for the preliminaries, i turned to baroness eliza manningham- buller. >> thank you. i think it is very helpful if you give us a quick resume of how the service was involved in the intelligence and policies relating to iraq. >> can i proceed that with a more general description of the service? >> that would be helpful. >> to collect intelligence. but from a range of sources, some of them secrets, on the threats to the united kingdom, and to develop that intelligence, analyze it, and where necessary, to act on it in mitigating or reducing those threats. and also using intelligence generated to provide information to government on rich policies in countermeasures can be developed. in terms of iraq, we were not directly involved in the decision making to go to war in iraq. that was generally other people, although we were involved, obviously, in a number of meetings and in some of the discussions. our focus was then on dealing with the manifestations of terrorist threats in the united kingdom since 9/11. and since 9/11 and for our worked increasing exponentially. it incr