"A senior American intelligence official involved in analysing the threat from Iraq accused the Bush Administration last night of being 'blind and deaf' to any evidence contradicting its case for war...'Senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence,' [Greg Thielmann, director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs, responsible for analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat for Secretary Colin Powell] told the CBS 60 Minutes programme. 'They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior Administration officials. They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem more alarmist and more dangerous.' Mr Thielmann left his post before General Colin Powell’s 75-minute address to the United Nations on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction programmes in February. He described that presentation as 'not very honest'."
Bush 'ignored evidence which did not suit his call for war'
London Times, 16 October 2003

"War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report."
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Reuters, 15 October 2003

"The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it... Which brings us to the grandest illusion of all: the link between Saddam Hussein and September 11... Yet just this week President Bush himself (and Donald Rumsfeld, too!) admitted that information to substantiate this popular fantasy just doesn’t exist.... Will the public recoil in horror, claiming he’s somehow lied to them? I don’t think so. Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride.... Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves. "
Pride and Prejudices
   Newsweek, 20 September 2003

"David Kelly, the British government scientist who was skeptical about evidence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, committed suicide after being mysteriously outed as a BBC source and later maligned by government officials. The Bush administration's alleged assault on Wilson's wife smacks in the same way of government retribution. If true, White House officials may have thought they were getting back at Wilson [for exposing  their false claim about Iraq's interest in acquiring uranium from Niger], but the thing they will have damaged most in the long run is their own credibility".
CIA Outing Snaps Back
Los Angeles Times, 30 September

"Britain ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq. Operation Rockingham, established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defence in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD programme and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down. The existence of Operation Rockingham has been confirmed by Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, and a US military intelligence officer. He knew members of the Operation Rockingham team and described the unit as 'dangerous', but insisted they were not 'rogue agents' acting without government backing. 'This policy was coming from the very highest levels,' he added.... Ritter has also offered to give evidence to [the British] parliament."
Revealed: the secret cabal which spun for Blair
Sunday Herald, 8 June 2003

"In contradiction to Dr Kelly, the government's leading expert with access to the underlying intelligence, the foreword to the document comprises an unqualified assertion by the Prime Minister that at the time of the production of the September dossier Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. This was stated to be 'beyond doubt' based on 'assessed intelligence'. The Prime Minister was certain, whilst the country's leading expert had 'no idea'. On the basis of this dossier, and the follow-on one in February - itself based in large part on material copied from a ten year old student thesis - Members of Parliament voted for war.... Would MPs have voted for war had they known that the government's leading expert... considered the only current risk to be a 30 per cent chance that Iraq had chemical weapons. And would they have voted for war had they realised that the principal documents submitted to the UN as evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions were exposed as forgeries barely 10 days earlier?....."
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"'American and British politicians have used the covert nature of intelligence gathering as cover to pass all kinds of arguments to the public,' says an official in France's intelligence community. 'There's a limit to that. Patience runs out. People demand accountability'...."
Uranium, Not Mine
Time, 28 July 2003

"As the London Times 20 June put it 'No 10 may have 'cherry-picked' the intelligence — Robin Cook’s colourful phrase — but there had to be cherries for the picking. Who grew them?' ...Indeed, there is little doubt now that somebody within the system 'sexed' things up in making the case against Iraq, albeit often in ways that have not featured strongly in the current debate. If the Prime Minister is really convinced of his own integrity, and by implication the rest of Downing St, then why is he not demanding an investigation of the intelligence services given all that we now know?.....A very close look at the operation of the intelligence services at and around the top of their command and at their interface with the political system is urgently needed."
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"An internal BBC note made by Gavyn Davies, the BBC Chairman, states that he received a phone call from an MP who claimed that he had discussed the September dossier with an MI6 official. 'The MI6 official said that the provisos which related to the 45-minute claim were removed from the original intelligence reports before the September dossier was published. He said that this had been done by Alastair Campbell,' says the memo".
Defence analyst wrote of dossier doubts
London Times, 16 September 2003

"The note kept by the Chairman of the BBC makes interesting reading, although it again throws blame back at 10 Downing St rather than at MI6.... There are three people apparently involved in this new allegation against Campbell - a senior MI6 officer, an MP and the Chairman of the BBC. This is potentially much more serious than a charge made by Andrew Gilligan. It is also more specific..... But none of this alleged political interference gets Dearlove [head of MI6] and Scarlett [chairman of the JIC] off the hook, because it was they who approved the dossier, including the foreword."
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious....  even people who aren't partisan Republicans shy away from confronting the administration's dishonest case for war, because they don't want to face the implications."
Denial and Deception
New York Times, 24 June 2003

