Bush Crimes Commission: Scott Ritter testimony, January 20, 2006

[Guest guest]

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 08:43:26 +0100

Bush Crimes Commission: Scott Ritter testimony, January 20, 2006

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http://www.bushcommission.org/Text/Ritter.htm

 

 

 

 

Bush Crimes Commission

 

Scott Ritter testimony, January 20, 2006

 

 

 

SCOTT RITTER's testimony, taken by RAY McGOVERN

 

 

 

Ray McGovern: I know that you were a Marine officer, so I know

that we don't have to swear you in. You took it oath, did you not? Can

you tell us what that oath was?

 

 

 

Scott Ritter: To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United

States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic.

 

 

 

RM: So it was to the Constitution of the United States that you

swore an oath to protect and not the commander in chief of the United

States?

 

 

 

SR: Correct.

 

 

 

RM: Let me simply remind everyone here that our witness was a UN

inspector from 1991 to 1998. But we only have about 20-25 minutes to

cut to the chase here, so questions will be brief and hopefully the

answers will be succinct, because we have a lot to cover.

 

 

 

Our task, our subject is wars of aggression. I think we need to

refer to what Nuremberg said about these wars. He defined it thusly:

" To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime,

it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war

crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the

whole. Think torture. Our task tonight is to produce evidence as to

whether or not the president of the United States, George W. Bush, in

launching our armed forces into Iraq in March 1993 thereby authorized

a war of aggression.

 

 

 

Now this war, as has been mentioned, was justified or explained by

something called weapons of mass destruction-- a subject that you are

an expert on, is that right, Mr. Ritter?

 

 

 

SR: I like to say specialist, I don't like to use the term expert,

it's used too often.

 

 

 

RM: I'd like to ask you right off the bat—What kind of role did

weapons of mass destruction play in this whole calculus?

 

 

 

SR: Weapons of mass destruction was the only foundation upon which

this war was justified. I submit to you for your consideration the

letter that was submitted by Ambassador John Negroponte of the United

States of America to the Security Council of the United Nations on the

eve of the decision by the president to invade Iraq in March 2003. In

this letter, Ambassador Negroponte repeatedly refers to Iraq's refusal

to disarm, the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and therefore

the existence of a clear and present risk to international peace and

security that warranted the use of military action on the part of the

United States. Weapons of mass destruction was the only justification

cited for the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.

 

 

 

RM: I think our citizens can be forgiven for being a little

confused at this point. We have the Secretary of State, Mr. Colin

Powell, saying to us in February 2001, " Saddam Hussein has not

developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass

destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his

neighbors. " Condoleeza Rice, July 29, 2001: " We are able to keep his

arms from him, his military forces have not been rebuilt. "

 

 

 

Then all of a sudden, we have weapons of mass destruction galore

in Iraq. Shortly after 911, we have the president telling us, `There

is no doubt that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. " We

have Secretary Rumsfeld saying, in his typically quotable way, " There

is no debate in the world as to whether that they have those weapons.

We all know that. A trained ape knows that. " He even professed to know

where they were, out there-- Tikrit, Baghdad, northeast, southwest of

there. How do you explain that, Mr. Ritter? How do you explain first

of all, that there were none there before 911, then all of a sudden

there were a plethora of same. What was going on?

 

 

 

SR: First of all, let's also refer to statements made by Secretary

of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when justifying the analysis put forward

that there were weapons of mass destruction. He acknowledged that the

United States suffered from a lack of current intelligence data about

the status of Iraq's WMD program. That in fact the foundation of the

analysis was based upon data that existed prior to 1998, that is data

that existed when UN inspection teams, of which I was a part of,

served in Iraq.

 

 

 

Now, this is the data that prompted Colin Powell and Condoleeza

Rice to make their statements in 2001 that Iraq did not have weapons

of mass destruction. This is data that was known to the Clinton

administration. Since 1995, the United States intelligence community

knew that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed in the field of

ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons and

biological weapons. What cause the Bush administration to change its

stated assessment is the policy decision undertaken by the Bush

administration to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein from power.

