Former House of Commons leader Robin Cook said: “only a month before [leading the U.K. into war in Iraq, on February 10, 2003] the Prime Minister [Tony Blair] had received an assessment that ‘there was no intelligence that Iraq had provided CB [chemical or biological] materials to al-Qa’ida.’ Even more startlingly, the Joint Intelligence Committee warned that ‘in the event of imminent regime collapse there would be a risk of transfer of such material.’ We had to wait until the report of the Intelligence and Security Committee six months later before we learnt of these warnings. Tony Blair was entirely within his rights to set aside this advice, but it is extraordinary that he should make the risk of the transfer of the CB material to terrorists a centerpiece of his case for war, when he had just received an intelligence assessment that war might make such transfer more, not less, likely.”
– Robin Cook, The Point of Departure, Page 289