"We will only know the truth of the matter if we have a full independent enquiry into the plot (and my other disclosures). Without that no one can say hand on heart what happened (apart from me. I was briefed on the plot at the time). Anything less sends out the wrong signal to MI6. Anything less suggests that MI6 is above the law or that MI6 can continue to carry out illegal operations without government interference. I need hardly tell you how that begins to eat away at the rule of law and also to undermine our democracy because unelected intelligence officers decide our foreign policy, not our elected representatives... Many MPs including the Intelligence and Security Committee are now looking negligent and foolhardy for not pursuing my disclosures more vigorously. They shouldn't be caught out a second time or the people will begin to think that parliament and the opposition in general has no credibility whatsoever".
Statement from David Shayler, former MI5 officer, on earlier illegal activities of MI6
15 February 2000

"That second time may now have arrived. And it is probably the most serious issue which lies at the heart of 'Iraqgate 2003'. In effect Shayler was spelling out the implications of such unaccountable subterfuge for the future of civil society in Britain at the beginning of the 21st century. A report in the Guardian 8 September throws some light on the role played by the Head of MI6 in the making of the case for the invasion of Iraq. ....  A senior minister told the Guardian that Dearlove 'was a strong supporter of pre-emptive action, anxious that the intelligence MI6 supplied produced results'. So at the highest levels has real intelligence been driving policy (which is what should happen), or has policy been driving 'intelligence' that is suspect? And if the latter then what policy, and emanating from whom?"
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"There may be something even more frightening here. What if Blair believes this stuff - if you have a leader who can be led around by the nose by a few bureaucrats with a right-wing agenda? That's what scares me... I've got all these inside documents, showing what's really going on behind the closed doors of these huge empires of finance. But instead, we get pictures of green-haired kids throwing chairs through the windows of McDonald's. That is what the press considers a discussion of globalisation".
Interview with BBC Newsnight award winning investigative reporter, American Greg Palast
Metro, 18 June 2003

"A retired MI6 officer has been appointed to a top post at BP-Amoco, the British-based oil company.....  During the first reading of the intelligence services bill, Lord Mackay, the conservative lord chancellor, told peers in 1994 that MI6 protected the 'economic wellbeing' of the country by keeping 'a particular eye on Britain's access to key commodities, like oil...'"
Former MI6 officer gets top post at BP
Guardian, 8 May 2000

"The woman seen as Prime Minister Tony Blair's closest and most trusted aide is to leave the government for a job at oil giant BP.... [Anji Hunter] has been a permanent fixture at the prime minister's side since he first became Labour leader in 1994 ...[and] is widely seen as the prime minister's door keeper..."
Blair's closest aide resigns
BBC Online, 8 November 2001

"Hunter, along with Alastair Campbell and Sir David Manning, had accompanied Blair on his trips to set up the coalition for the invasion of Afghanistan after 911. The Foreign Secretary was left at home. The links between oil, Downing St, the intelligence services, and war could hardly be more intimate."
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

David Shayler on the illegal activities of Britain's intelligence services - click here

"Once Dr Kelly indeed appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee on 15 July he confirmed that, as a government expert on Iraq's non-nuclear WMDs (we now know he was in fact the most experienced expert), he had 'no idea' whether it possessed them at the time of the dossier's publication. This was a complete disaster for the government even if the press didn't seem to pounce on it. Campbell's diary of 15 July acknowledges this stating 'Looking forward to Kelly giving evidence, but GS [Godric Smith], CR [?] and I all predicted it would be a disaster and so it proved'. Until then somehow Dr Kelly's views, based as they were on his unrivalled expertise paid for at the taxpayer's expense, had been successfully kept out of the dossier and the public eye. And even by the time Dr Kelly spilled the beans to the Foreign Affairs Committee, so transfixed had the media become by the BBC-Campbell feud that few journalists focused on the enormous importance of what Dr Kelly had actually revealed on the main issue that the committee had supposedly met to consider in the first place - namely 'The Decision to go to War in Iraq'. At best Dr Kelly felt there was only a 30% chance of Iraq having chemical weapons, a judgement completely at odds with the certainty expressed by the Prime Minister in the dossier. But for Gilligan's radio report on 29 May, whatever its peripheral imperfections, and but for Campbell's reaction to it, this crucial information would probably never have come to light - unless, that is, Dr Kelly had continued to expand the liberal nature of his unauthorised post-war briefings to journalists, which is probably what Downing St feared most of all."
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"Britain ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq. Operation Rockingham, established by the Defence Intelligence Staff within the Ministry of Defence in 1991, was set up to 'cherry-pick' intelligence proving an active Iraqi WMD programme and to ignore and quash intelligence which indicated that Saddam's stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down. The existence of Operation Rockingham has been confirmed by Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, and a US military intelligence officer ...'This policy was coming from the very highest levels,' he added.... Ritter and other intelligence sources say Operation Rockingham and MI6 were supplying skewed information to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) which, Tony Blair has told the Commons, was behind the intelligence dossiers that the government published to convince the parliament and the people of the necessity of war against Iraq."
Revealed: the secret cabal which spun for Blair
Sunday Herald, 8 June 2003

"Within the Defence Intelligence Services I liaise with the Rockingham cell..."
Evidence given by Dr David Kelly, in closed session 16 July 2003
To The British Prime Minister's Intelligence and Security Committee

