Ex-M15 spy chief testifies at UK's Iraq inquiry

[July 20, 2010]  LONDON (AP) -- British and U.S. intelligence had no credible evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States before the 2003 Iraq invasion, the former chief of Britain's domestic spy agency told the country's inquiry into the war.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of the MI5 between 2002 and 2007, said that nothing to connect the attacks to Baghdad was discovered ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA," she told the inquiry. "It was not a judgment that found favor with some parts of the American machine."

Manningham-Buller said those pushing the case for war had given undue prominence to scraps of inconclusive intelligence on possible links between Iraq and the 2001 attacks.

She suggested the dispute led former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to disregard CIA intelligence in favor of work produced by his own department.

"To my mind, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind," Manningham-Buller said.

Manningham-Buller, who is now a member of the House of Lords, acknowledged that the Iraq war vastly increased the terrorism threat to Britain and helped to radicalize "a whole generation of young people."

Many young British Muslims "saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam," she said. "So it undoubtedly increased the threat, and by 2004 we were pretty well swamped."

The ex-spy chief, giving evidence in a public session, also acknowledged that the intelligence picture before the Iraq war was incomplete.

"The picture was fragmentary," she said. "The picture was not complete. The picture on intelligence never is."

Other ex-intelligence chiefs have given evidence to the inquiry, commissioned by the government, in private sessions. The inquiry was convened to examine the build-up to war, and errors made on post-conflict planning.

It won't apportion blame or assign criminal liability for mistakes made, but will issue a report later this year in hopes of learning lessons from mistakes that were made.

Manningham-Buller said she was once asked by the British government to try persuade deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to ditch his plan to disband Iraq's army.

But she found she had "not a hope" of changing Wolfowitz's mind, Manningham-Buller said.

[Associated Press; By DAVID STRINGER]

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