Global Security Newswire

U.S. and British analysts of prewar Iraq's WMD capabilities overlooked high-level Iraqi government assertions that Saddam Hussein's now-deposed regime held no unconventional weapons, the London Independent reported on Monday.

Iraq maintained robust nuclear, biological, chemical and missile programs prior to the 1991 Gulf War, but the 2003 U.S.-led intervention turned up no evidence of WMD efforts that had been active since the earlier conflict. Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of the invasion's start.

High-level Hussein government spy official Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti before the war told the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service that his country no longer had unconventional arms, but the assertion only surfaced after the completion of a 2004 British study of prewar intelligence findings.

The report's authors inquired about the statements and were "told that it wasn't a very significant fact, because SIS discounted it as something designed by Saddam to mislead," study leader Robin Butler told the BBC.

A CIA officer in France spoke months ahead of the conflict with then-Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and informed the intelligence agency's main office that Iraq's WMD inventory contained "virtually nothing."

Meanwhile, lower-level Iraqi claims received significant play within the U.S. and British governments if they affirmed Hussein's possession of significant unconventional arms capabilities.

In the decade prior to the invasion, a group of Jordan-based Iraqis received information that the Hussein's regime could deploy chemical armaments within 45 minutes. The claim applied only to potential use of such weapons to target Iraqi military deserters, but then-MI6 chief Richard Dearlove allegedly withheld that qualification from British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Butler said the assertion "was interpreted as referring to missiles you could fire at Cyprus, and that did make it sensational. That misunderstanding was due to a sloppy bit of use of intelligence."