Around this policy, the Bush administration fixed intelligence,

including analysis that it claims was the result of a reexamination of

the facts in light of the events of September 11, 2001-- namely that

because of the terrorist attacks against the United States on that

date, the United States could no longer tolerate an uncertain

situation in Iraq. The reason why I highlight this is that the Bush

administration in making these statements acknowledges the uncertainty

that exists regarding WMD. This is a far cry from the statements made

by the president and indeed members of his administration, under oath

to the Congress of the United States, that they knew these weapons

existed.

 

 

 

RM: Mr. Ritter, the administration even now repeats one of Mr.

Rumsfeld's dictas here, not only trained apes, but all our allies, all

intelligence services, everyone in the whole world including Mr.

Rumsfeld's trained apes, knew, believed that there were weapons of

mass destruction there. Would you comment on how everyone could have

been so disastrously wrong?

 

 

 

SR: First of all, we need to differentiate between the concept of

knowledge and the concept of belief. I can't vouch for anybody's

belief. There are many beliefs out there, some of which are valid,

some of which aren't. But the administration has said that the French,

the Germans, the Russians, indeed the entire world, felt that Iraq had

weapons of mass destruction. I can tell you as the person who was

responsible for some of the most sensitive intelligence operations run

by the United Nations vis a vis Iraq and its weapons of mass

destruction program, the person who had total access to every shred of

intelligence data provided by the international community of the

United Nations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that while

there may have been uncertainty about the final disposition of the

totality of Iraq's WMD programs, the entire world including the CIA

acknowledged that the United Nations' weapons inspectors had, by 1998,

accounted for 95-98% of Iraq's declared stockpiles. That there was

uncertainty regarding the final disposition of this 5-2% that could

not be absolutely verified, but there was no nation, and I will say

that again, no nation including the United States, that had any hard

factual data to sustain the argument that Iraq a) retained weapons of

mass destruction, or b) was actively reconstituting weapons of mass

destruction.

 

 

 

So I will contradict the Bush administration by stating NO nation

supported the Bush administration's contention that Iraq maintained

viable massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction at any time

from 1998 up until the eve of the invasion in March of 2003.

 

 

 

RM: Are you saying, Mr. Ritter, that the president marched us off

to war in the subjective mood? Are you saying that his rhetoric was

incredibly declarative-- " There can be no doubt. " Quote- end quote.

And the intelligence analysts themselves were betwixt and between to

come up with the proof that he needed.

 

 

 

SR: I will say this, that as early as 1992 the CIA was in

possession of enough data to sustain the notion that Iraq had been

disarmed in the field of ballistic missiles. By 1993 the CIA had

enough data to sustain the notion that Iraq had been disarmed in the

field of biological weapons. By 1994, the CIA had enough data to

sustain the finding that Iraq was disarmed in the field of chemical

weapons. And by 1995, the CIA was in possession enough data to sustain

the finding that Iraq was disarmed in the field of biological weapons.

This knowledge, this certainty of data, was passed over from the

Clinton administration to the Bush administration. Therefore, I would

say that the president's rhetoric was not only baseless, but

deliberately misleading.

 

 

 

RM: Mr. Ritter, you mention 1995, and I am aware that Saddam

Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel defected to us, to the UN, at that

time. The President and Vice President Cheney and other high

officials, have praised him very highly for being the quintessential

defector source. As a matter of fact, if I recall correctly, the Vice

President used information he said that came from Kamel in his major

war speech in August 26, 2002, saying that Kamel had said that there

were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Later, it came out that

Kamel had said something quite different. Would you comment on that

firsthand evidence, and tell us a little bit about who this source was.

 

 

 

SR: Hussein Kamel was the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, he was the

former director general of the military-industrial commission during

the mid to late 1980s. As such, he was the man responsible for the

development and implementation of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction

programs. He was a gentleman who was in possession of the totality of

knowledge necessary to make one capable of speaking authoritatively on

Iraq's WMD programs. He defected in August of 1995. I need to point

out that I led the investigation into Hussein Kamal's defection, and

therefore I am singularly qualified to talk about not only his

defection, but also the results of his defection.

