Eliza Manningham-Buller at the Iraq inquiry - 20 July

9.06am: This morning's Iraq inquiry hearing should be fascinating. We're going to hear from Eliza Manningham-Buller - now Lady Manningham-Buller - who was head of MI5 at the time of the Iraq war. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of MI6 at the time, is one of the 35 witnesses who have given evidence to the inquiry in private. But Manningham-Buller will be speaking in public, on-the-record, for 90 minutes from 10am.

We know already know something about what she is likely to say. It has emerged that the joint intelligence committee, the body that advises ministers on the basis of intelligence from MI5 and MI6, warned Tony Blair before the war started that invading Iraq would increase the threat to Britain from terrorism.

And last year, in an interview with the Guardian, Manningham-Buller said she had delivered this warning as "explicitly" as she could. She was interviewed by my colleague Richard Norton-Taylor.

Manningham-Buller remembers flying up the eastern seaboard [the day after the 9/11 attacks in the US], seeing the smoke and wondering how Americans would react: "It never occurred to me they would go into Iraq."

As US and UK forces were preparing to invade, she asked, "Why now?" She said it "as explicitly as I could. I said something like, 'The threat to us would increase because of Iraq.'"

But who did she tell? How often did she repeat her warnings? How did minister react? Perhaps we may find out. Most officials and former officials who have given evidence to the inquiry have been reluctant to criticise Blair and his ministers in blunt terms and maybe Manningham-Buller will be no exception.

But she's also the person who, with a short but masterful speech in the House of Lords, probably did more than any other single individual to wreck Gordon Brown's plans to introduce 42-day pre-charge detention. What's she going to say today? I have no idea, but potentially it could be very powerful indeed.

9.42am: Here's a short Manningham-Buller reading list.

The intelligence and security committee report from September 2003. This is the report that revealed that intelligence chiefs warned Tony Blair that an invasion of Iraq would increase the danger of terrorist attacks. The key quote is in paragraph 126.

In their assessment International Terrorism:War with Iraq, dated 10 February 2003, the [joint intelligence committee] reported that there was no intelligence that Iraq had provided [chemical and biological] materials to al-Qaida or of Iraqi intentions to conduct CB terrorist attacks using Iraqi intelligence officials or their agents. However, it judged that in the event of imminent regime collapse there would be a risk of transfer of such material, whether or not as a deliberate Iraqi regime policy. The JIC assessed that al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq.

A speech Manningham-Buller delivered in November 2006. In this speech, which is on the MI5 website, Manningham-Buller said Britain's involvement in the Iraq war was one of the factors motivating Islamist terrorists who attack the UK.

There has been much speculation about what motivates young men and women to carry out acts of terrorism in the UK. My service needs to understand the motivations behind terrorism to succeed in countering it, as far as that is possible. Al-Qaida has developed an ideology which claims that Islam is under attack, and needs to be defended.

This is a powerful narrative that weaves together conflicts from across the globe, presenting the west's response to varied and complex issues, from long-standing disputes such as Israel/Palestine and Kashmir to more recent events as evidence of an across-the-board determination to undermine and humiliate Islam worldwide. Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kashmir and Lebanon are regularly cited by those who advocate terrorist violence as illustrating what they allege is Western hostility to Islam.

The video wills of British suicide bombers make it clear that they are motivated by perceived worldwide and long-standing injustices against Muslims; an extreme and minority interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence; and their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in particular the UK's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

10.02am: Sir John Chilcot starts by saying that he has published one declassified document. It's on the inquiry's website now.

10.12am: The declassified document is a letter that Manningham-Buller sent to John Gieve, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, in March 2002.

It is about the possibility of Saddam Hussein ordering terrorist attacks in Britain or elsewhere in retaliation. Manningham-Buller said Iraq's ability to mount attacks in the UK was "limited".

The most interesting passage is what she says about Iraq's ability to mount a chemical or biological (CB) attack.

Most Iraqi CB terrrorist attacks have been assassination attempts against individuals, often emigres ... Iraq used chemcial weapons during the Iran-Iraq war and also against civilian Kurds in 1988, but there is no intelligence that Iraq has hitherto planned or sought mass-casualty CB terrorist attacks. As with conventional terrorism, we assess that Saddam would only use CB against western targets if he felt the survival of his regime was in doubt. In these circumstances, his preferred option would be to use conventional military delivery systems against targets in the region, rather than terrorism.

10.13am: Manningham-Buller told the inquiry that the threat from al-Qaida did not start with 9/11.

10.18am: Sir Lawrence Freedman is now asking about the letter declassified today. Manningham-Buller says MI5 regarded the threat from Iraq as "low". She refers to the letter, and says the threat posed by Iraqi agents operating in Britain was also limited. That was partly because of action taken by MI5, she says.

