AND STILL NO INDICTMENTS OF THE CRIMINAL BUSH REGIME

Ex-MI5 spy chief: No link between Iraq and 9/11
Jul 20 02:21 PM US/Eastern
By DAVID STRINGER
Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) - The war in Iraq led to a loss of focus on the threat from al-Qaida, emboldened the group's leader Osama bin Laden, and helped to breed a generation of homegrown terrorists, Britain's former domestic spy chief told an inquiry Tuesday.

Making the sharpest criticism so far aired in Britain's inquiry into mistakes made in the Iraq war, Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of the MI5 agency between 2002 and 2007, said Britain's government paid little attention to warnings that the war would fuel domestic terrorism.

The ex-spy chief said those pushing the case for war in the United States gave undue prominence to scraps of inconclusive intelligence on possible links between Iraq and the 2001 attacks. She singled out the then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"It is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment," said Manningham-Buller, who was a frequent visitor to the U.S. as MI5 chief.

Manningham-Buller also said Iraq had posed little threat before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and insisted there was no evidence of a link between former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Manningham-Buller also indicated that MI5 disagreed with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair over a key justification for the war—Iraq's purported harboring of weapons of mass destruction.

She said the belief that Iraq might use such weapons against the West "wasn't a concern in either the short term or the medium term to either my colleagues or myself."