Global Security Newswire

The United Kingdom based its 2002 claim that Iraq could deploy biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes on information obtained from an Iraqi taxi driver, a British lawmaker told the London Daily Mail in remarks published today (see GSN, Nov. 25).

The British MI6 foreign intelligence agency was "running a senior Iraqi army officer who had a source of his own, a cab driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, conservative Parliament member Adam Holloway said, adding that the driver had "apparently overheard two Iraqi army officers two years before who had spoken about weapons with the range to hit targets elsewhere in the Middle East."

Holloway first made the assertions in a report published by the British think tank First Defense.

"Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case," MI6 leaders were "squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all," Holloway wrote in the document.

"In the [MI6] analysts' footnote to their report, it flagged up that part of the report describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. The missiles verifiably did not exist," the report states. "The footnote said it in black and white. Despite this the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks" of the United Kingdom's case for war with Iraq (Tim Shipman, Daily Mail, Dec. 8).

No signs of active WMD programs or operational stockpiles have been found in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that unseated dictator Saddam Hussein.

The former head of MI6 today said there was no demand to "firm up" the September 2002 document that contained the WMD assertion, the BBC reported.

"There was absolutely no conscious intention to manipulate the language or to obfuscate or to create any misunderstanding on what this might refer to," John Scarlett, who at the time led the Joint Intelligence Committee that issued the dossier, told a panel examining the British involvement in the Iraq war.

He acknowledged, though, that the document should have been more clear that it was addressing battlefield weapons rather than missiles (BBC News, Dec. 8).

The ongoing probe in the United Kingdom might seek input from U.S. officials, Newsweek reported yesterday.

"We do anticipate the inquiry might want to talk to U.S. citizens -- but we do not know yet who that would be or how they would be asked to get involved," a British diplomat told the magazine. No U.S. government sources have testified before the investigators to date (Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, Dec. 7).