological weapons.
'I don't think toppling Saddam Hussein is germane to the long-term ambitions of some terrorist groups to use them,' she said.
She was asked whether she agreed that Saddam would probably have brought together international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in a threat to Western interests if he had not been overthrown.
She replied: 'It's a hypothetical theory. It certainly wasn't of concern in either the short term or medium term to my colleagues and myself.'
The former MI5 head also revealed that she had no one-to-one discussions with prime minister Tony Blair about the effect invading Iraq would have on the UK's threat level.
'I believe the head of the SIS (the UK's foreign intelligence agency, MI6) saw him much more frequently than I did, for understandable reasons,' she said.
Lady Manningham-Buller disclosed that MI5 had been asked to contribute to the Government's now notorious 2002 dossier on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but had refused.
'We were asked to put in some low-grade, small intelligence to it and we refused because we didn't think it was reliable,' she said.
She said the intelligence on Iraqi WMD - most of which came from the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 - used to justify the invasion had been 'fragmentary' and did not justify the weight placed upon it.
'If you are going to go to war, you need a pretty high threshold, it seems to me, to decide on that and I think there is very few who would argue that the intelligence was not substantial enough on which to make that decision,' she said.
She said the views of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) - the UK's senior intelligence body which drew up the dossier - had been treated with too much reverence in Whitehall.
'The JIC has an aura about it that is undeserved. People talk in hushed tones about the Joint Intelligence Committee. It is another Whitehall committee. It is fallible,' she said.
She said the decision to go to war in Iraq meant that insufficient attention was paid to Afghanistan.
'By focusing on Iraq we reduced the focus on the Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan. I think that was a long-term major and strategic problem,' she said.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1296204/Chilcot-inquiry-Iraq-war-increased-terror-threat-Britain-says-head-MI5.html#ixzz0uG6KK65W
By Daily Mail Reporter (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=y&authornamef=Daily+Mail+Reporter)
Last updated at 5:06 PM on 20th July 2010
Comments (64) (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1296204/Chilcot-inquiry-Iraq-war-increased-terror-threat-Britain-says-head-MI5.html#comments)
Add to My Stories (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1296204/Chilcot-inquiry-Iraq-war-increased-terror-threat-Britain-says-head-MI5.html)
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was warned repeatedly by MI5 that going to war with Iraq would lead to a huge surge in the terrorist threat to the UK, the former head of MI5 said today.
Giving evidence to the official inquiry into the war, Baroness Manningham-Buller said that the service had struggled to cope with the number of plots emerging in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003.
Baroness Manningham-Buller said she explicitly warned former home secretary David Blunkett that terrorist plots would increase after any conflict in Iraq.
Mr Blair was also given her blunt prediction in a series of Joint intelligence Committee assessments.
After Saddam Hussein was toppled, Mi5 stopped 12 terrorist plots on British soil but failed to prevent the July 7 bombings in 2005 and had no warning of the failed suicide attacks on July 21 that year.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/20/article-1296204-0A82AC46000005DC-438_468x286.jpg War raised terror threat: Baroness Manningham-Buller gives evidence to the Iraq Inquiry today
'Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people - not a whole generation, a few among a generation - who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam,' she said.
'We were pretty well swamped - that's possibly an exaggeration - but we were very overburdened with intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with in terms of plots, leads to plots and things that we needed to pursue,' she said.
She said that many British-born individuals found themselves attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
She also said that the toppling of Saddam Hussein had enabled al Qaida to establish a foothold in Iraq which it had never managed before.
'Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before,' she said.
Lady Manningham-Buller said that in March 2002 - a year before the invasion - MI5 had advised the Home Office that Iraqi intelligence agents in the UK would pose little threat in the event of war.
'We regarded the direct threat from Iraq as low,' she said.
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'We did think that Saddam Hussein might resort to terrorism in the theatre if he thought his regime was toppled but we didn't believe he had the capability to do anything in the UK.
'That turned out to be the right judgment. That is partly as a result of the action we took.'
However she said that, even before the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, MI5 had been concerned about the threat from Al Qaeda.
She rejected any suggestion that Iraq had been involved in the attack on the Twin Towers.
'There is no credible intelligence to suggest that connection. That was the judgment of the CIA. It was not a judgment that found favour in some parts of the American machine,' she said.
'It is why (former US defence secretary) Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment.'
Lady Manningham-Buller said the number of Britons who became involved in terrorist plots against the UK after the Iraq invasion took MI5 by surprise.
