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Intelligence report forces Blair on to defensiveIntelligence report forces Blair on to defensive
By Ben Hall, Political correspondent
Published: July 19 2005 21:53 | Last updated: July 19 2005 21:53

Tony Blair was forced on to the defensive over the London bomb attacks for the first time on Tuesday after a leaked British intelligence report bolstered claims that the Iraq war had increased the terrorist threat.

The threat assessment from the Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre, which brings together Britain’s security services and law enforcement agencies, warned less than a month before the July 7 attacks that “events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK”.

The JTAC report, leaked to the New York Times, apparently by a foreign intelligence service, also said “at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK”, a conclusion that will increase the pressure on Britain’s security services to explain the failure to foresee the London attack.

The government has strenuously denied claims, most recently articulated by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the foreign affairs think-tank, that the war in Iraq had boosted al- Qaeda. The institute concluded that the UK’s efforts to combat the terrorist threat had been hampered by its position as “pillion passenger” to the US war on terror.

Ministers have responded to such arguments by saying that the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001 pre-dated the Iraq war and that the “root causes” of al-Qaeda terrorism are non-negotiable, such as the existence of the state of Israel.

Mr Blair yesterday cautioned against attributing the motives of the perpetrators of the London attacks to anger over the Iraq war.

He said: “We have got to be really careful of almost giving in to the perverted, twisted logic with which they argue. Of course these terrorists will use Iraq as an excuse. They will use Afghanistan. September 11, of course, happened before both those things and then the excuse was American policy on Israel.

“We have got to be very careful that we don’t enter into a situation where we think if we make some compromise on some aspect of foreign policy, these people are going to change. They are not going to change.” But critics counter that while the Iraq war is not necessarily the root cause of UK-based terrorism, it may have intensified the threat, as the JTAC assessment appears to conclude.

It emerged during the Hutton inquiry that the prime minister had been warned by the intelligence services in the run-up to the Iraq war that the fall of Saddam Hussein could increase the terrorist threat.

But the leaked JTAC report is the first official postwar confirmation of a link with the Iraq war and terrorist activity in Britain.