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Times of London/Times of India: The British government has confirmed that MI6 had organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
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http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/387882.cms
Confirmed: UK sexed up WMDs
[ SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2003 10:55:57 PM ]
LONDON: The British government has confirmed that MI6
had organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to
plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction.
The revelation will create embarrassing questions for
Tony Blair in the run-up to the publication of the
report by Lord Hutton into the circumstances
surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly , the
government weapons expert.
A senior official admitted that MI6 had been at the
heart of a campaign launched in the late 1990s to
spread information about Saddam's development of nerve
agents and other weapons, but denied that it had
planted misinformation.
"There were things about Saddam's regime and his
weapons that the public needed to know," said the
official.
The admission followed claims by Scott Ritter, a
former US marine who led 14 inspection missions in
Iraq, who said that MI6 had recruited him in 1997 to
help with the propaganda effort.
He described meetings where the senior officer and at
least two other MI6 staff had discussed ways to
manipulate intelligence material.
"The aim was to convince the public that Iraq was a
far greater threat than it actually was," Ritter said
last week.
He said there was evidence that MI6 continued to use
similar propaganda tactics up to the invasion of Iraq
earlier this year.
"Stories ran in the media about secret underground
facilities in Iraq and ongoing programmes to produce
weapons of mass destruction," said Ritter.
"They were sourced to western intelligence and all of
them were garbage." Kelly, himself a former United
Nations weapons inspector and colleague of Ritter,
might also have been used by MI6 to pass information
to journalists.
"Kelly was a known and government-approved conduit
with the media," said Ritter.
Sunday Times, London