10.21am: Manningham-Buller says she cannot remember exactly why she sent the letter to John Gieve. It was part of her "routine" work, she says.

She says there was "an animated exchange of information" about whether people should be deported because they posed a threat. MI5 was "not convinced" that anyone presented a serious enough threat to justify deportation, she says.

10.25am: Manningham-Buller says MI5 was "far from relaxed" about the threat from al-Qaida.

Sir Lawrence Freedman asks about suggestions that Iraq gave support to al-Qaida.

Manningham-Buller says she did not give any credence to this. There was no "credible intelligence" to suggest a connection. That was the judgment of the CIA as well, she says.

There were only "tiny scraps" suggesting contact.

Those "tiny scraps" were given a weight that was not there.

To her mind, Saddam had "nothing" to do with 9/11.

She says this view was not accepted by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary.

10.27am: Manningham-Buller is now talking about the threat posed by al-Qaida.

The real change came in 2003-04, she says.

Sir Lawrence Freedman asks about the assessment of the terrorism threat before the war started.

Manningham-Buller says MI5 thought the threat from al-Qaida "would increase". She mentions the JIC report (see 9.42am.)

Freedman asks what would have happened if Britain had supported the war, but not sent troops. Manningham-Buller says that that is a hypothetical distinction. She implies the threat would have been the same.

10.32am: Sir Roderic Lyne is asking about the interview with Richard Norton-Taylor (see 9.06am) and the 2006 speech (see 9.42am). How significant a factor was Iraq compared with other things used by extremist terrorists to justify their actions.

"Highly significant," Manningham-Buller says. By 2003-04 MI5 was receiving an increasing number of leads about terrorist activities. She says Iraq radicalised "a whole generation" of Muslims. Then she corrects herself: not a whole generation, but part of a generation, she says.

It undoubtedly increased the threat.

By 2004 MI5 was "pretty well swamped" by threats. About 70 or 80 Britons went to Iraq to join the insurgency, she says.

It became a strong motivation. In my speech in Queen Mary's College I said this publicly.

Manningham-Buller says she had to get permission from John Reid, the then home secretary, to make that point in her 2006 speech. Reid approved.

10.36am: Lyne asks if MI5 had evidence about Iraq being a motivating factor. Manningham-Buller says it featured in the "video wils" recorded by suicide bombers.

Arguably we gave Osama bin-Laden his Iraqi jihad.

10.39am: Manningham-Buller says she does not think getting rid of Saddam was "germane" to the long-term desire of some terrorist groups to acquire WMD.

Sir Roderic Lyne asks about the possibility of Iraq bringing together terrorists and WMD.

That was a "hypothetical" concern, she says. It was not a worry to MI5 at the time.

She appears to have just shot down Tony Blair's justification for the war. I'll post the full quote later.

10.46am: Sir Roderic Lyne asks if there was anything the government could have done after the war to reduce the threat from terrorism.

Manningham-Buller says planning for the peace could have been better.

The decision by the Americans to sack the Baathists was "an error", she says.

On a visit to the US, she was asked to speak to Paul Wolfowtiz, the US deputy defence secretary, about this. She tried to persuade him it was "not sensible".

By 2003 Manningham-Buller had to ask Tony Blair for a doubling of her budget. Blair accepted that, because she was able to show the threat had increased.

Lyne asks: "A doubling of your budget because of Iraq?"

Manningham-Buller says the two were connected.

She needed the extra resources because of the "almost overwhelming" number of terrorist leads and terrorist plots.

Lyne asks Manningham-Buller who asked her to see Wolfowitz. Manningham-Buller says she can't remember. But it may have been the Foreign Office.

Lyne asks if she converted Wolfowtiz. "Not a hope," Manningham-Buller replies.

10.53am: Sir Lawrence Freedman asks about the prewar period. Manningham-Buller says al-Qaida had not "focused" on the UK before the war.

Between 2001 and 2008 there had been 16 substantial plots, of which 12 were stopped, Manningham-Buller says. 7/7 occured. 21/7 would have occured "if they had been competent".

In those 12 plots, British citizens predominated.

Freedman asks how Manningham-Buller delivered her warning to Blair before the war about an invasion increasing the threat to the UK.

Through the JIC assessments, Manningham-Buller says. She does not recall discussing this with Blair. But she did talk about it with the home secretary.

Manningham-Buller says her job was to say what the assessment of the terror threat was.

Freedman asks if there was any "controversy" among the intelligence agencies about those threat. No, says Manningham-Buller.

If ministers read the JIC assessments, they would have had "no doubt" as to the views of the intelligence services on this.

Manningham-Buller says she did see Blair. But she did not have a "one-to-one" with him on this issue.

