British Officials Reportedly Used The Plot Of Michael Bay’s ‘The Rock’ To Justify The War In Iraq

The British Iraq Inquiry, better known across the internet as the Chilcot Inquiry, came out on July 6 and has been damning in its indictment of Tony Blair’s UK government leading up to the start of the Iraq war in 2003. Many accusations levied back then have been proven true in the report: that Saddam Hussein “posed no imminent threat” and that Blair had promised to support the U.S. led invasion back in 2002.

The report also goes over the intelligence used by the British government to justify an invasion of Iraq, and one piece stood out as particularly ridiculous. We’re talking Michael Bay levels of silliness. Almost as if someone took the plot from 1996 film The Rock starring Nicolas Cage and presented it as a real thing! Via The Hollywood Reporter:

In an MI6 report from September 2002, a “new source” with “phenomenal access” to Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons capabilities claimed that nerve agents VX, sarin and soman had been produced at a facility in Al-Yarmuk, and stored in containers including “linked hollow glass spheres.”

Eyebrows were soon raised inside MI6 after the report was circulated, with “one recipient” pointing out the similarities to [The Rock] film.

The report, claimed the Chilcott Inquiry, played a significant role in the arguments put forth by the British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, in his justification for war, helping him make “key judgments about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons capabilities.”

By 2003, however, MI6’s doubts had been confirmed and the “source had been revealed to have been lying,” according to the Inquiry, and after a meeting in June was concluded to be “a fabricator who had lied from the outset.”

It would make you laugh if it didn’t make you cry. The Iraq war set off a terrible chain of events that resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of Iraqi civilians, plunged the region into sectarian warfare and destabilized the entire Middle East, giving rise to ISIS and countless other terrorist organizations. All on evidence so flimsy the plot from The Rock ended up being passed around as a legitimate justification for an invasion.

(via The Hollywood Reporter)

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