A former high-level British diplomat said yesterday the nation had intelligence that made it "very clear" that the Saddam Hussein regime posed no major threat to the United Kingdom prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the London Guardian reported (see GSN, March 13).
"A lot of facts about the run-up to this war have yet to come to light which should come to light and which the public deserves to know," Carne Ross, British first secretary at the United Nations through 2004, told a House of Commons committee.
Ross argued that the government in Baghdad could have been toppled by stricter administration of sanctions and that he attempted to pass on concerns to government officials as war loomed.
The United Kingdom joined the United States in asserting that Saddam Hussein's government posed a significant threat through the development of weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorist organizations. No signs of active WMD programs or operational connections to al-Qaeda have turned up since the invasion.
There is a "paper trail" that could provide detail on the decision to go to war, Ross said, just days after lawmaker and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw blocked the release of minutes from a Cabinet meeting on the invasion decision, the Guardian reported.
"I feel very strongly that there has still not been proper accountability and scrutiny into what happened in Iraq," Ross said. ""There should be a full public inquiry or parliamentary inquiry into the decision-making that took place."
Ross and three other "whistle-blowers" testified yesterday before the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee on the buildup toward war.
"I feel that you gentlemen [the MPs] have been either deliberately or accidentally misled and these incidents have not been followed up. I think that there has been a great laxity and that won't encourage people like me or my colleagues to come to you," said Brian Jones, top chemical weapons expert at the Defense Intelligence Staff.
Said committee Chairman Tony Wright: "I think you are absolutely right to castigate parliament, which I think has behaved abysmally in this matter -- endless bleating about the need for an inquiry but a complete failure to insist upon one" (David Hencke, London Guardian, March 20).