10.56am: Sir John Chilcot asks Manningham-Buller to explain how she knows Iraq increased the threat.

Manningham-Buller says there was a correlation between the war and the increase in the number of threats.

What Iraq did was produce a fresh impetus of people prepared to engage in terrorism.

11.02am: Sir John Chilcot asks about any lessons learnt from dealing with terrorism in Northern Ireland.

Manningham-Buller says Irish terrorism was different. The IRA had a "recognisable structure". That does not apply with al-Qaida.

But dealing with Irish terrorism gave the British "an advantage" when it came to dealing with al-Qaida, she says.

11.06am: Sir Roderic Lyne asks if Manningham-Buller had regular one-on-one meetings with Blair.

Manningham-Buller says she saw Blair regularly in bigger meetings. But she did not have regular one-to-one meetings. Her main contact with Blair was at weekly meetings also attended by the home secretary.

She always saw the home secretary regularly.

Lyne asks if any of her predecessors had scheduled "bilaterals" with the prime minister. "Pretty irregularly," she says.

Lyne asks if the other intelligence agency heads saw Blair more often.

The head of MI6 did, Manningham-Buller says.

11.10am: Sir John Chilcot asks about the joint intelligence committee reports. Could the JIC process be improved?

Manningham-Buller says the Butler committee said some "important things". She was not really part of JIC when the September 2002 dossier was being compiled. MI5 was asked to contribute some "low-grade" intelligence to the dossier. They refused, because it was not reliable.

Manningham-Buller says she has considered whether she, or her predecessor, should have challenged the intelligence presented more strongly.

The job of the JIC is to assess raw intelligence. That's important. But the JIC has an "aura" about it that is "undeserved". It is fallible. It's just another Whitehall committee, she says.

Its judgments must always recognise, and others must recognise, that its judgments may be fallible.

The JIC assessments were reliable in relation to the terrorism threat. They were less reliable in relation to Iraq, she says.

11.14am: Sir John Chilcot asks if ministers need to be trained to understand intelligence.

Yes, says Manningham-Buller. Ministers need to learn about "the inadequacies of intelligence".

There used to be some induction for ministers, she says.

Chilcot asks what lessons MI5 has learned from Iraq.

Manningham-Buller says MI5 has learned to be "pretty quick" in responding to changing circumstances.

Chilcot asks if she has any general reflections.

Manningham-Buller says:

The main one would be the danger of over-reliance on fragmentary intelligence in deciding whether or not to go to war.

She also repeats her point about not accepting that there was a link between Iraq and the long-term threat from terrorism.

And she says the war distracted attention from the terrorism threat posed by al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

11.30am: Wow. It's hard to know where to start. That was one of the most damaging evidence sessions we've heard. Manningham-Buller has said before that the Iraq war increased the terrorism threat to the UK, but she has now just made the case more powefully than ever before.

"Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad," she said, as she revealed that 70 to 80 Britons went to Iraq to join the anti-coalition insurgency having been radicalised by the war.

She said that MI5 had to have its budget doubled after the war because the number of threats was "almost overwhelming". And, in her final remarks, she accused Tony Blair of placing too much credence on "fragmentary intelligence".

But the most significant comments may turn out to be the ones that she made about the links between Iraq and terrorist groups wishing to acquire WMD. Blair went to war, not just because he was worried about what Saddam might do with WMD, but because he was concerned about WMD produced by a country like Iraq falling into the hands of the terrorist group prepared to commit mass murder on the scale of 9/11. Manningham-Buller seemed to be saying that this was not much of a threat.

I'll post some of the key quotes from the hearing now before producing a full summary.

11.50am: This is the exchange about the danger of WMD produced by Iraq falling into the hands of terrorists. As I said at 11.30am, this was a key argument used by Tony Blair when he was arguing why Saddam had to be disarmed. But Manningham-Buller says it was not something that worried MI5.

I wrote about the exchange at 10.39am, but here are the quotes in full.

Lyne: Some witnesses that we have heard have argued that it was necessary or right to remove Saddam's regime in order to forestall a fusion of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism, which was in their view expected to come from Iraq at some point after or beyond 2003. In your view, did the toppling of Saddam Hussein eliminate a threat of terrorism from his regime?

Manningham-Buller: It eliminated the threat of terrorism from his direct regime. But it did not eliminate the threat of terrorism using unconventional methods of chemical or bacteriological or indeed radioactive. So using weapons of mass destruction as a terrorist weapon is still a potential threat. And, after all, Osama bin Laden said it was the duty of members of his organisation, or those in sympathy with it, to hire and use these weapons. It is interesting that such efforts as we have seen to get access to these sort of materials have been low-grade and not very professional. But it must be a cause of concern to my former colleagues that at some stage a terrorist group will resort to these methods. In that respect, I don't think the toppling of Saddam Hussein is germane to the long-term ambitions of some terrorist groups to use them.