 

 

 

Hussein Kamal provided testimony, debriefings, to the United

Nations Special Commission, to the CIA, and to British MI6 or the

Secret Intelligence Service, in August 1995. These three debriefings

contain almost identical information. Hussein Kamal did not change or

alter the basic characterization of his testimony. We know from the

documents that were directly related to the United Nations debriefing

of Hussein Kamal, that he testified to the United Nations, and indeed

to the CIA and British intelligence, that all weapons of mass

destruction—chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range ballistic

missiles, were destroyed unilaterally by the Iraqi government in the

summer of 1991. This is a finding, by the way, that has been certified

by the Central Intelligence Agency, in specific the Iraq Survey Group,

after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The CIA today states that

the Iraqi government and indeed Hussein Kamal was telling the truth.

All weapons were in fact destroyed in the summer of 1991.

 

 

 

However, this is not what Vice President Dick Cheney told the

Veterans of Foreign Wars in August of 2002. He referred to Hussein

Kamal, and he said that it is because of Hussein Kamal's defection

that the United Nations was able to acquire knowledge about the

existence of Iraq's biological weapons program. Furthermore, Dick

Cheney said that because of Hussein Kamal's defection, the United

Nations and the United States received evidence that Iraq was actively

reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. This of course served as

the foundation of the case that the Bush administration was

articulating to Congress, the United States and indeed to the rest of

the world, that Iraq had a viable ongoing WMD capability. Dick Cheney

was lying. Dick Cheney knew he was lying, and this is one of the

harshest indictments one can make against a government official of the

United States of America. This is a civil crime, not necessarily a war

crime. To lie in the conduct of your official duties is a felony, and

I believe that Dick Cheney and others should be held accountable to

this. But it also evidence that the Bush administration willfully

exaggerated the case about the threat posed by the Iraq WMD, thereby

negating any case they might make about the existence of a clear and

present threat that warranted pre-emptive attack.

 

 

 

RM: Besides the documentary evidence, firsthand observation, we in

the intelligence business would call Hussein Kamal an excellent source

with excellent access. Obviously, he was running the program. If I'm

not mistaken, Mr. Ritter, the rest of what he told us was also borne

out, the little things he told us about some biological weapons that

were hidden and that kind of thing. Is that correct? In other words,

he was a proven source.

 

 

 

SR: Well, actually he didn't make any reference to biological

weapons being hidden because there weren't any biological weapons

being hidden. He did speak about a concealment program that took place

in the summer of 1991 which was run by Saddam Hussein's personal

security force, the Special Security Organization. And that he

believed there was a possibility that documents continued to be hidden

as well as minor components relating to manufacturing processes. This

did turn out to be the case.

 

 

 

In the weeks following Kamal's debriefing, the United Nations

Special Commission brought under its control an archive of several

hundred thousand documents, including the material that Hussein Kamal

said was being hidden by the Iraqi government. These were not weapons

of mass destruction. They were not evidence of ongoing weapons of mass

destruction programs. They were part of past-described programs that

the Iraqi government had failed to completely turn over the weapons

inspectors.

 

 

 

RM: Mr. Ritter, I can just imagine how you reacted to the strange

pronouncements coming out from some of our leaders. You also had

pointed out that this information, though depressed—suppressed in our,

depressed as well— suppressed in our main media, that there was a

report on the Hussein Kamal information in Newsweek a month before the

war. How do you account for the fact that it remained in the Periscope

section of Newsweek, and that neither the Times or the Post nor anyone

else took any note of it—here, a report from the fellow in charge of

the weapons program--missile, biological, chemical, nuclear. He's

saying that they'd all been destroyed in 1991. How could it be that

our media would have ignored that, Mr. Ritter?

 

 

 

SR: That's a question that only the media can answer. I can say

that the information was provided by myself to CNN executives. Indeed,

CNN taped a one-hour interview with myself where these documents

played a central part. This interview was taped and never aired

because of an executive decision made by CNN. CNN can only answer why

they chose not to air this information. I believe the other outlets

are again the only ones who can answer this question. It's information

that was very relevant, it's information that directly contradicted

the statements made by the Bush administration, and it's information

that would have undermined severely the case the administration was

making regarding Iraq and the threat and justification for the war.

