US ‘misled Britain’ on Saddam’s weapons

BRITAIN was ‘misled’ by the US over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, according to Gordon Brown.

The former prime minister, who was chancellor when the decision to go to war was made in 2003, says in his memoirs that the invasion of Iraq was unjustified.

He claims top-secret US intelligence casting serious doubt on the dictator’s destructive capabilities was not shared with Britain. It was only after leaving office that he became aware of ‘crucial’ papers held by the US Defence Department, he says.

He argues that the course of history could have been different if the information had been shared.

Mr Brown writes in his book My Life, Our Times: ‘We now know from classified American documents that in the first days of September 2002 a report prepared by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s director for intelligence landed on the desk of the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

‘Commissioned by Rumsfeld to identify gaps in the US intelligence picture, it is now clear how forcibly this report challenged the official view.

‘If I am right that somewhere within the American system the truth about Iraq’s lack of weapons was known, then we were not just misinformed but misled on the critical issue of WMDs.’

Mr Brown says British intelligence suggested a capability, if not a production programme, of WMDs but the US report is said to have conceded that knowledge of Iraqi nuclear weapons was based largely on analysis of imprecise intelligence.