The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
•
Al-Zarqawi
made Iraq his base for jihad on his own initiative, but with plans
in line
with the Al
Qaida global jihadist agenda.”
The
additional points in the Assessment included:
Pre
9/11
•
After its
defeat in 1991, the Iraqi regime “sought to make contact with a
number of
Islamist
groups”.
•
“Senior Al
Qaida detainees have revealed that Bin Laden was personally against
any
formal
alliance with the Iraqi regime, but that others … believed some
contact would
be
useful.”
•
The exact
nature of early contacts remained “unclear”.
•
Intelligence
indicated that “further contacts took place in the late
1990s”.
•
There was
doubt about the reliability of some of the reporting, but
“sufficient
intelligence
to assess there was some contact throughout the
1990s”.
Post
9/11
•
After the fall
of the Taliban in Afghanistan, “reports suggested that Iraq was
being
used as a
transit route for Islamist terrorists”, and: “By 2002 Al
Qaida-linked terrorists
had
established a presence … some involved in the development of CB
substances
at a
facility near Halabjah, run by Ansar al-Islam.”
•
It was “likely
that the regime knew these Islamist terrorists were operating in
Iraq,
though it
would not have been able to act against them in the
KAZ”.
•
“Post war
intelligence” suggested that “in Baghdad and elsewhere some effort
… was
made to
arrest Al Qaida-linked terrorists”.
824.
In its meeting
on 7 July, the JIC discussed the forthcoming publication of
the Butler
Report.462
Sir David
Omand stated that it “would be the first time that such an
extensive
list of JIC
reports had been made public”. It was “in the JIC’s interests that
the Report
showed that
the right kind of warnings” had been given, and that “there was a
depth
to the
intelligence and assessment on Iraq”. There were, however, “serious
security
implications”
and the danger of setting precedents. Redactions to the extracts
from
JIC Assessments
would need to be agreed before publication.
825.
The Butler
Report was published on 14 July.463
826.
In the House
of Commons, Mr Blair assessed the Report’s implications for
two
questions
that had persisted throughout the debate on Iraq:
“One is an
issue of good faith – of integrity. This is now the fourth
exhaustive
inquiry
that has dealt with the issue. This Report, the Hutton Inquiry, the
Report of
462
Minutes,
7 July 2004, JIC meeting.
463
Review of
Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction [“The
Butler Report”], 14 July 2004, HC 898.
586