Ex-spy chief says no link between Iraq, 9/11

LONDON — The war in Iraq led to a loss of focus on the threat from al-Qaida, emboldened the group's leader Osama bin Laden and helped to breed a generation of homegrown terrorists, Britain's former domestic spy chief told an inquiry Tuesday.

Making the sharpest criticism so far aired in Britain's inquiry into mistakes made in the Iraq war, Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of the MI5 agency between 2002 and 2007, said Britain's government paid little attention to warnings that the war would fuel domestic terrorism.

Manningham-Buller also said Iraq had posed little threat before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and insisted there was no evidence of a link between former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

"There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection, and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA," she told the inquiry. "It was not a judgment that found favor with some parts of the American machine."

The ex-spy chief said those pushing the case for war in the United States gave undue prominence to scraps of inconclusive intelligence on possible links between Iraq and the 2001 attacks. She singled out the then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"It is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment," said Manningham-Buller, who was a frequent visitor to the U.S. as MI5 chief.

"Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind," she said.

Manningham-Buller also indicated that MI5 disagreed with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair over a key justification for the war — Iraq's purported harboring of weapons of mass destruction.

She said the belief that Iraq might use such weapons against the West "wasn't a concern in either the short term or the medium term to either my colleagues or myself."

Manningham-Buller, now a member of the House of Lords, was testifying to the inquiry panel in London. Convened by the government, the inquiry aims to examine the buildup to the Iraq war and errors made on post-conflict planning.

It won't apportion blame or assign criminal liability for mistakes made but will issue a report later this year with recommendations for future operations and military missions.