From Declassified U.K.
In an article for the New Statesman published four years after the invasion, Rose wrote in detail about how he (and other newspaper journalists) had long been cultivated by MI6. In an article which pays revisiting, he wrote:“To my everlasting regret, I strongly supported the Iraq invasion, in person and in print. I had become a recipient of what we now know to have been sheer disinformation about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his purported ‘links’ with al-Qaeda – claims put out by [opposition figure] Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. I took these stories seriously because they were corroborated by ‘off-the-record’ intelligence sources on both sides of the Atlantic.”
He added: “I am certain that those to whom I spoke at MI6 acted then in good faith,” giving as proof his conversation with an intelligence source shortly after the war who reassured him about the existence of Iraqi WMDs in the aftermath of the invasion.“Don’t worry,” my source said soothingly. “We’ll find them. We’re certain they’re there. It’s just taking longer than we expected. Keep your nerve.”
Source: When journalists act as state propagandists