"Although Dr Kelly worked for the MoD’s counter-proliferation and arms control department, he also worked alongside people within the Defence Intelligence Staff. If Rockingham existed few people could have been as well placed as he to have come across signs of it. This is particularly so given his involvement in WMDs, his high level security clearance, his access to related areas of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office, and his involvement with the 'security' apparatus as a consumer of intelligence. Dr Kelly's own evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee confirms that this was exactly the situation. On 16 July, the day before he died, Dr Kelly told the committee of his interaction with Rockingham...The reference to Rockingham does not elicit any specific reaction from the committee. Nobody asks 'Can you tell us a bit more about Rockingham?'. The chairman simply follows Dr Kelly's brief comments on his interaction with Rockingham and MI6 (SIS) with 'Fine, are there any more questions?'. "
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"I see the intelligence which is relevant to my expertise which is in the area of chemical and biological weapons..... I have no idea whether there were weapons or not at that time [of the September dossier].... It is possible it was not the case... I have referred to that: the issue of the 30 per cent probability of Iraq possessing chemical weapons. That is the sort of statement that I do make and may well have made to [Andrew Gilligan of the BBC]..."
Dr David Kelly
Evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, 15 July 2003

"At the very least it seems clear that Dr Kelly's views were being filtered and kicked into the long grass from somewhere within the system. Referring back to Dr Kelly's own conversation with BBC reporter Susan Watts suggests that he knew this. He told her that 'I reviewed the whole thing [dossier], I was involved with the whole process.... it was very difficult to get comments in because people at the top of the ladder didn't want to hear some of the things'. No wonder Dr Kelly may have felt obliged to speak more frankly to the press after the war. And no wonder former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has offered to give evidence to the British Parliament about 'Operation Rockingham', the alleged British behind-the-scenes intelligence cherry-picking operation whose existence he confirmed to the press at the beginning of June."
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"The Central Intelligence Agency is holding a review of whether it overestimated the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It must surely look at the simmering row about whether the British and US Governments based their case for war partly on forged documents that appeared to show Iraq was trying to get uranium from Africa. That was one of the headline-grabbing claims of Tony Blair’s 'dossier' on Iraq’s weapons, published with such drama last autumn. But the row about the forged documents that appear to have prompted the passage is not going away, particularly across the Atlantic, where it has attracted the attention of the Senate Intelligence Committee.... A [Downing St] spokesman adds that 'I wouldn’t draw the extrapolation' that the claims about Iraq’s attempt to get African uranium were based on the documents in contention. Really? Then what were they based on? This is an ambitious piece of stonewalling which Downing Street may yet be called on to justify, and it will be all the more embarrassing if there are no credible other sources. In the foreword to the dossier, amid a lavish tribute to the intelligence agencies, Blair got away with saying that to protect agents from Saddam’s regime 'we cannot, of course, publish the detailed raw Intelligence'. With Saddam’s regime gone, and few weapons found, that answer now looks blithe. It certainly would not satisfy a Senate committee."
The Forged Papers Chase That is Bound to Run and Run
London Times, 23 May 2003

"Asked if our information [on the uranium claim] had been based on material passed to our intelligence services by other security services - as the Prime Minister had appeared to imply to the Liaison Committee yesterday, the PMOS [Prime Minister's Official Spokesman] said no.... He was making the point that the material included in our dossier had been based on our intelligence and our intelligence assessment."
10 Downing St Press Briefing: 11.00 am Wednesday 9 July 2003

"Then, for reasons best known to itself, sometime during the same day.... Downing St changed direction on this subject fundamentally and came into line with the Foreign Office claim of reliance on intelligence from a third country. Prior to that Downing St had been presenting a case for some time that the uranium claim was based solely on British intelligence. Indeed Campbell himself had earlier been questioned on the evidence for the British government's uranium claim during his interview with Channel 4 News 27 June after he had stormed their studios in his now infamous finger-jabbing rage. Challenged on the possible use by the British government of the forged documents exposed at the UN in March Campbell had snapped at interviewer Jon Snow stating that 'the British intelligence put what they put in that dossier on the basis of British intelligence. Get your facts right before you make serious allegations against a government...' Snow had asked him 'The Niger source has nothing to do with us?' That may have been getting very close to the bone.... Quite apart from the Bush administration, it seems Downing St was having trouble singing from the same hymn sheet as the Foreign Office. So just exactly what should we make of such inconsistent explanations particularly when Downing St had such easy access to John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee? It looked suspiciously like someone had been trying to move the goal posts following the arrival of the awkward admission from the US that 'other reporting that suggested that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa is not detailed or specific enough for us to be certain that such attempts were in fact made'. Intelligence which was wholly British would be expected to have been shared with the US, in which case it would now be completely sunk by these remarks from across the Atlantic."
'Fight Smart', Special Report  - Click Here For Full Text

"Mr Straw not only denied that the forged documents came from British sources, but said Britain's allegations about Iraq's quest for uranium in Africa came from 'quite separate sources'. He said he would give further details of these sources for the uranium allegation in a closed session on Friday, during which he was fiercely cross-questioned by Sir John Stanley, the committee's chief sceptic. After hearing what the Foreign Secretary had to say, the Tory MP is reported to have told Mr Straw he did not believe him...."
Ministers knew war papers were forged, says diplomat
Independent, 29 June 2003