Enlarge http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/20/article-1296204-0A81A017000005DC-620_468x349.jpg (http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/20/article-1296204-0A81A017000005DC-620_468x349_popup.jpg)Top secret: This newly released memo, sent to John Gieve, then permanent secretary at the Home Office by Baroness Manningham-Buller, then deputy director-general of the Security Service, in 2002, summarised the terrorist threat to the UK in response to an attack on Iraq
She told the inquiry: 'It is fair to say that we did not foresee the degree to which British citizens would become involved...
'During 2003-04 we realised that the focus was not foreigners. The rising and increasing threat was a threat from British citizens and that was a very different scenario to, as it were, stopping people coming in.
'It was what has now become called home-grown.'
The ex-spy chief referred to a speech in which former home secretary Jacqui Smith said there were 16 substantial terrorist plots against the UK between 2001 and 2009, of which 12 were stopped.
'Of those, many did involve other countries and people in other countries, but in most of them British citizens predominated,' she said.
Lady Manningham-Buller added: 'Al Qaeda had not focused on the UK.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/20/article-1296204-05D512760000044D-674_233x346.jpg On trial: Saddam Hussein in court in December 2006
'It attacked us abroad in 2003 but it became clear that its ambition was to attack us in the United Kingdom.'
Inquiry panel member Sir Roderic Lyne asked her: 'To what extent did the conflict in Iraq exacerbate the overall threat your service and your fellow services were having to deal with from international terrorism?'
She replied simply: 'Substantially.'
Asked about the picture since she retired from MI5 in 2007, she said: 'The threat is still severe as I read it, and it has mutated and developed in different ways, but I cannot speak with authority on the threat today.'
Lady Manningham-Buller said there was clear evidence that Britain's involvement in the Iraq war was a motivating factor in terrorist attacks on the UK.
'If you take the video wills that we retrieved on various occasions after various plots where terrorists who had expected to be dead explained why they had done what they did, it features,' she said.
'It's part of what we call the single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the West was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to the Muslim world and to Islam, of which manifestations were Iraq and Afghanistan.'
She added: 'What Iraq did was produce a fresh impetus to people prepared to engage in terrorism.'
Lady Manningham-Buller said MI5 was given a budget increase after the September 11 2001 attacks on the US and again in 2002, but still needed far greater resources as a result of the Iraq invasion.
'By 2003 I found it necessary to ask the Prime Minister for a doubling of our budget,' she said.
'This is unheard of, certainly unheard of today, but he and the Treasury and the Chancellor accepted that because I was able to demonstrate the scale of the problem that we were confronted by.'
She suggested that the threat to the UK might have been reduced if there had been better plans for post-invasion Iraq.
'If it had been possible to resolve things in a more constructive and better way than it turned out to be, it is possible the degree to which threats arose might have faded,' she said.
'But this again is hypothetical.'
Lady Manningham-Buller said the Iraq invasion had not eliminated the risk of terrorist attacks using chemical and biological weapons.
'I don't think toppling Saddam Hussein is germane to the long-term ambitions of some terrorist groups to use them,' she said.
She was asked whether she agreed that Saddam would probably have brought together international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in a threat to Western interests if he had not been overthrown.
She replied: 'It's a hypothetical theory. It certainly wasn't of concern in either the short term or medium term to my colleagues and myself.'
The former MI5 head also revealed that she had no one-to-one discussions with prime minister Tony Blair about the effect invading Iraq would have on the UK's threat level.
'I believe the head of the SIS (the UK's foreign intelligence agency, MI6) saw him much more frequently than I did, for understandable reasons,' she said.
Lady Manningham-Buller disclosed that MI5 had been asked to contribute to the Government's now notorious 2002 dossier on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but had refused.
'We were asked to put in some low-grade, small intelligence to it and we refused because we didn't think it was reliable,' she said.
She said the intelligence on Iraqi WMD - most of which came from the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6 - used to justify the invasion had been 'fragmentary' and did not justify the weight placed upon it.
'If you are going to go to war, you need a pretty high threshold, it seems to me, to decide on that and I think there is very few who would argue that the intelligence was not substantial enough on which to make that decision,' she said.
She said the views of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) - the UK's senior intelligence body which drew up the dossier - had been treated with too much reverence in Whitehall.
'The JIC has an aura about it that is undeserved. People talk in hushed tones about the Joint Intelligence Committee. It is another Whitehall committee. It is fallible,' she said.
She said the decision to go to war in Iraq meant that insufficient attention was paid to Afghanistan.
'By focusing on Iraq we reduced the focus on the Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan. I think that was a long-term major and strategic problem,' she said.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1296204/Chilcot-inquiry-Iraq-war-increased-terror-threat-Britain-says-head-MI5.html#ixzz0uG6KK65W