Comment: Considering that the UK has crossed this "red line" on more than one occasion, and not Syria, we can never take a British government's claims at face value.

Hague "cannot be specific" because he is lying through his teeth. Hiding behind the cloak of "intelligence sources" is exactly what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War. The reason why a government like this defers such outrageous, unjustified claims to its intelligence services is because they can later plausibly say, when it's clear to all that the target country had no WMDs and no intention of using anything resembling WMDs, that "it was all just a failure of intelligence" or "we made the decision based on the intelligence that was available to us", all the while knowing full-well that the alleged 'intelligence' was bogus because they had used their intelligence services to invent, plant and propagate the 'intelligence' in the first place!

The following excerpts are from the excellent 2004 book Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses by former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Mark Curtis:

3. Deceiving the Public: The Iraq Propaganda Campaign

'Dark actors playing games'

In June 2003 it was revealed that the British government had for twelve years been promoting an operation designed to produce misleading intelligence that Iraq had WMDs. Operation Rockingham had been established by the Defence Intelligence Staff in 1991 to provide information proving that Saddam had an ongoing WMD programme and quashing evidence that stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down.

According to Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector, Operation Rockingham and MI6:

institutionalised a process of 'cheery-picking' intelligence produced by the UN inspections in Iraq that skewed UK intelligence about Iraqi WMDs towards a preordained outcome that was more in line with British government policy than it was reflective of ground truth.

[...]

One of the tactics used in the operation, according to Ritter, was leaking false information on weapons to inspectors and then when the search for them proved fruitless, using that as 'proof' of the weapons' existence. [...]

Another operation - called Mass Appeal - was revealed by the press in late 2003. This was launched in the late 1990s by MI6 and aimed to gain public support for sanctions and war against Iraq and involved planting stories in the media about Iraqi WMDs. Ritter was personally involved in this operation from 1997-1998 after being approached by MI6. He said that "the aim was to convince the public that Iraq was far more dangerous than it actually was", and that the operation involved the manipulation of intelligence material right up to the invasion of Iraq.

Poland, India and South Africa were initially chosen as targets for these media stories, with the intention that they would feed back into Britain and the US. Ritter notes that "stories ran in the media about secret underground facilities in Iraq and ongoing WMD prgrammes. They were sourced to Western intelligence and all of them were garbage... They took this information and peddled it off to the media, internationally and domestically, allowing inaccurate intelligence data to appear on the front pages."

[...]

British propaganda campaigns on Iraq were established well before the new phase began in late 2002. In the run up to the invasion, the government established a Coalition Information Centre technically based in the Foreign Office Information Directorate but chaired by Alistair Campbell and run from Downing Street. Campbell also chaired another cross-Whitehall committee, the Iraq Communication Group. It was these organs that played a key part in controlling the campaign that misled the public about Iraq's WMDs and which oversaw the production of the dossiers.

[...]

Although the intelligence presented to ministers was vague and uncertain, the Joint Intelligence Committee still miraculously came to the conclusion that Iraq was likely to possess some forms of WMDs - and it is this which has been interpreted as an intelligence "failure". Yet, the critical issue here is that, as the Butler report makes clear, Iraqi use of WMDs was seen as a threat only in response to an invasion. The intelligence was telling minister that Iraq was otherwise little or no threat.

The case for going to war was fabricated

Amazingly, various parliamentary committees and the Hutton Inquiry cleared the govt of 'sexing up' intelligence. In the real world, all the evidence suggests that the case for going to war was not just 'sexed up' but consciously fabricated; it needed to be, given the understanding of the level of threat posed by Iraq. Blair's cabal was so bent on promoting its perceived interests through invasion, that the result was a public deception strategy that sought to justify it. This shows how far removed from the national interest is that of the narrow policy-making elite.

Clare Short told a parliamentary inquiry that 'the suggestion that there was a risk of chemical and biological weapons being weaponised and threatening us in the short-term was spin. That didn't come from the security services."

[...]

In the material intended for public consumption, the government transformed possibilities about Iraqi capabilities into certainties and removed vital caveats. [...] Brian Jones, a former senior Defence Intelligence Staff official, stated that "the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier" which resulted "in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities... but the impression I had was the shutters were coming down on this particular paper [the September 2002 Blair-Campbell dossier], that the discussion had been concluded." An MoD civil servant similarly said that "the perception was that the dossier had been around the hosues several times in order to try to find a form of words which would strengthen certain political objectives."

The case against Iraq was indeed 'sexed up' by both No. 10 staff and some senior 'intelligence' officials. According to The Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor, John Scarlett [then chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee] was "hopelessly seduced by Blair's coterie. Under Scarlett's control, drafters of the dossier put things in at Downing Street's suggestion. They also took things out." [...]

Alistair Campbell suggested more than a dozen separate changes to the draft dossier on Iraq; Scarlett responded by saying that the language had been "tightened". Crucially, Campbell suggested that the word "may" was weak and be substituted for the word "are" so that when the dossier was published the assertion was that Iraq possessed weapons that "are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them."

And so history repeats. William Hague and David Cameron are two more names to add to the list of Great British war criminals.

Comment: Interesting choice of name the British government decided to call this political operation.

Operation Condor

was a campaign of political repression and terror involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate communist or Soviet influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the participating governments.