"We conclude that it is very odd indeed that the Government asserts that it was not relying on the evidence which has since been shown to have been forged, but that eight months later it is still reviewing the other evidence.....We recommend that the Government explain on what evidence it relied for its judgment in September 2002 that Iraq had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. We further recommend that in its response to this Report the Government set out whether it still considers the September dossier to be accurate in what it states about Iraq’s attempts to procure uranium from Africa, in the light of subsequent events."
House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee
The Decision to go to War in Iraq
Ninth Report of Session 2002 –03, Volume I, 3 July 2003

"The Government has refused to tell the IAEA what it knows [about the uranium claim]... arguing that the information came from a third country, and that it is up to that country to disclose it. But the IAEA says there is no such exemption from Britain's obligations under UN Security Council resolutions".
African nation says: we never sold uranium to Saddam
Independent, 20 July 2003

"If there is no such exemption then at the very least the UK should be disclosing the identity of the source country, if not the actual intelligence itself, and then letting the IAEA deal with the matter... it would appear that the government of the third country supplying the information has now been withholding their permission for Britain to release it for over a year, despite the provisions of UN resolutions 1051 and 1441 under which all such information should be passed over to the IAEA. The question is why is this information being withheld?"
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"The 1994 Scott Inquiry into Britain's illegal supply of arms to Saddam Hussein found that deception was widespread among senior British officials and diplomats. One of those commended by Sir Richard Scott for the honesty of his evidence was the former head of the Iraq Desk in Whitehall, Mark Higson, who described 'a culture of lying' in the Foreign Office."
IRAQ: THE LYING GAME
The Mirror, 27 August, 2002

"The [Italian] newspaper quotes a source from Sismi, the Italian military intelligence agency, as saying that the documents were passed to MI6 in 2002. Six documents referring to Niger, possibly the same as those given to the Italians, were also passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by Washington. Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, told the UN Security Council in March that they were crude forgeries."
MI6 was 'duped by forgeries'
London Times, 17 July 2003

"Italy may have passed on to the United States and Britain disputed claims that Saddam Hussein had been seeking uranium in Africa to make nuclear weapons, the head of a parliamentary intelligence committee said Wednesday. Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government has denied that Italy's intelligence services passed on 'documents' about the matter. But committee chief Enzo Bianco speaking after a top government official addressed the commission in secret, did not deny that the information may have been passed on informally. 'This is possible,' he said. 'I don't rule it out.' Cabinet undersecretary and top Berlusconi aide Gianni Letta, who briefed the intelligence commission Wednesday afternoon, refused to comment on the hearing.... Critics have been pressuring U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair over the disputed uranium intelligence. U.S. intelligence agencies had raised questions previously about assertions of the claimed activity by the Iraqi president. Underlying documents to support the contention proved to have been forged....The report in Rome's La Repubblica quoted a source from Sismi, the Italian military intelligence service, as saying in late 2001 or early 2002, the MI6 British intelligence unit obtained the documents. The source implied that Italian colleagues provided the information to the British intelligence officials. 'There were several meetings, at a higher level, almost always in London,' the source was quoted as saying."
Italy May Be Source on Uranium Story
Fox News, 16 July 2003

"The FBI has since been dispatched to Italy to investigate the Italian connection..... So what will the FBI discover about the Niger forgeries in Italy? Or more importantly, what will be reported it has discovered? That will probably depend on who is in charge of its investigation. ..Given the unsophisticated nature of the forgeries the suggestion in the London Times 17 July that MI6 were 'duped' is hardly convincing. The Repubblica report on the apparent involvement of SISMI with the forgeries was published after Berlusconi's office had issued its apparent public denial of the involvement of the Italian 'information services'. The rather different subsequent claim coming from within SISMI itself would therefore appear to represent something of a problem for the Berlusconi government."
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"At a NATO conference in Prague last November, [former CIA Director James] Woolsey declared 'Iraq can be seen as the first battle of the fourth world war,' in rhetoric that he has practiced and honed virtually since the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. 'After two hot world wars and one cold one that all began and were centered in Europe,' he said, 'the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East.' .... in January 1998 [he] signed a public letter to Clinton by the newly formed Project for the New American Century (PNAC) calling for the adoption of a 'regime change' as the main U.S. policy goal toward Iraq. In that same year, he lobbied hard for passage of the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), which not only formalized regime change as the policy but allocated up to 100 million dollars for the Iraqi opposition, mainly the Iraq National Congress (INC), headed by Ahmed Chalabi. That lobby went into high gear immediately after Sep. 11. Within just a few days, [Richard] Perle convened the DPB [Defense Policy Board] to discuss how Washington could use the incidents as justification for attacking Iraq, and Woolsey was tasked to go to Europe to collect evidence that Hussein was linked to al Qaeda."
Woolsey's Role Crucial to Impact of Occupation
'Foreign Policy in Focus', 8 April 2003

