Russell and Carol - hayle and hearty

Couple of exchanges from  Baroness Manningham-Buller DCB (Deputy Director General, Security Service until 2002  Director General, Security Service, 2002 to 2007)'s testimony to the Chilcot enquiry

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Were you given sight of some of the material produced by the Pentagon?
BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: I don't think I was. Probably a good thing; it would have made me cross.
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Thank you.

on the Pentagon

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: Well, there was discussion about whether -- I think with the Foreign Office -- about whether the Iraqi Interest Section in London should be closed. There were sort of things about if war came, what would it be necessary to do. I have to say my Service felt pretty relaxed on that side of things. We were far from relaxed about the threat from Al-Qaeda, which again, if I can refer to that open document, said back in 2001 the UK was a target. There was increasing information around the world of that. That was where our energies were placed.

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: I'm going to ask you some questions about that soon. Can I just ask one final question, which is related to the things that Iraqis might have done, and this refers to the proposition that Saddam's regime were in some way responsible for providing support, potential support to Al-Qaeda, and even might have been involved in 9/11. Did you give any credence to these sorts of assessments?

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: No. I think you have material suggesting that there had been intelligence on occasional contact in the past but I think -- I wrote this down when I was preparing for today -- there was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA. It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine, as you have also heard evidence on, which is why Donald Rumsfeld started an intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment. But there were tiny scraps suggesting contact, usually when Saddam Hussein felt under threat, and the danger was that those tiny scraps of intelligence were given an importance and weight by some which they did not bear. So to my mind Iraq, Saddam Hussein, had nothing to do with 9/11 and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind.

on focus and the al-Quaida threat

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: Can I make a few more general points?

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: It would be very helpful.

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: I think for the Inquiry in considering this very complex issue, it is important to say that threat from Al-Qaeda did not begin at 9/11. My Service was already engaged in concern about the threat posed by Al-Qaeda from the late -- mid- to late 1990s, after all the fatwa from Osama bin Laden was issued in London in 1996. We had various operations at that time, some of which had connections to Afghanistan, and well before 9/11 we were anxious and worried and doing investigations. I think one of the things that is often forgotten, and I was asking my colleagues to produce it yesterday and they couldn't remember it, was that actually a month after 9/11 the government put a paper into the public domain -- I'm sure the Inquiry is aware of that -- which was full of intelligence. If you like, that was the first dossier, which was who was responsible for 9/11, to which my Service and I contributed. So our focus was actually not on Iraq, on which we had very few working, not on Iraqi activity in the UK, but our focus was on various forms of terrorism relating partly to AQ and partly to extremism from that sort of area. That was our focus.

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: Thank you very much.

on Iraqi johad

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: Yes. I mean, if you take the video wills that were retrieved on various occasions after various plots, where terrorists who had expected to be dead explained why they had done what they did, it features. It is part of what we call the single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the west was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to the Muslim world and to Islam, of which manifestations were Iraq and Afghanistan, but which pre-dated those because it pre-dated 9/11, but it was enhanced by those events.

SIR RODERIC LYNE: So was support for an Iraqi Jihad, expressed like that, part of this single narrative spanning different extremist Islamic groups?

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: In some quarters, yes, and arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi Jihad, so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he wasn't before.