 

 

 

RM: One last question, Mr. Ritter. I was in London a few years ago

when you had a press conference and you talked about Operation

Rockingham and about Operation Mass Appeal. This too had to do with

massaging of information made available to the public in Britain and

here. Would you tell us what that involved?

 

 

 

SR: Well thing to note is that both Operation Rockingham and

Operation Mass Appeal were British operations. It's also important to

note that they were not conducted by the United States government, as

far as I was concerned or aware of, during the time of Bill Clinton.

So the relevance of these operations to the discussion about George W.

Bush is that they represented a trend on the part of both the United

States and the United Kingdom to create systems that were designed not

to disarm Iraq or to seek out hidden weapons of mass destruction

capabilities, but rather to maintain a public perception of a

non-compliant Iraq, so that economic sanctions could be

sustained--sanctions which served as the cornerstone of a policy of

regime change. Disarmament was only useful insofar as it facilitated

regime change by providing a basis for continuing sanctions that

destabilized Saddam Hussein and undermined Iraq's economic welfare.

 

 

 

This is a policy that was continued over into the time of George

W. Bush. I can't say that Operation Rockingham or Mass Appeal were

directly carried over. But I can say again the policy of regime change

was the dominant policy of the United States of America from 1991 to

2003. The United States government never intended to disarm Iraq because

 

a disarmed Iraq was counterproductive to a policy of regime change

because if Iraq was disarmed sanctions would have to be lifted. The

United States needed to maintain the even though it possessed the

definitive data that proved that Iraq was complying with its

obligations to disarm.

 

 

 

Although this took place during the Clinton administration, this

data set was transferred in its entirety to the Bush administration,

and the Bush administration knew that Iraq provided no threat to the

United States of America that warranted any form of military action.

 

 

 

RM: Thank you Mr. Ritter. Let me just make one more comment here.

On regime change, you keep coming back to regime change, and the

Downing Street Memoranda, which are going to be addressed shortly by

David Swanson, they throw a lot of weight on the British reaction to

regime change, because time and time again the British Attorney

General and the Foreign Secretary kept saying regime change is not a

justification for launching a war. Launching a war for regime change

just won't work. And that's why, as you know that famous sentence in

the Downing Street Memo-- you know it better than I—about the fixing.

Would you repeat that sentence?

 

 

 

SR: I can't repeat it verbatim, but I believe that intelligence is

being fixed around the policy. And the policy of regime change has

been decided upon by the Bush administration, and it is in the process

of fixing intelligence around that policy. Which means that what

passes for intelligence is nothing more than politically motivated

propaganda.

 

 

 

RM: A brief last comment. The president and his advisors were

badly misled by the Central Intelligence Agency, that it was a

terrible mistake. And at the same time, when the president is asked if

he would do it again, he says yes I would certainly do it again. How

does that parse in your mind?

 

 

 

SR: First of all, I think we need to make it clear that there was

no intelligence failure. You can't have an intelligence failure

regarding the disarming of Iraq unless of course you have a policy of

disarming Iraq, in which case you can say, oops, we got it wrong. The

policy was regime change. The intelligence failure was actually an

intelligence success, because it was the job of the CIA to put forward

a misrepresentation of the facts. The CIA actively suppressed data

which sustained Iraq's contention that it had unilaterally disarmed in

the summer of 1991. The Bush administration's contention that Iraqi

weapons of mass destruction posed a threat that warranted military

action is not only inconsistent with the data in possession of not

only the CIA but also the Bush administration, it is in itself a

violation of the principals, standards, and indeed the legal

foundation upon which I not only took an oath to uphold and defend,

but what the entire international community has embraced as the rule

of law since the end of the Second World War. And that is of course

the Charter of the United Nations. Article 6 of the Constitution

clearly states that when we enter into an international agreement or

treaty that has been ratified by two-thirds of the United States

Senate, that is the law of the land. We have signed the Charter of the

United Nations. We have ratified it, and the Charter gives only two

cases in which military force is authorized under international law.

Article 51, self-defense. And then Chapter 7 of the Charter that

states if the Security Council finds that a situation exists that

threatens international peace and security, it can authorize the use

of military force to rectify that. When it comes to Iraq, neither

condition existed.