"[Following 911] The three agencies [CIA, National Security Council and State Department] were also kept in the dark about a mission undertaken immediately afterward by former CIA director and DPB [Defense Policy Board] member James Woolsey to London to gather intelligence about possible links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, as if the CIA or the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) could not be trusted."
  Iran-Contra, Amplified
Inter Press Service News Agency, 9 August 2003

"And did this report of a trip to London by Woolsey represent a brief public surfacing of a transatlantic link between Operation Rockingham (the subversive British intelligence massaging exercise alleged by former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter) and the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon, a new US bureaucracy established by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to fulfil a similar purpose?.... it would be interesting to learn whether or not Woolsey had a hand in the promotion of the Niger uranium forgeries. This is particularly so taking into account the length of the overseas errand Woolsey was sent on post-911, not long after which the Niger forgeries first emerged. Did Woolsey make any visits, for example, to Italy in addition to London and Prague?"
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections....A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq. The British propaganda program—part of its Information Operations, or I/Ops—was known to a few senior officials in Washington.... dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—[were] to be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. 'It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world,' the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at safe houses in the Washington area..... None of the past and present officials I spoke with were able to categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or instigated by the same propaganda office in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties (An MI6 intelligence source declined to comment.)....[However] What is generally agreed upon, a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated by the British—President Bush said as much in his State of the Union speech—and that 'the Brits placed more stock in them than we did.' It is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence official told me, that 'something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions everywhere.'... "
WHO LIED TO WHOM?
New Yorker, 24 March 2003

"[Getting rid of a murderous regime in Iraq] was not the reason why we went to war.  My view is that we went to war because America wanted to establish a political and military platform in the Middle East, it saw a need for oil and of course it wished to support Israel. Weapons of mass destruction, if they existed, even on the most threatening predictions, were certainly not going to put Europe or the US at risk.”
Michael Meacher, UK Government Environment Minister sacked by Tony Blair June 2003
London Times, 20 June 2003

"I do not care under what system we keep the oil. But I am quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available."
Sir Arthur Balfour, British foreign secretary
1918, three years before creation of the Kingdom of Iraq under a British mandate

"Fuel is our economic lifeblood. The price of oil can be the difference between recession and recovery. The western world is import dependent. ....So: who develops oil and gas, what the new potential sources of supply are, is a vital strategic question...The Middle East, we focus on naturally."
Prime Minister's speech at the George Bush Senior Presidential Library
10 Downing St, Press Release, 7 April 2002

"My forecast is that between 2000 and 2005 the world will be reaching peak production from our known fields."
Franco Bernabe, chief executive of the [30% government owned] Italian oil company Eni SpA
'Energy apocalypse looms as the world runs out of oil'
Observer, 26 July 1998

"The economic motivators behind the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq are well known, even if polite company still finds it difficult to discuss them. Such discussion does, after all, require an acknowledgement that we may not be quite as 'civilised' as we are led to believe. Few commodities are as central to the continuation of the current process of globalisation and the 'liberalisation' of international trade as access to oil, and Iraq holds the world's second largest reserves at a time when global oil production is on the edge of major decline and international demand is soaring. As a result of a lack of forward planning for the provision of alternative energy sources the political and bureaucratic incentive to be 'economical with the truth' when making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as part of an effort to access what hydrocarbons are left in the world left, is immense. So whatever the actual outcome of the Iraqi WMD controversy let us not forget the real geo-political context for all of this...  Moreover the British Prime Minister himself has already misled parliament on this subject in a largely unnoticed statement made in the House of Commons 14 April 2003 which he provided in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. In a dismissive response to a rebel MP's assertion that the real reason Britain went to war was for the oil, he tritely stated that 'The UK is a net exporter of oil, so we have no need of the Iraqi oil.' This was technically true at the moment Blair uttered his response, but the Prime Minister also knew very well that this situation is about to change. His own energy White Paper published in February says so. In the signed forward Blair himself states '.... our energy system faces new challenges.... Our energy supplies will increasingly depend on imported gas and oil..... we need access to a wide range of energy sources.' With this kind of weasel-word chicanery going on it would seem the Prime Minister has spent too much time in the presence of Alastair Campbell learning the black art of spin, and too little time developing the alternative energy programmes that the country and the world now urgently needs. The imperative is much more than simply protecting the environment. It is also about preventing war and economic breakdown on an unprecedented scale."
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, yesterday pinpointed for the first time security of energy sources as a key priority of British foreign policy. Mr Straw listed energy as one of seven foreign policy priorities when he addressed a meeting of 150 British ambassadors in London. The US and British governments officially deny that oil is a factor in the looming war with Iraq, but some ministers and officials in Whitehall say privately that oil is more important in the calculation than weapons of mass destruction.... Mr Straw told ambassadors that, following a review he ordered last year, the Foreign Office drew up a list of seven medium to long-term strategic priorities, including 'to bolster the security of British and global energy supplies'".
Straw admits oil is key priority
Guardian 7 January 2003

