WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz

Post-9/11 Era Forum

http://news.independent.co.uk/world...sp?story=410730

WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz
By David Usborne
30 May 2003


The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it was politically convenient, a top-level official at the Pentagon has acknowledged.

The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair.

Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was "almost unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United States being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the threat of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington has said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom. "Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to the door" towards making progress elsewhere in achieving Middle East peace, Mr Wolfowitz said. The presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been one of the main grievances of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups.

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr Wolfowitz tells the magazine.

The comments suggest that, even for the US administration, the logic that was presented for going to war may have been an empty shell. They come to light, moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz's immediate boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, conceded for the first time that the arms might never be found.

The failure to find a single example of the weapons that London and Washington said were inside Iraq only makes the embarrassment more acute. Voices are increasingly being raised in the US _ and Britain _ demanding an explanation for why nothing has been found.

Most striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Mr Wolfowitz, recognised widely as the leader of the hawks' camp in Washington most responsible for urging President George Bush to use military might in Iraq. The magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz was even pushing Mr Bush to attack Iraq immediately after the 11 September attacks in the US, instead of invading Afghanistan.

There have long been suspicions that Mr Wolfowitz has essentially been running a shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring that the right-wing views of himself and his followers find their way into the practice of American foreign policy. He is best known as the author of the policy of first-strike pre-emption in world affairs that was adopted by Mr Bush shortly after the al-Qa'ida attacks.

In asserting that weapons of mass destruction gave a rationale for attacking Iraq that was acceptable to everyone, Mr Wolfowitz was presumably referring in particular to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He was the last senior member of the administration to agree to the push earlier this year to persuade the rest of the world that removing Saddam by force was the only remaining viable option.

The conversion of Mr Powell was on full view in the UN Security Council in February when he made a forceful presentation of evidence that allegedly proved that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.

Critics of the administration and of the war will now want to know how convinced the Americans really were that the weapons existed in Iraq to the extent that was publicly stated. Questions are also multiplying as to the quality of the intelligence provided to the White House. Was it simply faulty _ given that nothing has been found in Iraq _ or was it influenced by the White House's fixation on the weapons issue? Or were the intelligence agencies telling the White House what it wanted to hear?

This week, Sam Nunn, a former senator, urged Congress to investigate whether the argument for war in Iraq was based on distorted intelligence. He raised the possibility that Mr Bush's policy against Saddam had influenced the intelligence that indicated Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.

This week, the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies have promised to conduct internal reviews of the quality of the material they supplied the administration on what was going on in Iraq. The heat on the White House was only made fiercer by Mr Rumsfeld's admission that nothing may now be found in Iraq to back up those earlier claims, if only because the Iraqis may have got rid of any evidence before the conflict.

"It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict," the Defence Secretary said.

* The US military said last night that it had released a suspected Iraqi war criminal by mistake. US Central Command said it was offering a $25,000 (315,000) reward for the capture of Mohammed Jawad An-Neifus, suspected of being involved in the murder of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims whose remains were found at a mass grave in Mahawil, southern Iraq, last month.

The alleged mobile weapons laboratories

As scepticism grows over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, London and Washington are attempting to turn the focus of attention to Iraq's alleged possession of mobile weapons labs.

A joint CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency report released this week claimed that two trucks found in northern Iraq last month were mobile labs used to develop biological weapons. The trucks were fitted with hi-tech laboratory equipment and the report said the discovery represented the "strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biowarfare programme".

The design of the vehicles made them "an ingeniously simple self-contained bioprocessing system". The report said no other purpose, for example water purification, medical laboratory or vaccine production, would justify such effort and expense.

But critics arenot convinced. No biological agents were found on the trucks and experts point out that, unlike the trucks described by Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, in a speech to the UN Security Council, they were open sided and would therefore have left a trace easy for weapons inspectors to detect. One former UN inspector said that the trucks would have been a very inefficient way to produce anthrax.

Katherine Butler

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Stor...,968220,00.html
Blair: I have secret proof of weapons

Gaby Hinsliff, Nick Paton Walsh in St Petersburg and Peter Beaumont in London
Sunday June 1, 2003
The Observer

Prime Minister Tony Blair last night insisted he had secret proof that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq in his strongest signal yet that coalition forces believe they may have begun to uncover leads to Iraq's alleged deadly arms cache.
Stung by claims that the Government exaggerated the threat from Saddam, Blair said he was waiting to publish a 'complete picture' of both intelligence gained before the war and 'what we've actually found'.