 

 

 

RM: Thanks, Mr. Ritter. We have a question from one of the judges.

 

 

 

Dennis Brutus: We do have three questions. I'd like to take the

opportunity to start with Ajamu Sankofa.

 

 

 

AJ: When the president of the United States says today that he and

his administration relied on faulty " intelligence. " Can you describe

specifically what he is referring to, if you know?

 

 

 

SR: There's two data sets that the Bush administration relied on.

One is a data set that I'm intimately familiar with. That is,

information or intelligence data that was collected by or on behalf of

the inspectors from 1991 to 1998 pertaining to Iraq's disarmament.

 

The Bush administration contends that after September 11, 2001, it

had to reevaluate these findings that said Iraq had been fundamentally

disarmed but not totally disarmed. And that it had to put a weight on

the fact that there was unaccountable material. This fact that there

was unaccountable material was then combined with new data which was

not the sort of data that we would call actionable intelligence or

viable intelligence. It was intelligence information, or I should say

information, that comes from sources such as Akmed Chalabi's Iraq

National Congress, where you have defectors who have failed CIA

quality control standards, they failed polygraphs. In fact this was

information that was rejected by the CIA but again was reinserted into

the mix because this is not about genuine intelligence analysis, this

about political motivation to find any data to sustain the notion of a

non-compliant Iraq.

 

 

 

DB: We have a second question from Mr. Abdeen Jabarra.

 

 

 

AJ: Thank you very much for that testimony, Mr. Ritter. This will

certainly help the jury here to evaluate in terms of the counts of the

indictment. My question is since you indicated the United States had a

policy of regime change that began in 1991, and the economic sanctions

that were imposed on Iraq was part and parcel of that policy-- and

there have been some statements now about the number of civilian

casualties in Iraq since the beginning of the " shock and awe " campaign

against Iraq, and the invasion of Iraq by American military and

coalition forces. But can you tell us something about the number of

casualties and deaths in Iraq under the sanctions regime, before the

beginning of actual invasion?

 

 

 

SR: No sir, sadly, I can't. I was a weapons inspector. My job in

Iraq was focused solely on disarming of Iraq. There were other United

Nations officials who were there to oversee the economic sanctions

program, and it would be irresponsible speculation for me to put a

number to that. There are people who can answer that question

definitively. Unfortunately I am not one of them.

 

 

 

DB: The third question is from Ann Wright.

 

 

 

AW: The US Congress did pass a piece of legislation called The

Iraq Liberation Act, and it did call for regime change, if I

understand. Did the Bush administration's attack on Iraq, did it

comply with what Congress had said in that act?

 

 

 

SR: It's curious, when we talk about the Iraq Liberation Act which

was passed by the Congress in a bilateral fashion, Democrats and

Republicans alike in the fall of 1998, the genesis of that was a

letter written by an organization called the Project for a New

American Century sent to Bill Clinton in August 1998 that held Clinton

to task for failing to deal with Saddam Hussein's regime. An outgrowth

of that is the legislation that came forward in the fall of 1998, the

Iraq Liberation Act, which put down as public law an American policy

of regime change.

 

 

 

However, this regime change was based on financial support on the

part of the United States of America, to Iraqi opposition groups, in

particular Akmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. $98 million in of

US taxpayers' money was set aside for this. What's important about the

Iraqi Liberation Act, however, is that it specifically prohibited the

use of United States military force to achieve this objective. So

while George W. Bush did inherit from the Clinton administration, a

policy of regime change, it was a policy of regime change that had a

specific caveat that said US military force will not be used. And the

reason why this is important is that when one draws a chronological

link between the Clinton administration's policies on Iraq and the

Bush administration's policy on Iraq, it's not simple enough to say

regime change was the policy of both. The Bush administration made a

decision at some point in time, that it would step away from the Iraq

Liberation Act, and engage in a policy of regime change that had as

its heart the utilization of US military force. And this is where we

get into the notion of planning and executing of a war of aggression

as opposed to simple regime change.

 

 

 

AW: So indeed the Bush administration's going to war was a

violation of the 1998 legislation which said you cannot use military

force.