United Kingdom Oil Production Curve (with discovery as a bar graph),
Association for the Study of Peak Oil, Newsletter 20, August 2002
(Compiled by Dr Colin Campbell)

"By 2020, the country could be dependent on imported energy for 80 per cent of its needs"
Blowin' in the wind: the answer to Britain's looming energy crisis
Independent, 15 July 2003

"Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too.... The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the 'global war on terrorism' has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy?"
Former British Environment Minister, Michael Meacher
Guardian, 6 September 2003

"Weapons expert Dr David Kelly told of  'many dark actors playing games' in an e-mail to a journalist hours before his suicide, it was reported on Saturday. The words appeared to refer to officials at the Ministry of Defence and UK intelligence agencies with whom he had sparred over interpretations of weapons reports, according to the New York Times.".
Kelly warned of 'dark actors'
London Times, 19 July 2003

"Proof of Operation Rockingham came to light in a Sunday Herald investigation and its existence was backed up in a series of astonishingly frank interviews with Scott Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq who served on the staff of General Norman Schwarzkopf -- who led the allied forces in the first Gulf war -- before joining the UN weapons inspections team, Unscom. Ritter was also a US military intelligence officer for eight years. His claims about Rockingham are supported by UK parliamentary documents and briefings with other British intelligence sources....Staff once connected to Rockingham are now thought to be involved in the new Iraqi Survey Group which has been sent to Iraq in a bid to find WMDs....To back up claims that Operation Rockingham was deliberately 'cherry-picking' intelligence and producing misleading reports, Ritter described how its staff blatantly ignored proof of Saddam's compliance. 'Britain and America were involved in a programme of joint exploitation of intelligence from Iraqi defectors. There were mountains of information coming from these defectors, and Rockingham staff were receiving it and then selectively culling reports that sustained the claims that weapons of mass destruction were in existence. They ignored the vast majority of the data which mitigated against such claims.'...'In terms of using selective intelligence,' Ritter said, 'this policy was coming from the very highest levels.' The only written reference to Operation Rockingham is found in a 1998 British parliamentary report. In it, Brigadier Richard Holmes, who was giving evidence to the defence committee, refers, in an off-the-cuff aside, to Operation Rockingham and linked it to Unscom inspections in Iraq. Some of the Rockingham staff were military officers, others came from the intelligence services, such as MI6, and others were civilian ministry of defence personnel. From 1991 to 1998 it had three chiefs, one man and two women.... Both the MoD and Downing Street refused to comment on Ritter's allegations about Operation Rockingham, saying they didn't make statements on intelligence matters. However, a number of British intelligence sources have spoken to the Sunday Herald about the operation...."
Blair's secret weapon
Sunday Herald, 8 June 2003

"Senior figures in the intelligence community and across Whitehall briefed the former international development secretary Clare Short that Tony Blair had made a secret agreement last summer with George Bush to invade Iraq in February or March.... In damning evidence to the foreign affairs select committee Ms Short refused to identify the three figures, but she cited their authority for making her claim that Mr Blair had actively deceived the cabinet and the country in persuading them of the need to go to war.... She also claimed that the intelligence and diplomatic community had privately opposed the war.... Justifying her charge of deception, she said: 'Three extremely senior people in the Whitehall system said to me very clearly and specifically that the target date was mid-February.'... Both former cabinet ministers [Short and Cook] confirmed a previous Guardian story that cabinet ministers had been given private intelligence briefings by SIS, but insisted the briefings did not indicate that the world had to act immediately to stem an imminent Iraqi threat.... Ms Short also claimed there was a shocking collapse in proper government procedure, with a small unelected entourage in Downing Street making the decisions without minutes, proper options papers or any written material...The prime minister has declined to speak to the foreign affairs committee".
Short: I was briefed on Blair's secret war pact
Guardian, 18 June 2003

Click here for graphs and other details of US and global oil production fall-off and soaring global demand

"My forecast is that between 2000 and 2005 the world
will be reaching peak production from our known fields."
Franco Bernabe, chief executive of the [30% government owned] Italian oil company Eni SpA
'Energy apocalypse looms as the world runs out of oil'
Observer, 26 July 1998

"An influential energy task force headed by Vice President Cheney has broached the possibility of lifting some economic sanctions against Iran, Libya and Iraq as part of a plan to increase America's oil supply. According to a draft of the task force report, the United States should review the sanctions against the three countries because of the importance of their oil production to meeting domestic and global energy needs. The April 10 draft acknowledges that sanctions can 'advance' important national security and diplomatic goals. But it adds that United Nations sanctions on Iraq and U.S. restrictions on energy investments in Libya and Iran 'affect some of the most important existing and prospective petroleum producing countries in the world.'.... A cross-section of the energy industry, including oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and production services companies such as Halliburton, have been pressing Congress and administration policy-makers under Bush and former president Bill Clinton to give them access to Libya, Iran and Iraq. Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton before Bush tapped him to be his running mate last year... a key conclusion of the energy task force will be the need to diversify the nation's sources of energy supplies as widely as possible, administration officials have said. 'Growing levels of conventional and heavy oil production and exports from the western hemisphere, the Caspian and Africa are important factors that can lessen the impact of a supply disruption on the U.S. and world economies,' the task force draft said."
Cheney Panel Seeks Review Of Sanctions - Iraq, Iran and Libya Loom Large in Boosting Oil Supply
Washington Post, 19 April 2001

