CIA admit war caused by spellcheck error

The CIA made a startling and unprecedented apology yesterday for accidentally providing the White House with false intelligence information regarding the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. The spy agency attributed the error to a simple spelling mistake and is now claiming that the WMD are actually in Iran, not Iraq.

Bob Scroggins, a junior filing clerk in the Q-directorate, has been blamed for using the spellcheck to change all mentions of Iran to Iraq in the first CIA report to be seen by President Bush and his advisers in January 2000 as he had never heard of a place called Iran. The Republican Neo-conservatives seized their chance when they spotted the error and took up the cause from there.

Once the mistake had been made, it was then duplicated throughout the Administration and war became inevitable. Mr Scroggins was fired soon after (from a helicopter over the Atlantic), but the agency said that it was too embarrassed to admit its error at the time.

Mullahs in Tehran reacted with fury by issuing 39 more fatwas and 11 separate calls for jihad against the 'corrupt donkeys of Western imperialist aggression in the lands of the Prophet'. They also handed out decks of playing cards bearing the faces of all the leading figures in the Bush Administration, but it was unclear exactly why.

April 2003