Last week Blair claimed that the West did not know Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons capability until the regime began using them in 2012. "What we now know from Syria is that Assad, without any detection from the west, was manufacturing chemical weapons. We only discovered this when he used them." Blair declared.
John Morrison, former head of the defence intelligence staff and the deputy chief of defence intelligence between 1994 and 1999, says in a letter to the Observer that, for more than a decade before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Blair must have been aware that Syria had a chemical attack capability because intelligence officials had told him so. Morrison, also an ex-member of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), added that Syria's chemical stockpile was a recurring theme in reports by the JIC, which advises the prime minister and the cabinet of security matters. "The issue was not whether he [Assad] had them but when and how he might use them," he writes.
Morrison writes: "One wonders whether Blair read the assessments we provided him, is trying to rewrite history to his benefit, or is suffering from some prime ministerial false memory syndrome. Whatever, he should not be allowed to get away with untruths."
A March 1995 US intelligence assessment entitled The Weapons Proliferation Threat concluded that: "Syria has had a chemical warfare programme since the mid-1980s." This was updated in a 1997 US Department of Defence report entitled Proliferation: Threat and Response, stating that the Syrian chemical weapons programme began in the 1970s.
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