Blix Blasts Blair on Iraq WMD Intelligence

British officials intentionally exaggerated intelligence assessments of Iraq’s prewar WMD capabilities, according to the former top U.N. weapons inspector (see GSN, Dec. 20, 2006).

If U.S. and British leaders had allowed U.N. inspectors just “a couple of months more” to conduct work in Iraq, they would have concluded that the regime of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had no active WMD programs, said Hans Blix in an interview to be broadcast today.

Instead, officials chose to ignore concerns within the intelligence communities about the confidence of their assessments.

“I do think they exercised spin,” Blix said.  “They put exclamation marks instead of question marks” (Associated Press/New York Times, March 12).

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