New BBC report details how MI6 and the CIA both knew in advance that Iraq did NOT have WMD's well before the invasion.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

Fresh evidence is revealed today (Yesterday) about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction. 

Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was “active”, “growing” and “up and running”. 

A special BBC Panorama programme tonight (Last night actually) will reveal how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries. 

It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, told the CIA’s station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had “virtually nothing” in terms of WMD. 

Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was “totally fabricated”. 

However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq’s head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002. 

Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri’s comments, and that he should have been. 

Butler says of the use of intelligence: “There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages.” 

When it was suggested to him that the body that probably felt most misled of all was the British public, Butler replied: “Yes, I think they’re, they’re, they got every reason think that.”

This broadcast comes on the heels of Rachel Maddow's brilliant documentary "Hubris" which examined how we in the US were lied into believing that Saddam Hussein presented a threat as well.

With so much new information coming out, and the reexamination of that evidence with clear eyes, it is almost making me hopeful that we will finally see some accountability.

Not that I expect to see George W, Bush,. Dick Cheney, or Tony Blair taken away in handcuffs (Though a boy can dream can't he?), but perhaps something will happen that will prevent such an atrocity from EVER happening again.

After all I thought after the Vietnam War that we had learned our lesson about war, but such was not the case.