some fed into jic analysis. but there is a standard flow of information because clearly it is important that ministers and senior officials know what domestic intelligence work is showing and illuminating. >> just to clarify, you said there was a response and then you referred to considerations of deportation of iraqi nationals and the problems for human rights that that would cause. were there any other responses at all? >> well, there was discussion about whether -- i think with the foreign office -- about whether the iraqi interest section in london should be closed. there were sort of things about if war came, what would it be necessary to do. i have to say my service felt pretty relaxed on that side of things. we were far from relaxed about the threat from al-qaeda, which again, if i can refer to that open document, said back in 2001 the uk was a target. there was increasing information around the world of that. that was where our energies were placed. >> i'm going to ask you some questions about that soon.

>> it was communicated through the jic assessments, to which i fed in. >> there were jic assessments that warned of this threat. did you have any direct conversations yourself with the prime minister or other senior members of the government, particularly about this issue? >> i don't recall with the prime minister -- i did talk about it with the home secretary. >> did you feel that this particular aspect of the overall assessment about the pros and cons of going into iraq was taken sufficiently account of? >> i think this is a difficult question because -- i mean, at some stage you are going to ask me about lessons learned. the imperative of the government was to do this and the view was, i think, implicit that if there was resulting terrorism, that would be dealt with in the medium term. so in a way it is a question of balancing the short and the medium term. additionally, you could say that even if terrorism increases, that shouldn't stop you doing what you believe, as the government believed, to be right. i saw it as my job to continue to say, as objectively as i could, what our j

and the jic assessment, which i have reminded myself of, say that. we were receiving an increasing number of leads to terrorist activity from within the u.k., and our involvement in iraq radicalized, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people. not a whole generation but a few among a generation. who saw our involvement in iraq on top of our involvement in afghanistan as being an attack on islam. so although the media has suggested that in july, 2005, the attacks that we surprised these british citizens. that is not the case because with their be an increasing number of british-born individuals living in that country who were attracted to osama bin laden and saw the west its activities in iraq and afghanistan as threatening their fellow religionists. so it undoubtedly increased the threat, and by 2004, we were pretty well swamped. that is possibly and exaggeration, but we were very overburdened by intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with in terms of threats to plot leads and to make plots and t