Former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix testified yesterday at Britain’s inquiry into the Iraq war.
Blix headed a team sent in to find any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) present in Iraq. He had criticized Iraq before the invasion for not being transparent about its weapons programs, but his reports fell far short of giving then US president George W. Bush the evidence that would secure UN support for war.
The US and Britain, with a smattering of other allies, invaded Iraq without a UN mandate, overthrowing former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Blix had been expected to address claims that he urged London and Washington to be more skeptical over Saddam’s military program.
Blix has said in the past that he warned Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair that Iraq may not have been concealing WMDs, as they believed.
He claims that, immediately before the 2003 US-led invasion, his inspectors checked around three dozen sites said by British and US intelligence to contain such weapons, but discovered no evidence.
“We said if this is the best [intelligence], then what is the rest? Doubts arose from that,” Blix told Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper in January.
Blix has previously said a discredited British dossier on Iraq’s weapons programs deliberately embellished the case for war.
Blair’s government published a dossier ahead of the invasion that claimed Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could deploy some within 45 minutes. A government inquiry made sharp criticism of the document in the aftermath of the war.
“I do think they exercised spin. They put exclamation marks instead of question marks,” Blix said in a 2007 interview with Britain’s Sky News television.
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown set up the five-member inquiry panel last year, former civil servant John Chilcot, to examine the case made for the war and errors in planning for post-conflict reconstruction.
It won’t apportion blame or establish criminal or civil liability.
Last week, Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of Britain’s MI5 spy agency, said the prewar intelligence picture was “fragmentary.”
“The picture was not complete. The picture on intelligence never is,” she told the panel.
She said there had been only a low risk of an Iraq-backed attack on Britain before the war, but that the country was “swamped” by terror threats after the invasion because the conflict had radicalized some Muslims.
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