Lyne: From what you said earlier ... there is an implication that you did not at that time see Saddam Hussein's regime as an important sponsor of terrorism directed at least against this country.

Manningham-Buller: That is correct.

Lyne: Does it therefore follow from that you don't subscribe to the theory that at some point in the future he would probably have brought together international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in a threat to western interests.

Manningham-Buller: It's a hypothetical theory. It certainly wasn't a concern in either the short term or the medium term to either my colleagues or myself.

11.58am: This is what Manningham-Buller said right at the end of the hearing (see 11.14am) when she was asked if she had any final reflections on the war.

The main one would be the danger of over-reliance on fragmentary intelligence in deciding whether or not to go to war. If you are going to go to war, you need a pretty high threshold, it seems to me, to decide on that. And I think there are very few who would argue that the intelligence was [not] substantial enough on which to make that decision.

The second point would be the point you picked up on, of making sure the immediate imperative, as the government saw it, to forestall Saddam Hussein was connected with the medium-term increases in the threat, and the two were seen together in a way that, I suggest, they were not entirely.

The third one should be, of course, by focusing on Iraq we ceased to focus on the al-Qaida threat, or we reduced the focus on the al-Qaida threat in Afghanistan. I think that was a long-term major strategic problem.

In relation to point one, from what I can hear (having played the tape back several times), Manningham-Buller actually said: "And I think there are very few who would argue that the intelligence was not substantial enough on which to make that decision."

But from the context, it's very clear she mis-spoke and meant either "there are very few who wouldn't argue that the intelligence was not substantial enough on which to make that decision" or – as I have put it – "there are very few who would argue that the intelligence was substantial enough on which to make that decision".

12.42pm: There was so much in that session that it has taken me a while to pull together all the top lines. But here it is – a summary of Lady Manningham-Buller's evidence.

Manningham-Buller said MI5 did not think getting rid of Saddam Hussein would reduce the risk of terrorists getting hold of WMD. Tony Blair defended the war partly on the grounds that if a country like Iraq was allowed to keep WMD, those weapons would eventually get into the hands of terrorist groups such as al-Qaida. Manningham-Buller said this was not a concern to MI5 (see 10.39am and 11.50am).

She accused Blair of "over-reliance on fragmentary intelligence". Summing up the lessons to be learnt from the war, she said: "If you are going to go to war, you need a pretty high threshold, it seems to me, to decide on that. And I think there are very few who would argue that the intelligence was [not] substantial enough on which to make that decision" (see 11.58am).

She said that going to war in Iraq distracted attention from the fight against al-Qaida in Afghanistan (see 11.58am).

MI5 told ministers the threat to Britain from al-Qaida "would increase" if Britain supported the war against Iraq. This prediction turned out to be true. Manningham-Buller has made this point in the past, but today she spelt it out more bluntly than ever before. Iraq was a "highly significant" factor in radicalising terrorists, she said (see 10.27am, 10.32am and 10.56am).

Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people, some British citizens. Not a whole generation, a few among a generation who saw our involvment in Iraq, on top of our involvment in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam.

MI5 needed to have its budget doubled to deal with the increase in the number of terrorist threats facing Britain after 2003. "We were pretty well swamped, that's possibly an exaggeration, we were very over-burdened by intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with, in terms of threats and things that we needed to pursue," she said (see 10.32am and 10.46am).

About 70 or 80 Britons went to fight in Iraq against US-led forces. "Arguably we gave Osama bin-Laden his Iraqi jihad,\ Manningham-Buller said (see 10.32am and 10.36am).

MI5 refused a request to contribute some intelligence to the September 2002 dossier about Iraq's WMD. They were asked to submit some "low-grade" material, but said no because the intelligence was unreliable (see 11.10am).

The joint intelligence committee was treated with more respect than it should have been, Manningham-Buller said. It had an "aura" that was "undeserved". It was fallible (see 11.10am).

Manningham-Buller did not discuss her concerns about the Iraq war in a one-to-one meeting with Blair. Instead, she just saw him in group meetings (see 10.53am and 11.06am).

She told the inquiry there was no 'credible intelligence" to suggest a link between Saddam and al-Qaida. She said Donald Rumsfeld, the then US defence secretary, was wrong to suggest otherwise.

MI5 said well before the war that there was "no intelligence" that Iraq wanted to mount mass-casualty terrorist attacks using chemical or biological weapons. MI5 also believed Saddam would only use WMD against western targets if his regime was threatened (see 10.02am and 10.12am).

That's it for today. Thanks for the comments.