Vikram Dodd, Nicholas Watt and Richard Norton Taylor of The Guardian write:
Tony Blair's headline-grabbing claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so was based on hearsay information, the Guardian has learned. ...
The revelation that the 45 minute claim is second hand is contained in an internal Foreign Office document released by the Hutton inquiry. It had been thought the basis for the claim came from an Iraqi officer high in Saddam Hussein's command structure. In fact it came through an informant, who passed it on to MI6.
And just like in the US, the intelligence professionals were resisting the politicization of intelligence needed for Blair to make his war-justifying claim. Paul Waugh of the Independent writes:
John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, "winced" when asked about the credibility of the Government's key 45- minute claim about the Iraqi threat, a document submitted to the Hutton Inquiry reveals.
And just like in the US, the administration tried to duck their responsibilities. Kim Sengupta of the Independent
writes:
At 2.48 on a hot and slow afternoon in the Hutton inquiry, Martin Howard, an intelligence chief, casually dropped into his evidence that the Prime Minister had personally intervened in the case of David Kelly. Amid the frantic scratching of journalists' pens on their notebooks, there was a loud whisper, "torpedo running".
And just like in the US, there were honest intelligence professionals who raised their doubts in the press: David Kelly among them. Kelly was the source for this quote:
The government would not have convinced the public of the need for war against Iraq without exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, its own leading expert believed.
David Kelly made the devastating claim in a taped conversation with a BBC journalist revealed yesterday at the Hutton inquiry.
The concern, he said, was not the weapons Iraq had, but what it might be allowed to develop in the future. "But that unfortunately wasn't expressed strongly in the dossier because that takes away the case for war."
In the UK, events took a tragic turn, as David Kelly committed suicide. After which Blair was asked by a journalist if he felt he had "blood on his hands."
I wonder what it's like to live in a country with a free press? And where hearings into doctored intelligence don't get caught up in months and years of stonewalling?