The honourable and trustworthy West.Exclusive: UK Spy Agencies Knew Source of False Iraq War Intelligence was TorturedBritish intelligence agencies fed questions to the interrogators of a captured terrorism suspect whom they knew was being seriously mistreated in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and ministers then relied upon his answers to help justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Through a close analysis of redacted official documents, Middle East Eye has established that an MI6 officer was aware that CIA officers had placed Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi inside a sealed coffin at a US-run prison in Afghanistan. The officer had then watched as the coffin was loaded onto a truck and driven to an aircraft that was waiting to fly to Egypt.
In an incident report sent to MI6 headquarters in London, the officer and his colleagues reported that “we were tempted to speak out” at the treatment of Libi, but did not. “The event reinforced the uneasy feeling of operating in a legal wilderness,” they said.
Despite being aware that Libi had been flown to Egypt inside a coffin, and despite that country’s well-documented record of human rights abuses, both MI6 and MI5 decided to pass questions to be put to him, and continued to receive reports about what he was saying.
Under torture, Libi told his Egyptian interrogators that there were links between al-Qaeda and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons programme. Three members of the militant organisation had been sent to Iraq for training, he said.
On his eventual transfer back into CIA custody, Libi said that he had fabricated the account in order to avoid further torture.
By that time, however, his statements had been used to justify the invasion of Iraq.Some had been included in a speech that US Secretary of State Colin Powell gave to the United Nations Security Council on 5 February 2003, just weeks before the US-led invasion, while on the same day, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told parliament that there were "unquestionably" links between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
"It would be wrong to say that there is no evidence of any links between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime," Blair said.
“There is evidence of such links. Exactly how far they go is uncertain. However… there is intelligence coming through to us the entire time about this.”
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