"... I heard it from a Taxi driver who heard it from some passengers..."

DECLASSIFIED, here

"It sounds like a bad joke but it may be a true story: one of the most sensational claims made by the British government in the run-up to the Iraq War about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction may have come from an Iraqi taxi driver based on a conversation he overheard from passengers in his backseat two years earlier.

That’s what happened, according to Adam Holloway, a conservative member of Parliament reputed to have “close links” to intelligence officials, in a paper published this week. The claim raises new questions about the origins of pre-Iraq war intelligence at a sensitive time for the British government. An official United Kingdom tribunal is currently examining how and why former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government chose to join the invasion of Iraq.

Among the most eye-grabbing of those claims came in an official British government “ white paper” released in late September 2002 after Blair had returned from a meeting at Camp David with George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney claiming Saddam had chemical or biological weapons that could be deployed “within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” Blair said this, and other claims in the white paper based on secret intelligence, demonstrated that Saddam was a “current and serious threat to the U.K. national interest.”

“Brits 45 Mins from Doom” screamed the headline in The Sun, Britain’s largest-selling daily newspaper, after the white paper was released.

But according to Holloway, the 45 minute claim should have been regarded as questionable from the outset. According to Holloway’s paper, the claim “had originated from an émigré taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, who had remembered an overheard … conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier.” According to the MP, in a footnote to the original intelligence report, a U.K. intelligence analyst had “flagged up” that specific portion of the report, which supposedly related to the readiness of Iraqi missiles, as “demonstrably untrue.” It was provably false, Holloway says, because the missiles in question, according to the MP’s information, “did not exist …The footnote said it in black and white ink.” According to Holloway, while “the truth of the matter was that the intelligence services simply did not know whether Saddam Hussein had WMD, it was equally probable that he was bluffing to maintain a credible threat against Iran.” But Holloway says a senior U.K.intelligence official told him: “There was no appetite in government to hear that.”

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