SOURCES & METHODS

WMD source 'was senior Iraqi officer' (James Blitz and Mark Huband, June 4 2003, Financial Times)

A senior Iraqi officer on active service within the country's military provided British intelligence last August with the information that Iraq could fire chemical or biological warheads within 45 minutes of Saddam Hussein giving the order, according to senior Whitehall officials.

The claim, contained in the government's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, has become the chief test of whether ministers "duped" the British public over the need for war.

Whitehall officials in two departments said last night the evidence of the 45-minute capability had come from a serving Iraqi officer with a record for providing reliable data over years. The information was analysed by Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee and immediately distributed to some cabinet ministers at the end of August, a few weeks before the compilation of the government's WMD dossier.

If you lived under Saddam wouldn't you be telling Western intelligence whatever they wanted to hear in order to bring the war of liberation? Or, if you were a Saddam double agent wouldn't you try to scare off the attackers? Or, might you be telling the truth? It's all so confusing; maybe we should have just waited until he actually used WMD...again. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2003 9:07 AM