• Military
• WMD

• Intelligence Menu               

• Systems
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Imagery
• Links

• Homeland Security
• Space

UK intelligence damaged for decades, says former Foreign Secretary

IRNA

    
London, Oct 9, IRNA - The way the British government presented its 
case for war against Iraq has inflicted lasting damage to the 
country`s intelligence service, former Foreign Secretary Lord Owen 
warned Thursday. 
Speaking ahead of the report of the inquiry, headed by Lord 
Hutton, into the death of former Iraq arms inspector David Kelly, 
Owen said that millions of Britons felt "deceived" by the 
government`s justification for the war. 
"I do not need to await Lord Hutton`s verdict to judge that the 
Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) machinery, which I have known well 
and respected, was corrupted in the run up to that war in a way which 
will leave damage for decades to come," he said. 
In particular, Owen criticised JIC chairman John Scarlett for 
allowing the Prime Minister`s director of communications Alastair 
Campbell and Tony Blair`s chief of staff Jonathan Powell to changes 
to the dossier on Iraq`s arms threat, published in September 2002. 
"It is impossible to believe Sir Anthony Duff, Sir Percy Craddock 
or Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, to name but three heads of the JIC 
with whom I have worked, would ever have conducted themselves as John 
Scarlett did with Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell over amending 
the statement on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction," he said. 
In a speech at the London School of Economics, the former Labour 
foreign secretary said that British intelligence agencies already had 
been turned into a "laughing stock" by a subsequent government Iraq 
dossier that was based on a PhD thesis posted on the internet. 
"Amongst the reasons for these failures is the `matey`, corner- 
cutting, somewhat shambolic structure of No 10`s defence and security 
decision-making which were revealed in the Hutton hearings," he said. 
Owen, who supported the Iraq war, was foreign secretary during the 
1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. He later left the Labour Party to 
found the Social Democrat Party its subsequent merger with the 
Liberals. 
He criticised the absence of effective planning to cope with the 
post-war situation in Iraq and the failure to anticipate a guerrilla- 
style campaign against occupying force, while calling for a full- 
scale inquiry into the war. 
HC/212 
End