Britain's secretive intelligence chief conceded on Monday that criticism of a dossier setting out Prime Minister Tony Blair's case for war with Iraq was valid because its most sensational warning was "misinterpreted."
Breaking with precedent, MI6 head Richard Dearlove testified via audio-link to the judicial inquiry into the suicide of a weapons expert, which has raised questions about Blair's reasons for war and sent his trust ratings plunging.
Dearlove said he stood by the intelligence in the dossier of last September but added that a contentious assertion that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons at 45 minutes' notice was only meant to refer to short-range arms.
"Given the misinterpretation placed on the 45-minutes intelligence, with the benefit of hindsight you could say that was valid criticism," said Dearlove, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6.
"The original [intelligence] report referred ... to battlefield weapons. What subsequently happened in the reporting was it was taken that the 45 minutes applied to weapons of a longer range," he said.
The 45-minute claim was the most dramatic element of the dossier that Blair used to counter widespread public opposition to joining a US war against then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Blair's team denies it "sexed up" the dossier on the threat posed by Iraq. But five months after Saddam's overthrow, no banned weapons have been found in Iraq.
Dearlove, whose disembodied voice echoed round the courtroom during his 40-minute testimony, insisted the 45-minute claim was "a well-sourced piece of intelligence."
Scientist David Kelly slashed his wrist in July after he was exposed as the source of a BBC report accusing the government of hyping up the case for war to win over skeptical Britons.
Blair's public trust ratings have since evaporated. Although he will not have to testify again, his Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon and outgoing communications chief Alastair Campbell are recalled to be grilled by judge Lord Hutton next week.
Hoon, Kelly's ultimate boss, has been portrayed as a potential fall guy lined up to take the rap and protect Blair.
He faces questions over why he overruled advice to protect Kelly from a hostile public grilling just days before the scientist's death, and why concerns among defense intelligence staff over language in the dossier were not acted on.
Fresh evidence of that concern emerged on Monday when the inquiry was shown a letter from the Defence Intelligence Staff, sent just one week before Blair's Iraq dossier was published, saying some of its claims were put too forcefully.
The judgment that Iraq had continued producing chemical and biological weapons was "too strong," the letter said. It also described the 45-minute warning as "rather strong since it is based on a single source."
The government was rocked further on the weekend when a new book claimed that just days before Iraq was invaded, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw begged Blair not to go to war.
Blair's spokesman said Straw was merely outlining a "Plan B" if parliament had voted against war, which it did not. "That is entirely different to expressing policy differences," he said.
But author John Kampfner, an experienced political journalist, said his work was sourced to interviews with 40 key government figures and was confident about its authenticity.
His report follows a revelation last week that Blair ignored warnings from spy chiefs that war would raise the risk of militants like al-Qaeda acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of