"The task force's draft recommendations come amid a brewing battle over whether Congress should reauthorize the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act for five more years when it expires in August [2001]. White House officials, who have sought to keep the task force's work quiet, cautioned that the recommendations are not final. 'There have been many drafts of the energy proposals and many changes made,' said Juleanna Glover Weiss, a spokeswoman for Cheney. 'We're still quite a while out from a final product to be presented to the president. Until the president makes final decisions on that product, everything is subject to change.'"
Cheney Panel Seeks Review Of Sanctions - Iraq, Iran and Libya Loom Large in Boosting Oil Supply
Washington Post, 19 April 2001

"Making a bogus WMD case to justify an attack on Libya was a much harder task [than for Iraq], and so was making a claim of a link between Libya and al Qaeda. The latter would have simply risked drawing attention to the British government's own previous sponsorship of al Qaeda in a failed attempt to assassinate Gaddafi in 1996. The lifting of sanctions was therefore the only realistic way of gaining greater access to Libyan hydrocarbons and a fudged deal with Gaddafi over compensation for families of the victims of the 1988 bombing of New York bound Pan Am Flight 103 was done. And a fudge it was. According to the BBC Libya had to make an acknowledgement of guilt in relation to Flight 103 as part of the deal, but 'it did so by 'accepting responsibility for the actions of its officials,' which is not quite same thing but near enough and importantly it did not mention the colonel himself'. In effect it was a cheap deal for Gaddafi in return for the prospect of a huge increase in Libya's hydrocarbon exports. According to a BBC report 12 September 'Colonel Gaddafi claimed recently that Libya had in effect bought off the US and Britain'. However, a different approach was applied to Iraq where there was more scope for the successful application of hostile propaganda, despite the fact that Iraq had (unlike Libya) never sponsored the IRA or carried out a terrorist attack against Britain or America (Iraq is now believed to have disarmed in 1991, according to former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix - this is the same year that the IRA carried out a mortar attack on No 10 Downing St using Libyan Semtex explosives)."
Iraqgate 2003
'Fight Smart', Special Report - Click Here For Full Text

"President Bush's Cabinet agreed in April 2001 that 'Iraq remains a destabilising influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East' and because this is an unacceptable risk to the US 'military intervention' is necessary. Vice-president Dick Cheney, who chairs the White House Energy Policy Development Group, commissioned a report [on which this policy was built] from the Baker Institute for Public Policy, a think-tank set up by James Baker, the former US secretary of state under George Bush Snr...."
Official: US oil at the heart of Iraq crisis
Sunday Herald, 6 October 2002

"A federal appeals court on Thursday refused to reconsider its ruling against Vice President Cheney in his effort to keep secret the documents of his energy task force.  The U.S. Court of Appeals voted 5-3 against rehearing the case, leaving Cheney and his Justice Department lawyers with the option of either appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court or complying with a lower court order to release information about White House contacts with the energy industry....A three-judge panel of the appeals court had decided in July that it would not intervene to stop the lawsuit delving into Cheney's energy contacts. Cheney has acknowledged meeting Lay [the Chief Executive of Enron], but his lawyers argue that the task force was comprised of government officials, not corporate chieftains. The Bush administration has released thousands of pages of information from agencies involved in drafting the energy policy, but none from the White House."
U.S. Appeals Court Rejects Cheney Energy Bid
Reuters, 11 September 2003

"Never before in history has a group of such relatively weak nations been able to impose with so little protest such a dramatic change in the way of life of the overwhelming majority of the rest of mankind."
Henry Kissinger, on the 1973 OPEC oil embargo

"At a NATO conference in Prague last November, [former CIA Director James] Woolsey declared 'Iraq can be seen as the first battle of the fourth world war,' in rhetoric that he has practiced and honed virtually since the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. 'After two hot world wars and one cold one that all began and were centered in Europe,' he said, 'the fourth world war is going to be for the Middle East.' "
Woolsey's Role Crucial to Impact of Occupation
'Foreign Policy in Focus', 8 April 2003

"For a war supposedly not about oil, military planners made a high priority of securing the oilfields [in Iraq].... Geologist Dr Colin Campbell predicted a decline in the North Sea several years ago and claims by 2015 Britain may have to import over half its oil needs.... Campbell thinks the decline [of global oil production] will start by 2010. 'It starts with a price shock due to control of the market by a few countries, and it is followed by the onset of physical shortage, which just gets worse and worse and worse,' he says."
Oil War
BBC 'Money Programme' 26 March 2003'

White House sets up special task force unit for Enron in National Security Council pre-911 - click here

