Europe/UK/WMD: Blair Alliance With Danish PM Unsettled by MI Leak

Blair Alliance With Danish Prime Minister Unsettled by MI Leak
Posted: 04/14
From: Mathaba

April 14 (Mathaba.Net) - No less than 10 consecutive summaries from early Sept. 2002 till March 2003 on the threat to security that Iraq posed to the outside world before the war all told the same thing: there were no WMD, there were no links between the Saddam regime and al-Qaida, nor was Iraq deemed capable of launching another full scale military operation against its neighbours. This is now clear according to an officer in the Danish FET 'Forsvarets Efterretnings Tjeneste' (Military Intelligence).

FET Officer Major Frank Søholm Grevil, has appeared on national radio to explain why he decided to become a whistleblower and hand over confidential papers to a reporter from the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende. He said he did it because he felt the rules of a decent democracy were jeopardised by the government misleading the public into joining a coalition of war.

The Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has repeatedly told the public that the WMD and the terror links existed as facts, and that he knew this from the intelligence reports given to him, and that of course Mr Bush and Mr Blair also had that information from the very same reports. The Danish FET gathered no information of their own about Iraq at that time; everything that appeared in the 10 summary reports came from CIA and the British MI.

This means that major Grevil has exposed not only that the Danish Prime Minister was lying to Parliament, but he is also involving Prime Minister Blair. He, the PM, has claimed with hindsight how he thought that the famous 45 minutes meant that this was the amount of time Saddam needed to attack an enemy with WMD, and that the intelligence reports were "open to interpretation". Now the Danish major has implied that the intelligence from the British MI and American CIA was in fact unambiguous, and in the reports the 45 minutes were not referring to WMD, but meant the time needed for Saddam to defend himself with conventional weapons. Also the officer says that there were no inconsistencies about WMD, or the overall poor state of Iraqi military in general, in the reports right up March 2003 on the eve of war, and that the appropriate intelligence assessments needed for an attack on Iraq were instigated as early as in the summer of 2002.

The leak of "conscience" from the major in the Danish FET has had severe consequences for himself. When revealed, he was immediately dismissed, and along with the reporters and the editor of Berlingske Tidende he is currently being investigated by police on charges of putting national security at risk, as reported earlier on Mathaba.Net.

The officer, who is himself a member of the same right wing political party as the Danish Prime Minister, explains that he wanted to go public so as not to be made out as an unbalanced individual with a chip on his shoulder, and because, as he said, "many officers in the Danish MI felt that someone should alert the civil servants in the government administration - we heard the politicians citing as grounds for going to war "facts" from intelligence, when those facts were the very opposite. And in that case, there is no longer any use for an intelligence service."

Berlingske Tidende, a conservative government loyal newspaper, has not followed up on its own story that included the leaks of the intelligence reports. After being charged with putting national security at risk by publishing confidential documents the paper has muffled itself, the inference is now that someone has been leaning on it from above.
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