Asked if he knew things he could not yet reveal, he said: 'I certainly do know some of the stuff that has been already accumulated as a result of interviews and others... which is not yet public, but what we are going to do is assemble that evidence and present it properly.'

His words, in an interview with Sky TV, came as Downing Street moved to halt damaging leaks over its handling of the evidence by heaping praise on the intelligence services. 'The Prime Minister hugely values the work of the intelligence agencies,' his spokesman said in St Petersburg, where heads of state were celebrating the Russian city's tercententary, yesterday.

The pointed comment followed a week of furious rows over whether the intelligence dossier on Iraq published by the Government last September was 'sexed up' to convince a sceptical public that they were in danger from Saddam.

It will fuel speculation that private assurances have been given to the intelligence community that they will not be left to carry the can over the failure to find WMD after a week of briefing against senior Blair officials by intelligence officials over the alleged ramping up of intelligence.

Labour backbenchers, increasingly convinced they were misled, are unlikely to be impressed by Blair's argument that they must trust in proof they cannot see. According to intelligence sources the new leads have been provided by Iraqi scientists and a member of the State Security Organisation who are currently being debriefed by MI6 and the CIA. This follows a week in which Government and intelligence sources appear to have changed their story on the likelihood of finding WMD on an almost daily basis.

One source claimed mid-week that British intelligence suggested Saddam had destroyed his WMD even before UN inspectors visited Iraq, a version of events that had changed by yesterday morning to the claim that chemical weapons may actually have been deployed in the field and then destroyed as American troops advanced.

Yesterday the US announced that another 1,400 experts will join the hunt for banned weapons - a signal that Washington has accepted the political significance of the issue.

In Britain it is thought that Ministers want eventually to publish a checklist of claims made before the war alongside subsequent discoveries which they believe vindicate the warnings. So far the only publicly announced discovery has been that of two trailers thought to have been part of a mobile laboratory system.

Blair said in his interview that claims that the existence of WMD was 'a great big fib got out by the security services' would be proved wrong. He said he had 'absolutely no knowledge' of an alleged meeting between the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell, in a New York hotel to discuss concerns over whether the evidence on WMD would be strong enough. Leaked transcripts suggested Straw had warned the issue could 'explode in our faces'.

The Foreign Office insisted the two men had not met on the date given in February.

Downing Street has been hampered in its argument by repeated suggestions from the Bush administration that WMD may never be found. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy to the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, suggested last week that WMD were a bureaucratic pretext to start a war.

Blair told Sky that WMD were the basis in law for taking military action - but 'that's not the same as saying it's a bureaucratic pretext'.

The Prime Minister was due to leave Russia early this morning for the G8 summit in Evian, France, which is expected to agree new measures to stop WMD falling into the hands of terrorists.

it smells bad ......

only one seems to know where they are and a big stock of them .....

here is one for you Mr Blair: http://www.tchacheurs.com/forum/common/images/smiles/icon_520.gif

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Stor...,968175,00.html
What the experts say now

Sunday June 1, 2003
The Observer

Denis Healey, Labour ex-Foreign Secretary
I don't think there are any weapons - and the case for war was quite unnecessary. Blair shouldn't have said there were. He followed the Bush line. The really criminal thing was that they wouldn't let Blix go back. Here is a man of outstanding ability and honesty. I think this will be very damaging in Britain. Unfortunately, less so in America where the public doesn't care as much.
Dr. Glen Rangwala, Politics lecturer at Cambridge University
If Saddam Hussein had a chemical and biological capability, as we were assured that he did have prior to the invasion, and Saddam is obviously still at large, it is difficult to imagine what could be a more urgent priority than finding and eliminating those weapons. Either the evidence was deeply flawed, or the present policies are highly reckless.

Lee Feinstein, Director for strategic policy at the US Council for Foreign Relations
The search for WMDs is a very sensitive issue and one that the Bush administration is very concerned about. There is grave concern over the potential politicisation of intelligence. Throughout the Clinton administration Republicans in Congress continually criticised the President over the fact that intelligence was used for political purposes. Potentially the issue of WMDs could be much worse.

