. >> i turn to sir lawrence freedman then. lawrence? >> you have just mentioned your letter that has been declassified and put on our website of march 2002, to john gieve at the home office, and it deals with the possible threat to e uk from iraqi agents in the event of an effort to topple saddam hussein's reme. perhaps you could just give us a gist of the nature of the threat that you saw at the time from the regime itself. >> i think you asked david omand -- were we ked to oduce this? i think i can asre you we were not. the service would regard it as its duty to alert government to threats as they emerge -- this is pre-jtac. as i said to lady prashar, we regarded the threat, the direct threat from iraq as low. we did think -- and it comes in that letter -- that saddam hussein mighresort to terrorism in the theater if he thought his regime was toppled, the capability tdo anything much in the uk. that turned out to be the right judgment. what the letter -- has been redacted from the letter, like i say, in general terms is that is partly

i am going to turn to sir lawrence freedman in a moment. we are in for quite a long afternoon and it would very much help with the transcription if we could take a measured pace. thank you. >> just following up from what has been said, i mean, you have made the point about the americans suggesting that they were upholding the security council resolutions and you noting that the security council as a whole did not seem to go along with that at that time, but, as i recall, part of the american argument was to challenge the security council to uphold its own resolutions. there was a concern that from the late 1990's a number of key security council members had lost interest in pursuing this question and therefore this whole exercise might peter out. do you think that was a reasonable concern? >> well, i think there was at least implied from the us side that if the security council doesn't agree with us and go along with our view, then it sentences itself to irrelevance. i think that's a very presumptuous attitude. i think the us at the time wa

. >> i think sir lawrence would like a follow-up question. >> yes, i would like just to go back to before the war. you were giving evidence, assessments of an increased ri of -qaeda and other jihadist reactions to a potential war in iraq. could you give us a sense of the difference between the sort of things you were anticipating and what you actually experienced? >> i think it is fair toour focd earlier on these issues involved, for example, members of algerian extremist groups, members of libyan extremist groups and others. we had had an operation to which david omand referred in his evidence, which was a case in birmingham in 2000, where we retrieved and prevented the detonation of a large bomb. david omand said he thought that was related to al-qaeda. that was the case at the time i thought i retired. we now think, i gather from my colleagues, it probably wasn't. but those were british citizens of bangladeshi origin planning an attack, target unknown, disrupted, convicted -- one convicted. but certainly i think during 2003/200we realized that this was not, as it were, the focus -- the

i am going to turn to sir lawrence freedman in a moment. we are in for quite a long afternoon and it would very much help with the transcription if we could take a measured pace. thank you. >> just following up from what has been said, i mean, you have made the point about the americans suggesting that they were upholding the security council resolutions and you noting that the security council as a whole did not seem to go along with that at that time, but, as i recall, part of the american argument was to challenge the security council to uphold its own resolutions. there was a concern that from the late 1990s a number of key security council members had lost interest in pursuing this question and therefore this whole exercise might peter out. do you think that was a reasonable concern? >> well, i think there was at least implied from the us side that if the security council doesn't agree with us and go along with our view, then it sentences itself to irrelevance. i think that's a very presumptuous attitude. i think the us at the time was

. >> i will now turn to sir lawrence freedman again. >> there was a lot of interest in the potential of the smoking gun and you have already given an indication that's certainly not what you found, but you have mentioned a number of other things that you did find which were small in themselves but not without significance. i think you have mentioned the chemical warheads didn't have chemicals in them but they could take them, the missiles, nuclear documents. was there anything else you found in addition to those that were prohibited items or indicated something suspicious? >> well, there were the missile engines. the warheads i think was the most important, i think that was in january that we found them, and i remember i was in london at the time when i was told abo this, and i thought, "well, maybe this is it." maybe this is the tip of the iceberg that we are now seeing and maybe we will find more. as time went by and we really found more fragments, i think -- i concluded that it was an ice -- might well have been an ice that had been broken long ago and tse were e flows that remain

. >> i think we are coming pretty much to the end, but sir lawrence has a question or two before we do. >> just with lessons learned, you have had enormous experience on both the nuclear and non-nuclear side of weapons of mass destruction. i would just like to ask a few questions looking forward to what lessons we might learn from this experience. we have had quite a bit of discussion with a variety of witnesses about this term "weapons of mass destruction." it includes a wide variety of capabilities. i wonder just to start with if you would like to say something about the distinction about the different types of capabilities that come under this heading. >> well, it's been a convenient term, w.m.d., weapons of mass destruction. of course, after the iraq war we talked about weapons of mass disappearance or other things, but it is not a very good term, because the core of it are three -- nuclear, biological and chemical, and missiles to deliver them. there is a vast difference between nuclear, on the one hand, and the biological and the chemical. so for iraq i think this has importance.