Report implicates Blair in illegal Iraq war

Previously unseen evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry has shed more light on the build-up to the war on Iraq, showing that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered production of intelligence for the US-led invasion of the Arab country.

According to secret testimony by British intelligence to the Iraq war inquiry led by Sir John Chilcot, during a meeting with UK Intelligence officers, including former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, Blair accepted that Libya was a “bigger threat” than Iraq in respect of weapons of mass destruction, The Independent on Sunday reported.

The former British premier is said to have “understood the risk … of focusing on WMD in relation to Iraq” in the session, which was held one day before his meeting with former US president George Bush on April 5, 2002.

However, Intelligence officers told the inquiry that Blair came out a “changed man” after his meeting with Bush and ordered the production of dossiers to “find the intelligence” necessary to justify going to war.

In an interview on BBC2’s Newsnight earlier in February, Blair said despite the death toll among British troops and Iraqi civilians being “very, very high”, the decision to wage a war against the Arab country was the right one.

The former leader of Britain’s Labour party is globally discredited for his war crimes, as under his premiership between 1997 and 2007 hundreds of thousands were killed and injured in illegal military interventions.

The US and Britain attacked Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam Hussein on the pretext of possessing weapons of mass destruction. However, no WMD was ever discovered in Iraq.

More than one million Iraqis were killed as the result of the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country, according to the California-based investigative organization Project Censored.