Voices in the Wilderness UK Press release
Saturday February 8th 2003
0794 7839992

Dodgy dossier 2- Government's weapons dossier shaky too.

Following Thursday's revelations about Downing Street's dodgy dossier,
described as "a fine paper" by Colin Powell at the UN on Wednesday, derided
as a plagiarised con by Friday afternoon, actvist Milan Rai from Voices in
the
Wilderness UK (1) and author of War Plan Iraq has revealed another much
smaller plagiarism but more
significantly a
major misrepresentation of a lie which has been repeated over and over again
by the Prime Minister and Foreign Office Ministers.

The victim of this piece of plagiarism is Tim Trevan, former UNSCOM
inspector and author of Saddam's secrets- The hunt for Iraq's hidden
weapons.
In this case the so called "intelligence" officers lifted most of a
paragraph from P364 of the book, detailing early refusals by the Iraqi
Government to allow inspections at Presidential Palaces, and pasted it into
P34 of "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The assessment of the British
Government." (2) More importantly they omitted an entry in the books
chronology P414 stating "4 April 1998 Access to the presidential sites is
obtained." thus giving the impression that inspections of the palaces never
occured.
The weapons inspectors were subsequently withdrawn from Iraq in December
1998 prior to the Operation Desert Fox, a point made forcefully to the Prime
Minister by Jeremy Paxman in his interview with the PM Thursday 6 February.
Blair claimed firstly that weapons inspectors were thrown out of Iraq, then
when he was proven wrong he said they were'effectively thrown out' because
they were denied access to Presidential Palaces, a frequent claim of the UK
and US Governments. (3)

Richard Byrne, of Voices in the Wilderness said, "Given that the September
dossier is misleading on the crucial question of Presidential Palaces one
has to question whether the Prime Minister was misled too or was he lying.
The Prime Minister has repeated the Presidential Palace claims for years. Is
the Prime Minsiter incompetent, or worse, is he lying to the British public?
If he is incompetent, he should no longer be Prime Minister. If he is lying,
if he is lying about a matter so important that he cites it as a reason to
take Britain to war, then we should question whether our country should be
led by this man."

(1) Voices in the Wilderness UK is a campaign group campaigning for an end
to economic sanctions on Iraq, now working to prevent an escalation in the
ongoing war on Iraq.
(2)  http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6117.asp
(3) For full transcript see
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/2732979.stm
TONY BLAIR: "They were effectively thrown out for the reason that I will
give you. Prior to them leaving Iraq they had come back to the Security
Council, again and again, and said we are not being given access to sites.
For example, things were being designated as presidential palaces, they
weren't being allowed to go in there. As a result of that, they came back to
the United Nations and said we can't carry out the work as inspectors;
therefore we said you must leave because we will have to try and enforce
this action a different way. So when you say the inspectors, when you imply
the inspectors were in there doing their work, that is simply not the case."


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