Owner59
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100720/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_iraq_inquiry
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."
and
recommendations for future operations and military missions.
Manningham-Buller said the focus on Iraq had far-reaching consequences for the mission to tackle global terrorism.
"By focusing on Iraq, we reduced the focus on the al-Qaida threat in Afghanistan. I think that was a long-term, major and strategic problem," she told the panel.
She acknowledged the Iraq war vastly increased the terrorism threat to Britain — with her officers battling to handle a torrent of terrorism plots launched by homegrown radicals in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"Our involvement in Iraq radicalized, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people — not a whole generation, a few among a generation — who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam," she said.
She disclosed for the first time that about 70 to 80 British citizens had traveled to Iraq to join the insurgency. Video messages left by the four suicide bombers who killed 52 commuters in the 2005 attacks on London's subway and bus network had referred to Britain's role in Iraq.
Manningham-Buller told the five-member inquiry panel that the decision to invade Iraq had likely provided an impetus to al-Qaida.
"Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad, so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before," she said.
< Message edited by Owner59 -- 7/20/2010 3:59:16 PM >
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"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals"
President Obama
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British Intel Cheif:No link between Iraq and 9/11,Thank... - 
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