MI5 knew terrorism would increase after Iraq attack

Good article revealing that MI5 knew attacking Iraq would lead to more terrorist threats against the UK; MI5 refused to participate in the WMD dossier against Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq triggered a massive upsurge in terrorist activity against the UK, the former head of MI5 said today.

Baroness Manningham-Buller said the Security Service had been forced to seek a doubling of its budget as it struggled to cope with the volume of plots generated in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003.

Giving evidence to the official inquiry into the conflict, she said ministers had been warned that the launch of military action against Iraq would lead to a heightened prospect of attack by al Qaida.

The evidence of Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had been "fragmentary", she said, and she dismissed Tony Blair's argument that action had been necessary to prevent them falling into hands of terrorists.

She disclosed that MI5 had refused to contribute to the Government's dossier on Iraqi WMD in 2002 and she criticised the way that the invasion had shifted attention away from the al Qaida threat in Afghanistan.

The agency had, however, warned ministers through the assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee - Britain's senior intelligence body - that an invasion would lead to an increased threat from al Qaida.

While they had seen a build up terrorist activity following the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001, she said that the threat had increased "substantially" in the wake of the military intervention in March 2003.

She suggested that "a whole generation of young people" had been "radicalised" by what they saw as an attack on Islam, before quickly correcting herself to say: "Not a whole generation, a few among a generation".

At times, she said, MI5 had been almost overwhelmed by the number of terror plots that sprung up.

"We were pretty well swamped - that's possibly an exaggeration - but we were very overburdened with intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with in terms of plots, leads to plots and things that we needed to pursue," she said.

Despite having seen MI5's budget increase immediately following the 9/11 attacks and then again in 2002, Lady Manningham-Buller said that she had to ask Mr Blair for a further doubling of its resources in 2003.

"This is unheard of, certainly unheard of today, but he and the Treasury and the chancellor accepted that because I was able to demonstrate the scale of the problem that we were confronted by," she said.