By GottaLaff
Next time you're out on the street screaming, "Taxi!",
consider this:
An Iraqi taxi driver may have been the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.
Gee, I hope he was at least licensed. But I digress:
Adam Holloway, a defence specialist, said MI6 obtained information indirectly from a taxi driver who had overheard two Iraqi military commanders talking about Saddam's weapons.
And then he divulged that one commander was in the middle of a messy affair and was leaving his wife. But MI6 didn't think he was credible on that score, so we never heard any of the juicy details.
Oh, but I kid the MI6.
After the war the dossier became hugely controversial when it became clear that some of the information it contained was not true. An inquiry headed by Lord Butler into the use of intelligence in the run-up to the war revealed that MI6 had subsequently accepted that some of its Iraqi sources were unreliable, but his report did not identify who they were.
That would have been too embarrassing. It's a good thing it didn't leak out. That wouldn't have ended well.
Oops.
Holloway, a former Grenadier Guardsman and television journalist who is now a member of the Commons defence committee, wrote:
"Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, British intelligence was squeezing their agents in Iraq for information. One agent did come up with something: the '45 minutes' or something about missiles allegedly discussed in a high level Iraqi political meeting.
"But the provenance of this information was never questioned in detail until after the Iraq invasion, when it became apparent that something was wrong. In the end it turned out that the information was not credible, it had originated from an émigré taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, who had remembered an overheard a conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier.
"Indeed, in the intelligence analyst's footnote to the report, it was flagged up that part of the report probably describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. They verifiably did not exist.
"The footnote said it in black and white ink. Despite this glaring factual inaccuracy, which under normal circumstances would have caused the reliability of the intelligence to be seriously questioned, the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier."
Bus drivers are so much more reliable. Had they been smart, they would have gotten more bang for their buck, er, pound, er, Euro, had they relied on public transportation.
There is much more
here.
H/t: DCPlod
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