"Hans Blix, former UN chief weapons inspector on Thursday backed the BBC in its row with the government over whether the case for war was overstated in its official dossier published last September. Mr Blix told the BBC's flagship Today programme he believed spin had become involved in the presentation of the intelligence in the document."
MoD personnel chief unrepentant over Kelly
Financial Times, 18 September 2003

"... it is very much the Blair-Campbell tactic to start a tremendous row over something which is not the point. In whose hand the 45-minute warning was inserted is almost immaterial: the material allegation — the claim which should concern us citizens — is that there was pressure on experts such as Dr Kelly to override their better judgment...."
Campbell: the Blair that dare not speak its name
London Times, 26 July 2003

"Turning reporters into personalities impeded the message of this important story: that a weapons scientist and his colleagues were deeply worried by government abuse of intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. No amount of subsequent spin can hide that fact."
The BBC dragon needs slimming not slaying
London Times, 23 July 2003

"In the period immediately before the second Gulf War, Kelly assessed that there was 'a 30 per cent chance' that Iraq possessed biological weapons. As events turned out, the basis for such a relatively precise opinion is less significant than the fact that he made it and expressed it frequently...."
David Kelly, Obituary
London Times, 21 July 2003

"There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, Letter to the Director of the FBI, March 2003
Washington Post, 22 March 2003

"We must find out whether the CIA deceived the President as he was developing his Iraq policy or whether it is deceiving the public now to protect the President and the Vice President".
 New Questions on President's Use of Forged Nuclear Evidence
Statement of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Ranking Minority Member, House Committee on Government Reform, 12 June 2003

"Where else did the U.S. stretch evidence to generate public support for the war? If so many doubted the uranium allegations, who inside the government kept putting those allegations on the table?.... late in 2001, the Italian government came into possession of evidence suggesting that Iraq was again trying to purchase yellowcake from Niger. Rome's source provided half a dozen letters and other documents alleged to be correspondence between Niger and Iraqi officials negotiating a sale. The Italians' evidence was shared with both Britain and the U.S. When it got to Washington, the Iraq-Niger uranium report caught the eye of someone important: Vice President Dick Cheney...."
A Question of Trust
TIME, 13 July 2003

"They may have finally found the smoking gun that nails the culprit responsible for the Iraq war. Unfortunately, the incriminating evidence wasn't left in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces but rather in Vice President Dick Cheney's office....Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson publicly revealed over the weekend that he was the mysterious envoy whom the CIA, under pressure from Cheney, sent to Niger to investigate a document - now known to be a crude forgery - that allegedly showed Iraq was trying to acquire enriched uranium that might be used to build a nuclear bomb. Wilson found no basis for the story, and nobody else has either... In order to believe that our president was not lying to us, we must believe that this information did not find its way through Cheney's office to the Oval Office."
A Diplomat's Undiplomatic Truth: They Lied
The Los Angeles Times, 8 July 2003

"CIA chief George Tenet tried to take the bullet for the [uranium] 'yellowcake' flap, but the flap flapped on. So NSC aide Stephen Hadley was sent out to take it on the chin. Neither resigned, neither was fired. They just took responsibility.... the Bush White House is becoming Nixon-like..."
George W. Nixon
CBS News, 24 July 2003

"...the only Democratic presidential contenders who voted against the war when it mattered were Florida Sen. Bob Graham and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Like President Bush, Democrats who backed the war have a lot of explaining to do."
Democrats who got war right
Madison Capital, 29 July 2003

"Democratic presidential aspirant Dennis Kucinich is calling on Vice President Dick Cheney to explain his role in how the now-disavowed claim that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa ended up in President Bush's State of the Union address.... In a letter sent to the vice president, the Ohio congressman and two members of the House Government Reform subcommittee on national security, emerging threats and international relations asked Cheney to explain his multiple visits to CIA headquarters.... Kucinich and Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., posed 10 questions that they want the vice president to answer, such as: 'Did you or a member of your staff at any time direct or encourage CIA analysts to disseminate unreliable intelligence?'..."
Kucinich Challenges Cheney in Iraq Flap
Associated Press, 22 July 2003

Ralph Nader (Green Presidential candidate 2000) backs Kucinich for 2004 Democrat nomination
John Hagelin (Natural Law Party Presidential candidate 2000) backs Kucinich for 2004 Democrat nomination
Kucinich campaign web site - click here

"Kucinich also said his campaign is the most inclusive, attracting young people as well as members of the Green Party, Natural Law Party and Libertarians. 'I can bring out the vote,' he said.'... Kucinich, who opposed the war in Iraq and advocates a federal Department of Peace, chastised his rivals for sidestepping questions about whether they support Bush's request for $87 billion for postwar Iraq. 'They're all dancing around the issue,' he said. 'The president wants that $87 billion for a down-payment toward further involvement in Iraq, not to get out.' Kucinich said the United Nations should take over the rebuilding of Iraq as soon as possible. 'It's time to get the U.N. in and get the U.S. out,' he said."
Kucinich fires up New Hampshire crowd
Associated Press, 20 September 2003