Peter Singer, Co-ordinator of the Brookings Institution's project on US policy towards the Islamic world
The inability to find weapons of mass destruction is highly disturbing. If you accept that they did exist, then you have to ask where are they now and who has them. Part of the original argument in favour of war was that we needed to act quickly in order to prevent these weapons getting into the hands of terrorist groups. There is now a very real possibility that, through our failure to secure the country quickly, we have made this fear a reality.

Marc Ginsberg, Former American ambassador to Morocco and expert on the Middle East
The failure to find WMDs will clearly change global opinion about the war. Although the Democrats have already criticised President Bush on the issue, my own perception is that American public opinion toward the war won't be overly swayed by failure to find biological or chemical weapons.

Trevor Findlay, Executive director, The Verification Research, Training and Information Centre, London
The admission by Donald Rumsfeld that the alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction may never be found is astounding. The only legal case under the UN Charter for going to war against Iraq was to enforce Security Council resolutions demanding that Baghdad disarm itself of such weapons. If the weapons never existed to the extent or manner portrayed by the US and UK, then the war was illegal on even more grounds than before.
Interviews: Thomas Reilly and Burhan Wazir

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Stor...,968198,00.html
When spies meet spin...

Claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction are at the heart of a ferocious political debate. Were we misled?

Peter Beaumont in London and Gaby Hinsliff in St Petersburg
Sunday June 1, 2003
The Observer

In the stifling heat of the Chinook helicopter, Tony Blair was uncharacteristically quiet during Thursday's 20-minute trip from the outskirts of Basra to the port of Umm Qasr: but then, he had much to think about.
Less than an hour before, the Prime Minister had told an audience of British soldiers that they had achieved a 'momentous and mighty' act of which all Britain could be proud.

But as the jeans-clad Prime Minister began shaking soldiers' hands, journalists were besieging his director of communications, Alastair Campbell. They wanted the answer to a single question that had come to obsess the media, military, politicians and intelligence community on both sides of the Atlantic: where were the weapons of mass destruction over which those soldiers risked their lives? And was it true that intelligence reports had been made up?

The media were not alone. Squinting into the sun, one long-serving officer who had listened to the speech in respectful silence summed it up: 'I believed him in January when he said they had WMD and we'd find it. It seemed we knew exactly where it was and we'd find it in two weeks. Now, it's been two months...' The officer tailed off.

Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, is a stocky figure, a little under average height, and a career spy to his bones. When he sat down at the table of the Cabinet Office's Joint Intelligence Committee early last autumn to discuss the Government's dossier on Iraq's WMDs, the sometimes heated conversations would lay the foundations of a feud between the intelligence community and senior officials at Number 10 that would continue through the Iraq war and finally explode last week.

Also around the table of the ad hoc committee were the head of MI5; Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary; John Scarlett, chairman of the committee and himself a former head of MI6; Blair; and Campbell.

It was a difficult moment for Dearlove. For the first time in MI6's history, it had been asked to supply its product not just for the eyes of the Prime Minister and senior Ministers and the military, but also for a dossier that would be made public.

It was a move that Dearlove knew was deeply unpopular with some of his most senior officers, who feared that the publication of such information would not only endanger sources but might also lead to a profound misunderstanding of the analysis they generated.

As the members of the committee sat down to go through the dossier line by line to argue for inclusion in the published version, they would make a decision that would have profound reverberations for the Government and its case for going to war against Iraq: the allegation that Iraq not only retained WMDs, but also that Saddam's regime was capable of launching them at 45 minutes' notice - an allegation that would be repeated by the Prime Minister more than once and would provide the underpinning for a war.

And what bothered some of those present, as intelligence sources admit, was the fact that the information, gleaned from an Iraqi scientist, was from a single source - it was therefore 'uncorroborated' intelligence.

But it wasn't the only issue to come up. As the argument came to an end another controversy emerged. Campbell insisted that the information in the dossier was still too diffuse and argued for the inclusion of a passage that the rest of the JIC felt stretched the evidence too far. When the dossier was finally signed off - with the agreement of all present -- that passage had been excised.

Nervous as they were, the senior MI6 men felt comfortable that, despite the very public airing of their material, it reflected their analysis.

The spooks thought they had a deal and that the Government would brief in line with the carefully constructed jigsaw puzzle of the dossier - a shadowy world of best guesses, cautious conclusions and circumstantial evidence.

They had not, however, counted on Number 10's formidable spin machine. Campbell's offence, in the eyes of the spooks, would be to allow the Government to brief the cautious conclusions as hardened fact.

