No 10 unlikely to assist inquiry by MPs

PARLIAMENT’S Intelligence and Security Committee is encountering stiff resistance from Downing Street over its planned inquiry into Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and the case for war against that country.

Whitehall insiders say that the committee is highly unlikely to get the ministerial backing that it requires for access to intelligence reports upon which the Government’s now infamous dossier on Iraq’s weapons programme was based.

The Times also reports;

A GROUP of former US intelligence officials has written to President Bush claiming that the US Congress and the American public were misled about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the war.

The group’s members, most of them former CIA analysts, say that they have close contacts with senior officials working inside the US intelligence agencies, who have told them that intelligence was “cooked” to persuade Congress to authorise the war.

The manipulation of intelligence has, they say, produced “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions”. They write in the letter to Mr Bush: “While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes, never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorise launching a war.

“You may not realise the extent of the current ferment within the intelligence community and particularly the CIA. In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin — cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy. There is ample indication that this has been done in Iraq.”

Is There Anything Left That Matters?