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British intelligence seriously flawed says butler report { July 14 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/a/2004/07/14/international0741EDT0500.DTLhttp://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/a/2004/07/14/international0741EDT0500.DTL
Inquiry says British Iraq intelligence ``seriously flawed''
- ED JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
(07-14) 05:59 PDT LONDON (AP) --
An official inquiry into the quality of British intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction said Wednesday that some sources were "seriously flawed" or "unreliable" but found no evidence of "deliberate distortion or culpable negligence."
Prime Minister Tony Blair said he accepted the conclusions in Lord Butler's report in full, but that "getting rid of Saddam Hussein" was not a mistake.
"Any mistakes made should not be laid at the door of our intelligence and security community," Blair told the House of Commons after the report was released.
"They do a tremendous job for our country. I accept full personal responsibility for the way the issue was presented and therefore for any errors made," he said.
Contradicting a central claim made by Blair, Lord Butler's report said that before the war, Iraq "did not have significant, if any, stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment or developed plans for using them."
The report said the government's claim in a September 2002 dossier that Saddam Hussein could use chemical and biological weapons on 45 minutes notice was potentially misleading because it did not explain that it referred to battlefield weapons.
However, the report backed the government's claim that it had intelligence that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa, and that the claim was not based on forged documents.
"No one lied, no one made up the intelligence, no one inserted things into dossier against the advice of intelligence services," Blair said.
"Everyone genuinely tried to do their best in good faith for the country in circumstances of acute difficulty. That issue of good faith should now be at an end."
The report said a key dossier prepared by Blair's government on the threat posed by Saddam pushed its case to the limits of available intelligence.
"Language in the dossier may have left with readers the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgments than was the case," the report said.
"The clearest evidence that the British government hadn't got an intention to mislead is that it would have been a very foolish thing to do to say that these weapons were there, when as a result of the war the fact that whether they were or not was going to be established so soon," Butler said at a news conference following the release of his report.
His report repeated the assessment of a previous inquiry that the 45-minute claim was potentially misleading because it was not made clear that it referred to battlefield munitions.
Butler said there was a suspicion the 45-minute detail, mentioned four times in the Blair government's September 2002 dossier, had been included because it was "eye-catching."
However, Butler's five-member committee, which interviewed Blair, senior Cabinet figures and key intelligence officials, said that in general intelligence material had been correctly reported.
"We should record in particular that we have found no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence," the report said.
"We do regard it as a failing, a serious failing, in the dossier that there were not the warnings which were in the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments about the thinness of the evidence," Butler told a news conference.
"But we have no evidence that the government did not itself believe the judgments which it was placing before the public."
The report supported Britain's controversial claim that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from Niger. The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said documents supporting the uranium claim were forgeries.
But Butler said Britain had intelligence from "several different sources."
"The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it," it added.
The report was highly critical of British intelligence-gathering in Iraq.
"Validation of human intelligence sources after the war has thrown doubt on a high proportion of those sources and of their reports, and hence on the quality of the intelligence assessments received by ministers and officials in the period from summer 2002 to the outbreak of hostilities," it said.
The report acknowledged that its conclusions would probably lead to calls for the resignation of John Scarlett, who as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee drew up the dossier. He has since been appointed the chief of MI6, Britain's secret intelligence service.
The report, however, said it hoped Scarlett would stay on. "We have a high regard for his abilities and his record," it said.
The informality of the procedures within Blair's government for forming policies on the risks posed by Iraq "reduced the scope for informed collective political judgment," the report found.
"There was as a result of the process some strain between the desires of the government to have a dossier which helped to support the case they were making and the Joint Intelligence Committee's normal standards of objective assessment," Butler told a news conference.
"No single individual is to blame. This was a collective operation in which there were the failures we have identified but there was no deliberate attempt on the part of the government to mislead."
Blair has weathered three previous inquiries, all of which cleared his government of misusing intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as it built a case for war.
"Tony Blair should admit that he was wrong about the size, scope and capacity of Iraq's WMD arsenal," Charles Kennedy, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrat Party, said Tuesday. "It's time he acknowledged his mistakes and took the blame."
Blair was in a bullish mood Tuesday after receiving an advance copy of the report. Asked if he believed he had been fed "duff intelligence" that had made him look foolish, he replied: "I don't accept that at all."
The prime minister's personal ratings have fallen since the war, and newspapers constantly speculate about the end of his run in power. But he remains in a strong position. A recent poll asked whether respondents would rather have Blair or opposition Conservative leader Michael Howard as prime minister, and Blair was favored by 47 percent to 31 percent.
The 45-minute claim has caused the government the most trouble.
In May 2003, the British Broadcasting Corp. claimed Blair's office had "sexed up" the dossier by inserting the detail against the wishes of spy chiefs and probably knew it was wrong.
The man identified as the BBC's source, weapons scientist David Kelly, committed suicide.
Two parliamentary committees -- the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and the Intelligence and Security Committee -- cleared the government of "sexing up" the dossier. Both said the "jury was still out" on the existence of WMD in Iraq.
Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, whose Iraqi National Accord group supplied Western intelligence agencies with information on Saddam's weapons, said Wednesday that the 45-minute claim "really related to using such weapons against Iraqi troops if they moved against him."
Blair received some supportive words Wednesday from former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who said Britons needed to remember that "it was very difficult in the aftermath of 9/11 for any world leader not to act on his intelligence."
"And the British intelligence, whatever Lord Butler says about it, was clearly even more forward-leading than the American intelligence in believing that Saddam (Hussein) was trying to get nuclear materials, in believing that Saddam had some kind of relationship with al-Qaida," Clinton told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
Butler noted that British intelligence had not suggested there was evidence of cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
"The (Joint Intelligence Committee) made clear that, although there were contacts between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaida, there was no evidence of cooperation."
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