Iraq inquiry: Ex-MI5 boss says war raised terror threat

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10693001


The invasion of Iraq "substantially" increased the terrorist threat to the UK, the former head of MI5 has said.

Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller said the action had radicalised "a few among a generation".

As a result, she said she was not "surprised" that UK nationals were involved in the 7/7 bombings in London.

She said she believed the intelligence on Iraq's threat was not "substantial enough" to justify the action.


Baroness Manningham-Buller said she had advised officials a year before the war that the threat posed by Iraq to the UK was "very limited", and she believed that assessment had "turned out to be the right judgement".

Describing the intelligence on Iraq's weapons threat as "fragmentary", she said: "If you are going to go to war, you need to have a pretty high threshold to decide on that."

In a previously secret document from 2002, Baroness Manningham-Buller wrote to the Home Office saying: "We assess that Saddam is only likely to order terrorist attacks if he perceives that the survival of his regime is threatened."

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