EA Video Special: Intelligence, the Iraq War, and What's Next --- Key Questions and Some Answers

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Last week, we featured extracts from an interview with Steve Hewitt, one of the world's top specialists on intelligence services and counter-terrorism, about the place of "intelligence" in the drive to the 2003 Iraq War.

This is the full discussion, ranging from the significance of intelligence to the way that politicians manipulated it to create the reasons for the War to the possibility that this could be done again.

EA Video Analysis: Iraq, 10 Years Later --- 5 Points About the "Intelligence" Factor

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Extracts from an interview with Steve Hewitt, one of the world's top specialists on intellilgence services and counter-terrorism, about "intelligence" and the 2003 Iraq War:

1. Is "Intelligence" Important?
2. Did Intelligence Services, Before the War, Have A Good Sense About Iraq and WMDs?
3. Did Politicians Manipulate the Intelligence to Declare that Saddam Had WMDs?
4. Was the Truth Deliberately Distorted?
5. Could Intelligence Be Used This Way Again, to Take Us Into Military Conflict?

The full interview will be posted over the weekend.

Terrorism: Taking Apart the British Warnings of a "Mumbai-Style" Attack

Earlier this week the British media was in a tizzy over a BBC story that some British police were getting military style training with automatic weapons to deal with a Mumbai-style assault on a UK urban centre.

The alleged existence of such a plot is, of course, why the US government warned its citizens not to go to Europe and why the British government warned its citizens not to go to France and why the French government warned its citizens not to go to the United Kingdom (actually, in the latter case, the warning came supposedly in retaliation for the British warning about travelling to France: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose). There’s also a suggestion that the warnings conveniently provided a justification for even more drone attacks being carried out in Pakistan by the Obama administration.

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