'Basically, it was over-sold,' said a well-placed source last week. 'He [Campbell] did not understand the basic nature of intelligence material. It is almost never a set of facts; it's a set of indicators from which you can make judgments.'

For example, the '45 minutes' allegation was based on one defecting scientist, say sources , not corroborated elsewhere: not necessarily untrue, but not a concrete fact either. But it was sold as 'true'.

It was a point that Dearlove himself would insist on, even in the immediate run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when he would let it be discreetly known that intelligence, in his view, far from being hard facts and rocket science, was instead a far more nuanced affair; that the intelligence on Iraq's WMD in particular was more equivocal than had been sold to MPs and the electorate.

It was not the way that it would appear in the British media, briefed by Number 10 - and it was the beginning of a falling out between MI6 and Campbell that crashed into the open last week.

For if Campbell had oversold the '45-minute allegation' and the Government's second dossier, he would embarrass the Secret Intelligence Services and Dearlove - a man with whom he was on on 'Sunday lunch terms' - by his 'appalling behaviour' in stuffing extracts from a plagiarised student thesis between two wedges of MI6 material to beef it up and claiming it as intelligence.

All of which might well have been quietly forgotten if the allied forces had turned up the WMD promised in the first September dossier, spun to the media by Number 10. But those weapons - the British casus belli - have not turned up. And on both sides of the Atlantic, it has turned the spotlight both on the intelligence produced by MI6 and the CIA and on how their political masters span that intelligence to both their own legislatures and their publics to accelerate the trajectory to war.

They were questions that would would overshadow Blair's visit to thank British troops for their actions in Iraq. It was designed as a triumphal visit, but instead it served merely to underline the growing suggestion that the very basis of the war itself had been flammed up.

It is a suspicion that has grown daily while the Prime Minister has been away, fed both by stories in the British media and by a series of statements by senior US officials that have cut the rug from under the British case for invasion.

First, the hawkish US Secretary for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, said last week that he believed weapons would 'never be found'. This directly contradicting Blair's position - a stance he was forced to reverse by the week's end.

Then Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was quoted in an interview in Vanity Fair as saying that the whole issue of pushing the argument over WMD was simply a 'bureaucratic' device that would allow an invasion of Iraq and the removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia.

As if to pour petrol on the fire, Under-Secretary of State John Bolton has also been quoted as saying that the war was not about real weapons of mass destruction, but breaking up the 'intellectual property' - the scientists with the knowledge to produce them.

'The Americans can afford to be much more flippant,' said one British intelligence source last week. 'But Iraq's retention of weapons of mass destruction is why we went to war.'

None of which has been very helpful for a British Government that won shaky approval for war on the grounds that the weapons really did exist.

It was against this background of a split between Washington and London over WMD that Blair set off on his whirlwind tour of six countries in five days, supposedly to highlight Britain's brave new role in the world.

And it was against this background of 'unhelpful comments' from Blair's allies in the US that Tom Kelly, the Prime Minister's press secretary warned him of another bombshell that threatened to undermine Blair's case for war - the news that Radio Four's Today programme was reporting a much more damaging split - between the Government and its intelligence services, a division striking to the heart of the fabric of the state.

Defence reporter Andrew Gilligan was claiming that key elements of the dossier on Iraq published last September - specifically the suggestion that Saddam had chemical weapons ready to use within 45 minutes - were thrown in to 'sex up' painfully thin material - against the wishes of intelligence officers.

Gilligan was right in the broad brush, if not in the detail. The material had been 'sexed up' - as the spooks alleged - but by more subtle and more pernicious means. The consequence, however, would be the same.

In a hurried conference call with London from the airport lounge in Kuwait City, the decision was taken to wait and hope the story faded. The plane took off only a little behind schedule: within hours, the combative Defence Minister Adam Ingram and Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell were deployed in London to insist that Downing Street had not applied undue pressure.

If Blair had hoped that would put an end to it, he was mistaken. By the time his Chinook landed in Umm Qasr, the travelling press had largely lost interest in his tour of a minesweeper in favour of asking questions about weapons of mass destruction.

When his third flight of a gruelling day touched down into a brilliant orange Warsaw sunset, the message of his tour - national pride, the skill of British troops, a new model of patriotism that embraced both being a good European and resisting a federal superstate - was unravelling.

