My friend John Rentoul has said basically everything that needs to be said on Baroness Elizabeth Manningham-Buller’s – former DG of MI5 – latest hypocritical comment on the Iraq War. It is, however, worth contrasting the evidence given by the Baroness to Sir John Chilcot with what she said in a radio interview with The Times.
Yesterday, Manningham-Buller declared “Iraq did not present a threat to the UK”.
That is interesting because she told the Iraq Inquiry panel “we regarded the threat, the direct threat from Iraq as low” and “six months before I became Director General we felt we had a pretty good intelligence picture of a threat from Iraq within the UK and to British interests”. Although she admitted the threat was “limited and containable” it is misleading to suggest there was not one at all.
Another question which arises is how the Baroness can make such a categorical statement, as in the interview with The Times, when she reported to Chilcot that “in terms of Iraq, we were not directly involved in the decision-making to go to war in Iraq” on which her “service is obviously not an expert” and on which “we had very few people working”.
Elizabeth Manningham-Buller has added nothing new or significant to the ongoing Iraq debate. Her comments are yet another example of hindsight hypocrisy and re-write of history in an anti-Iraq war fashion.
