Memo reveals intelligence chief's bid to fuel fears of Iraqi WMDs

[Ichingcarpenter]

Source: the Guardian

Sir John Scarlett was chairman of the joint intelligence committee before serving as head of MI6 from 2004 to 2009. Photograph: Martin Godwin
The senior intelligence official responsible for Tony Blair's notorious dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction proposed using the document to mislead the public about the significance of Iraq's banned weapons.

Sir John Scarlett, who as head of the Joint Intelligence Committee was placed "in charge" of writing the September 2002 dossier, sent a memo to Blair's foreign affairs adviser referring to "the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional".

The memo, released under the Freedom of Information Act, has been described as one of the most significant documents on the dossier yet published.

The disclosure supports the evidence of the former intelligence official Michael Laurie, who told the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war that it was widely understood that the dossier was intended to make a case for war and misrepresented intelligence to this particular end.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/26/intelligence-chief-iraqi-wmds

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Is it War Crimes yet?

[deminks]

1. Yes. To the Hague with the lot of them.

[KoKo]

2. More and more keeps coming out... Maybe one day decades from now

someone will be held accountable for what this cost the American People and the Iraqi People.

[leveymg]

3. Yes, that's the "dicey dossier" that found its way into Powell's UN Speech

Is there some law that says that all the Tippy-Toppy SECRET AGENT types take a TV action figure pseudonym: "Captain Scarlet"?