7/20/2010

In testimony to the U.K. panel investigating the 2003 invasion of Iraq, former head of MI5 (U.K.’s counter-intelligence and security agency) Eliza Manningham-Buller “said that Iraq had presented little threat to Britain before the invasion, and that there had been no reliable evidence linking the government of Saddam Hussein to the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. ‘There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection, and that was the judgment, I might say, of the C.I.A.,’ she said. ‘Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11,’ she added, ‘and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind.’ But, she said, ‘it was not a judgment that found favor with some parts of the American machine’ namely Donald H. Rumsfeld, the United States secretary of defense at the time. That ‘is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment,’ she said.”

 – Sarah Lyall, “Ex-Official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain,” The New York Times, July 20, 2010