April 22, 2003
Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said in an interview Tuesday that he was disturbed the United States and Britain had used shaky intelligence to justify the war on Iraq. Blix, who was later Tuesday to meet the UN Security Council to discuss the possible return of his team to Iraq, said: "I think it has been one of the disturbing elements that so much of the intelligence on which the capitals Washington and London built their case seems to have been shaky."
"We have heard about the alleged contract between Iraq and Niger about the import of some 500 tonnes" of uranium, Blix told the BBC. "When the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) got the contract they had no great difficulty in finding out that this was a fake, falsified simply. "I think that is very, very disturbing. Who falsifies this? And is it not disturbing that the intelligence agencies that should have all the technical means at their disposal did not discover that this was falsified?"
Blix made his comments in an interview for a BBC television programme The Road to War, the Inside Story to be broadcast on Saturday. Excerpts were released in advance and broadcast on BBC radio. Asked if he was accusing US and British intelligence services of having falsified documents, Blix said he was not going "that far".
"They may have got this fake contract from somewhere. The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) says that it got a copy from the UK. I certainly do not suggest that UK intelligence would have fabricated it." Britain on Monday kept the door open for a UN role in verifying the presence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons inside Iraq following the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Junior foreign minister Mike O'Brien said "we need to have some element of independent verification" as the hunt for weapons of mass destruction goes on. O'Brien's statement was in sharp contrast to a claim Monday in Rome by Marc Grossman, US under secretary of state for political affairs, that it was "hardly realistic" to let UN inspectors go back into Iraq.
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