Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director of MI5 from 2002 to 2007.
by Brian Romanoff July 21, 2010
Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former Director of the British Intelligence Agency known as MI5, has stated that there was no evidence linking Iraq and Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 9/11:
“Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind.”
This is a nice gesture 7 years after the fact that American and British (NATO) forces led the invasion into Iraq in 2003; of which we still have over 80,000 American troops deployed to , plus the 100,000 American troops deployed in Afghanistan.
But…
Manningham-Buller was in favor of the terror war vocally back in 2003, saying Al Qaeda was “the first truly global threat“.
And just like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Manninghan-Buller was confident that this war would be long, so long that she was not sure that it could be won, saying, “if this is a war that can be won, it is not going to be won soon.”
In 2005, Manningham-Buller wondered if civil liberties were worth preserving compared to heightened security measures and law enforcement procedures employed after the 2005 London bombings.
“But the world has changed and there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of what we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives..”
Manninghan-Buller resigned after the London 7/7/05 bombings due to the obviously inept, and quite possibly criminal, intelligence failures. This is from a Daily Mail article in 2006:
The head of MI5 has resigned weeks before full details of the role of her agents in a surveillance operation involving two of the July 7 bombers are due to be revealed.
The two British-born bombers did not merely pass through the ‘periphery’ of an intelligence operation monitoring other suspects but were photographed and recorded on several occasions.
More details of the operation are likely to emerge in the New Year.
Intelligence sources say the men were first seen in early 2004, nearly 18 months before the suicide attacks in London, which left 52 people dead on three Underground lines and a bus.
Watch Ripple Effects, a documentary on the 7/7/05 bombings to learn more.
However when Prime Minister Gordon Brown wanted to extend the holding time of “potential terrorists” without any charges from 28 days to 42, Manninghan-Buller was right there to speak against it:
“In deciding what I believe on these matters, I have weighed up the balance between the right to life, the most import civil liberty, the fact that there is no such thing as complete security and the importance of our hard-won civil liberties,” she said. “And therefore on a matter of principle, I cannot support the 42-days pre-charge detention in this bill.“
This was her first speech in the House of Lords as a Life Peer, and it surprised more than a couple of people that she took the position she did.
So how are we supposed to react to her new statements? Well to be sure some may say, “better late than never.”
Me? I wonder where the hell she was when the Downing Street memos were released in 2005, and every day inbetween during the last 5 years.
None the less, if she is really interested in justice, maybe she can give us some “intelligence” that is not half a decade old next time.