And so, when the Prime Minister's party reached his suite on the sixth floor of the Hotel Sheraton in Warsaw, the secure phone lines to London were swiftly activated. The man in demand was Sir David Omand, known publicly as Britain's head of homeland security, charged with co-ordinating the security services with the political machine. It was clear by now that nothing would be resolved until the intelligence services denied they were unhappy with the dossier.

The deal hammered out late into the night was for Blair to come out fighting - and drag the complaining security services with him.

It may already be too late to repair the damage both to the reputation of MI6 and to relationships between key figures in the present Government and the intelligence community.

For even as Gilligan was being briefed, other media organisations were having conversations with intelligence sources about the failings of the government's use of intelligence material to justify the war - and in particular about the involvement of Alastair Campbell in overselling the story.

And if a shadow war has been declared between officers in the Secret Intelligence Service and Campbell and Number 10, then the front line has been the capital's coffee bars, the more chi-chi restaurants of the West End.

It has been a curious sort of punch-up. For while few who will talk can hide their contempt for the way they believe Campbell has behaved, which they argue has undermined a still strong case for going to war against Iraq, there are none who seriously believe that Campbell's scalp is up for grabs.

'What we are seeing,' said one source, 'is something very new, and very strange. MI6 is sticking its head over the parapet as much as it ever will and saying that it is unhappy with the way its intelligence has been used and its reputation damaged.

'MI6 feels totally discredited and used. That is behind the reason to brief [against Campbell].

'It has been bubbling under for a long time, since October at least. So they feel they are taking out the opposition, as that is what they are trained to do.'

Another source added: 'The focus is on Campbell at the moment. MI6 feels as though it has been pushed rather unwillingly into the limelight by the Government. It is a shot across the bows saying: "If you want us to be public property, then, when we feel you have misused our material, we'll brief against you."'

By yesterday, the spooks' point seemed to have prevailed on the Prime Minister, as he insisted to journalists travelling with him that whatever the outcome on finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the intelligence services certainly 'would not be blamed'.



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http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq...,968826,00.html
Government defiant over Iraqi WMD

· Blair: dossier not doctored
· Straw: threat was 'sufficient'
· Cook: Blair made 'monumental blunder'

Matthew Tempest, political correspondent
Monday June 2, 2003


The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, today retrospectively toned down the government's judgment on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction programme from "imminent" to "sufficent", following an avalanche of leaks and allegations over the weekend.
Under intense questioning from the BBC, Mr Straw refused to use the word "imminent" and opened up a new line of defence for the US-led coalition's invasion, saying that UN security council resolution 1441 showed the international community agreed Iraq was a genuine threat.

In Evian, the prime minister's press conference was dominated by the issue of WMD, with Mr Blair telling reporters: "I stand absolutely 100% behind the evidence we presented to people."

However, when it came to specific denials, Mr Blair's comments were more qualified. At one point he said: "The idea that we 'doctored' intelligence reports to invent a notion of a 45-minute capability is completely and totally false."

But critics of the government will argue that the allegation is not that the reports were invented, merely that information that was not fully substantiated was strongly emphasised at Downing Street's request.

Similarly, Mr Blair seemed to deny point blank Clare Short's weekend allegation that he had made a war pact at his September Camp David summit with the US president, George Bush. However, he actually said it was "completely and totally untrue" that they had decided to attack "at a particular time".

Mr Blair ended by pleading for people "to have a little patience".

"There is a process in place," he said.

The Conservatives, scenting political turmoil, have already hinted they may drop their bipartisan support for the war and back calls for an inquiry.

The foreign secretary also made a deliberately opaque denial of claims that he had expressed doubts about the the veracity or strength of some reports of Iraqi WMD with the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, in a recorded transcript.

Mr Straw dismissed the claim, first made in the Guardian, but only to the extent of repeating that he had not been in New York, let alone the Waldorf hotel, at the time of the supposed conversation. However, he did not deny some such discussion took place, saying merely that he would be very surprised if such a transcript emerged.

Mr Straw also brushed aside calls for an independent inquiry into Britain's justification for war and denied claims by Clare Short, who resigned last month as international development secretary, that the government had "duped" MPs and the public.

Britain entered into the US-led conflict because Saddam posed a "sufficient threat" to international peace and security, the foreign secretary insisted.

Failing to take action would have allowed the Iraqi leader to use weapons of mass destruction against his own people and neighbouring countries, Mr Straw added.