 

 

 

SR: The Bush administration will contend that the Congress gave

them a new mandate in the aftermath of September 11, and specifically

a vote by both houses of Congress to authorize the president to use

military force to rectify the situation in Iraq.

 

 

 

Larry Everest: I realize that your service with the United Nations

ended in 1998. One of the arguments we've heard from the Bush

administration is that Saddam forced the inspectors out in 1998.

Therefore, for the next 5 years, Saddam Hussein's government could

have, might have, and of course they were saying that it did in fact

reconstitute banned weapons programs. What can you tell us about that

argument?

 

 

 

SR: I can tell you that in May 1998 that the Clinton

administration, particularly Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright

articulated a policy that had the US stepping away from full support

of UN weapons inspectors, that UN weapons inspections had become a

difficulty for the United States, and they were desperate to find a

solution for terminating these inspections in a manner that maintained

a perception of a non-compliant Iraq. In December 1998, the Clinton

administration was successful in putting an inspection team on the

ground in Iraq that deliberately confronted the Iraqis over access to

sensitive sites, namely political parties, presidential sites. One

such site was the ______ of Baath Party headquarters. The inspection

team went up to the site, demanding access. The Iraqis granted access

in accordance with modalities that had been in place since 1996. But

under orders from the Clinton administration, the chief inspector

unilaterally revoked these modalities without referring it to Security

Council. The Iraqis said you're welcome to come in if the modalities

apply. But because the modalities didn't apply the Iraqis you cannot

come in.

 

 

 

Now let's be clear, 8 inspectors actually gained access to the

site, and the Iraqis were willing to allow an additional 16 inspectors

to gain access to the site. The inspectors were withdrawn, not by the

Iraqi government but on orders of the US government. And once the

inspectors were withdrawn, the United States government, the Clinton

administration said that the Iraqi government is unwilling to

cooperate with the UN weapons inspectors, therefore there's no reason

to continue these inspections. They began a 72-hour bombing called

Operation Desert Fox. The Iraqi government said that the inspection

process had been corrupted, they refused to allow the inspectors back

in. But they did not kick the inspectors out, the US government

ordered them out.

 

 

 

Abdeen Jabara: The regime here—there may be regime change here as

well – but the current regime charges, and the president himself has

said, that Saddam Hussein kicked out the inspectors that went into

Iraq at the turn of the year 2002-2003. Did Saddam Hussein throw them

out, what happened?

 

 

 

SR: My understanding again is based on second hand information

because I was not a participant in this particular phase of the

inspection process. But I can say based on talking with inspectors who

were there, that the inspectors were on the ground, doing their job

with the full cooperation of the Iraqi government. In fact, they had

not been interfered with in any way, shape or form by the Iraqi

government.

 

 

 

In the week prior to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, in

fact the weapons inspectors were actively engaged in the process of

dismantling Iraqi ballistic missiles that had been declared in

violation of the Security Council resolution. Because the United

States ordered the inspectors out-- they were not kicked out by

Saddam-- many of these missiles remained in place and in operational

status and were in fact used by Iraq against US forces during that

war. So some could make the argument that the Bush administration, by

failing to allow the inspections process to be seen through actually

placed US forces at additional risk.

 

 

 

LE: We're really out of time but this is very very vital

testimony. There was no additional intelligence stream, to your

knowledge, between 1998 and 2003 that would have justified the

intelligence estimates that were being publicly made by US Officials

in the run-up to the war. Is that correct?

 

 

 

SR: Correct. The only information that was new was the so-called

intelligence data derived from defectors provided by Akmed Chalabi's

Iraq National Congress. Akmed Chalabi and his defectors have been

shown since then to be complete fabricators. The other thing that

existed was a national intelligence estimate put forward by the

Central Intelligence Agency in October 2002 that was based upon a

reassessment of the data that existed up until 1998. But this was a

politically motivated document that was passed by the CIA after the

president had made his decision regarding the threat posed by Iraq. It

was dropped into being because the United States Senate said, " Excuse

me, Mr. President, you said a threat exists in the form of WMD. What

is the national intelligence estimate that states this? " There was

none, so the president quickly had the CIA gin up a document, which

only reinforces the Downing Street Memo's contention that intelligence

was fixed around policy.

 

 

 

LE: Thank you very much.