The former head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, told the Iraq inquiry in July that she believed the intelligence on Iraq’s threat was not “substantial enough” to justify the war.
She said she had advised officials a year before the war that the threat posed by Iraq to the UK was ‘very limited’. She had told the senior civil servant at the Home Office in March 2002 that there was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
She told Blair, after the invasion, about the growing domestic threat from terrorism: he accepted her argument and doubled the number of MI5 staff. So much for all his claims that attacking other countries would make us safer.