The Taxi Driver Who Drove Us to War

Over on the other side of the pond, the British are doing something we would never ever do – aside, that is, from spreading Marmite on a tea biscuit and actually consuming it. They are investigating the origins of the Iraq war. They want to know how did they get lured into an operation that not only turned out badly, but also seems to have been based on a battery of ill-thought-out lies. A commission has been set up, and public hearings are being held: among the revelations is the information that a key source of claims for the existence of Iraq's fabled "weapons of mass destruction" was the "intelligence" provided by an Iraqi taxi driver who said he overheard a conversation between two Iraqi military officers. According to a report written by Tory MP and defense specialist Adam Holloway, here's how it went down:

"Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, British intelligence was squeezing their agents in Iraq for information. One agent did come up with something: the '45 minutes' or something about missiles allegedly discussed in a high level Iraqi political meeting.

"But the provenance of this information was never questioned in detail until after the Iraq invasion, when it became apparent that something was wrong. In the end it turned out that the information was not credible, it had originated from an émigré taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, who had remembered an overheard conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier."

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