He said it was "likely" that two trailers found in Iraq had been used as mobile biological weapons laboratories.

"The evidence is overwhelming and I have got it in front of me and it's on the website," Mr Straw told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"If Saddam had nothing to hide, why had he failed over a 12-year period to provide answers to these questions?

"Why did he throw out the weapons inspectors at the end of 1998 and refuse to allow them back?

"All the evidence, categorical evidence in this Unmovic document, and the circumstantial evidence of Saddam's own behaviour, pointed to one end, that he did indeed, in the words of security council, pose a threat to international peace and security."

Asked whether it had been an imminent threat, the foreign secretary said: "A sufficient threat for us to need to take military action. And that was why we took that action.

"What we did say was 'This is a sufficient threat that if we continue to sit on our hands, the threat will get worse, and there'll come a moment where for sure Saddam will use these weapons against his own people and against his neighbours, and not only be a threat to international peace and security, but directly and very sinisterly affect international peace and security"

Former foreign secretary Robin Cook has challenged the government again today to hold an independent inquiry into decisions made in the run-up to war.

He accused the government of exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam and his WMD, of which he argued there has been no evidence so far.

Mr Cook, speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, said: "I have difficulty with the idea that we [the British government] were right all along but, cunningly, the Iraqis destroyed everything before the war.

"The idea that you would choose to destroy your weapons immediately before the war seems to me implausible. If he didn't have them at the end of the war, then he probably didn't have them for some time beforehand, during the very time we were told he was such a menace and that we had to go to war now and we couldn't wait a few months and let Hans Blix finish his task.

Mr Cook said he wanted an independent inquiry looking at the "legality of war". He added: "I think we need to make sure there is an independent inquiry.

"The government has got it wrong. Governments do make mistakes. What they should never do, though, is try and deny it or cover it up. We now need the government to admit that the threat of Saddam was over-exaggerated."

The Conservatives indicated last night that they may drop their bipartisan approach to Iraq and add their voice to calls for an inquiry from Mr Cook.

The shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, sought to keep up the pressure on Mr Blair over weapons of mass destruction - though he held back from demanding an inquiry.

In a statement, Mr Ancram said: "There are questions to be answered. The prime minister says that he has the answers in information not yet made public. He should now come forward with those answers. Firstly, to dampen down suspicions and, secondly, to show the people why he did what he did.

"If he fails to do so, then he might not be able to avoid an inquiry, but to call for one at this stage is premature."

Mr Cook accused Tony Blair of a "monumental blunder" while Labour backbenchers demanded a Commons statement from the prime minister after his return from the Evian G8 summit tomorrow.

Pressure for an inquiry was increased yesterday when Ms Short - who had access to intelligence briefings in the run-up to the conflict as a member of the war cabinet - accused Mr Blair of "duping" voters, MPs and ministers about the level of threat posed by Saddam.

Mr Straw said he could "no evidence yet" for an independent inquiry. The extent of the threat posed by Saddam was a question of "judgment", he added.

"Our case was a very clear and explicit one," Mr Straw said.

Ms Short, Mr Cook and others were "trying to change the basis on which those judgments were made," he said.

"We never said that we are proposing to take military action on a contingency of what we might find in the future.

"I hope very much we do find further evidence, but it will be further evidence.

"Everybody, including, let me say, Robin Cook when he was foreign secretary, accepted that the threat from Saddam Hussein was real and that unless we did something about it, yes indeed he would continue to pose what the security council said last November was a threat to international peace and security."

Downing Street last night denied a report that officials had admitted illicit weapons would never be found in Iraq, saying in a statement: "As the prime minister has said, we have no doubt whatever that the evidence of WMD will be there ."

Pathetic...Those guys make me sick.

By Richard Benedetto, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Most Americans still say things are going reasonably well for the United States in Iraq, despite reports of continued civil disorder there, escalating attacks on American troops and failure to find weapons of mass destruction, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows.

Overall:

• 56% say the Bush administration has a clear plan for improving conditions in Iraq; 41% say it does not.

• 56% say the war in Iraq would be justified even if weapons of mass destruction were not found; 41% say it would not.

• 31% say Bush deliberately misled the American public about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; 67% say he did not.

Those who side with the critics tend to be mostly Democrats and people who opposed the war before it began.

People who do not approve of Bush's overall leadership are also among them.

Karlyn Bowman, a polling analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, says getting public opinion to turn around on the war in Iraq will not be easy because Saddam Hussein had been a nagging problem for more than a decade and there is relief that he is gone.

"The American public has long been realistic in its expectations about the difficulties of the task, so they are going to be somewhat patient with the administration and not be in a mood to second-guess," she says.


___
'The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying 'Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.' She's got a baseball bat and she's yelling, "You want a piece of me?"'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Stor...,971576,00.html
Blix attacks Blair warnings over Iraqi weapons

Nicholas Watt, John Hooper and Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday June 6, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair suffered a damaging blow yesterday when the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, launched a point-by-point attack on Anglo-American warnings about Iraq's banned weapons.
As George Bush promised to "reveal the truth" about the weapons, Mr Blix criticised Britain for "jumping to conclusions" that Iraq posed a serious threat to world security.

In a valedictory appearance before the UN security council before his retirement this month, Mr Blix said: "It is not justified to jump to the conclusion that something exists just because it is unaccounted for."

His intervention came amid new claims that Downing Street placed strong pressure on the security services to "sex up" a controversial dossier on Iraq's banned weapons. The BBC reported last night that the dossier, which claimed that a chemical or biological weapon could have been launched within 45 minutes of an order, was returned by Downing Street to intelligence chiefs on at least six occasions.

A Downing Street spokesman again insisted no pressure was put on the intelligence services.

Downing Street will find it less easy to dismiss Mr Blix's attack. Angered by the way in which British ministers have used his reports to claim that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons, Mr Blix said: "The lack of finds could be be cause the items were unilaterally destroyed by the Iraqi authorities or else because they were effectively concealed by them."

As a UN official, Mr Blix did not name Britain and the US. But there was no doubt who he had in mind when he said there was no evidence that Saddam had continued with his banned weapons programme after the 1991 Gulf war. This contradicted Mr Blair's warning last year that Iraq's banned weapons programme was "active, detailed and growing".

A former UN inspector, Bernd Birkicht, 39, said he believed the CIA had made up intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to provide a legal basis for the war. He told the Guardian how supposedly top-secret, high-quality intelligence had led the inspectors on an absurd wild goose chase.

"We received information about a site, giving the exact geographical coordinates, and when we got there we found nothing. Nothing on the ground. Nothing under the ground. Just desert."

He said the so-called decontamination trucks which figured in satellite photographs presented to the security council were fire engines.

President Bush, in Qatar, yesterday, said: "We'll reveal the truth. But one thing is certain: no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because it is no more."

[QUOTE]Originally posted by nowar
[B]http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Stor...,971576,00.html
Blix attacks Blair warnings over Iraqi weapons

Nicholas Watt, John Hooper and Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday June 6, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair suffered a damaging blow yesterday when the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, launched a point-by-point attack on Anglo-American warnings about Iraq's banned weapons....
[blah, blah, blah....][/SIZE][/COLOR]


Why does this not surprise me of hans Blix.... and of the Guardian?


______
June 6, 2003 is the 59-year anniversary of D-Day. To all the combat soldiers, officers, airmen and navy men of Britain, Canada and the United States who participated in the invasion of Normandy, France in 1944, and to all those men and women of the then-French underground, including the French, Brits and Scandinavians—to all these heroes, most of them mere children then, who made the supreme sacrifice—we all, those now living and those yet to be born, owe our profound gratitude.

Originally posted by Americaaah
Blix attacks Blair warnings over Iraqi weapons

Nicholas Watt, John Hooper and Richard Norton-Taylor
Friday June 6, 2003
The Guardian

Tony Blair suffered a damaging blow yesterday when the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, launched a point-by-point attack on Anglo-American warnings about Iraq's banned weapons....
[blah, blah, blah....][/SIZE][/COLOR]


Why does this not surprise me of hans Blix.... and of the Guardian?


OK... listen instead of arguing with you how about a question?

Is it not, at the very least, possible that Mr. Blix has no vested interest in making the USA look bad? Is it not possible he has told the truth?

Do you have any reason, other than your Gov. or media, to think he was lying or even worse incompetent?

Does not the fact that USA military has been just as unable to produce hidden stockpiles of WMD prove that Mr. Blix was honest?

At the very least, explain to me how patriotism belongs in such a discussion. I would freely criticize my Gov when it does wrong... and I have. Why is this so hard for Americans?