New Labour's war lies
frank talking | 30.04.2003 11:11
New Labour's war lies.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,944569,00.html
Tony Blair's diplomacy of intolerance
Claims that the outcome in Iraq vindicates the British approach risk further damaging Britain's position in Europe.
Kirsty Hughes
Sunday April 27, 2003
Blair's intolerance of countries holding different views to his sank to new depths after the failure to get a second UN resolution. He and Jack Straw, led extraordinary insults and attacks on France to try to cover up this failure, ignoring the fact that they had no majority at the UN Security Council, and France was in line with international political and public opinion. At the same time the new myth was born, which Blair still repeats post-war, that the second resolution was a final ultimatum which could have prevented the war and not about providing a legal basis for it. As one Brussels official puts it with considerable understatement, these insults to France from top British politicians 'were not appreciated'. Blair and Straw's behaviour is not forgotten by many, and not only France, in the EU today. Nor does the imminent enlargement of the EU 25 member states rescue the UK. It is true that eight of the central and East European countries who will join the EU next year signed declarations of support for the US over Iraq, allowing the UK to claim a majority of 14 out of 25 future member states. But many of these countries felt highly pressured into their statements of support, given their twin applications for NATO as well as EU membership.
...
Meanwhile, plans for progress on a common European defence policy - pushed forward by France and Britain five years ago - will be taken forward at a mini-summit of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg on 29 April. They will hold the door open to encourage Britain to join them afterwards. But the message is clear - if we Europeans cannot move forward in unanimity on political integration, we will aim to do so in a smaller 'coalition of the willing'.
Britain has tried to caricature the French position as anti-American, to cover its own damaging marginalisation, arguing that France will have to shift its position to avoid isolation. Blair has called for a European 'reckoning' over transatlantic relations. But officials say that no such reckoning or postmortem is likely. Given the deep ongoing divisions, it is seen as too damaging a process. Nor would many EU countries, in such a reckoning, endorse the various myths that Blair is creating for the UK audience.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-658453,00.html
Iraq
April 25, 2003
Foreign Editor's Briefing
Reports of weapons 'greatly exaggerated'
By Bronwen Maddox
Foreign Editor's Briefing
Blix never said they definitely existed. But Blair, Bush and their henchmen stepped repeatedly over that line, particularly in the frenetic and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to secure the backing of a second UN resolution.
In particular, Blair presented Parliament with a 'dossier' on September 24 last year, headlined Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction - The Assessment of the British Government. It said that "Intelligence has established beyond doubt . . . that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons".
The most dramatic claim of the dossier, much publicised, was that Saddam's "military planning allows for some of the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them".
...
What they said about weapons of mass destruction:
"If we know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction - and we do - does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him?" "It (Iraq regime) possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons . . . we know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX gas"
George Bush, October 7, 2002
"We are dealing with a very real threat today, that of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction"
Geoff Hoon, March 10, 2003
"His (Saddam Hussein's) regime has large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weaponsand he has an active programme to acquire and develop nuclear weapons"
Donald Rumsfeld, January 20, 2003
"Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.
"In fact, they (Iraqi regime) can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people. "Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions, and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents. If we consider just one category of missing weaponry, 6,500 bombs from the Iran-Iraq war. . . Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tonnes of chemical-weapons agent. Even the low end of 100 tonnes of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan"
Colin Powell, address to the UN Security Council, February 5, 2003
"It is right (going to war) because weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, are a real threat to the security of the world and this country"
Tony Blair, House of Commons, January 15, 2003
"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme.
His (Saddam Hussein's) military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them."
Tony Blair, Foreword to Iraq 'dossier'
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=400805
Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies
Intelligence agencies accuse Bush and Blair of distorting and fabricating evidence in rush to war
By Raymond Whitaker
27 April 2003
The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. "They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat," the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, "Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies", he added: "You can draw your own conclusions."
UN inspectors who left Iraq just before the war started were searching for four categories of weapons: nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles capable of flying beyond a range of 93 miles. They found ample evidence that Iraq was not co-operating, but none to support British and American assertions that Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the world.
On nuclear weapons, the British Government claimed that the former regime sought uranium feed material from the government of Niger in west Africa. This was based on letters later described by the International Atomic Energy Agency as crude forgeries.
On chemical weapons, a CIA report on the likelihood that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction was partially declassified. The parts released were those which made it appear that the danger was high; only after pressure from Senator Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the whole report declassified, including the conclusion that the chances of Iraq using chemical weapons were "very low" for the "foreseeable future".
On biological weapons, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council in February that the former regime had up to 18 mobile laboratories. He attributed the information to "defectors" from Iraq, without saying that their claims - including one of a "secret biological laboratory beneath the Saddam Hussein hospital in central Baghdad" - had repeatedly been disproved by UN weapons inspectors.
On missiles, Iraq accepted UN demands to destroy its al-Samoud weapons, despite disputing claims that they exceeded the permitted range. No banned Scud missiles were found before or since, but last week the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, suggested Scuds had been fired during the war. There is no proof any were in fact Scuds.
Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to an end - a "global show of American power and democracy", as ABC News in the US put it. "We were not lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."
American and British teams claim they are scouring Iraq in search of definitive evidence but none has so far been found, even though the sites considered most promising have been searched, and senior figures such as Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, intelligence chiefs and the man believed to be in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons programme are in custody.
Robin Cook, who as Foreign Secretary would have received high-level security briefings, said last week that "it was difficult to believe that Saddam had the capacity to hit us". Mr Cook resigned from the Government on the eve of war, but was still in the Cabinet as Leader of the House when it released highly contentious dossiers to bolster its case.
One report released last autumn by Tony Blair said that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, but last week Mr Hoon said that such weapons might have escaped detection because they had been dismantled and buried. A later Downing Street "intelligence" dossier was shown to have been largely plagiarised from three articles in academic publications. "You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence," said one aggrieved officer. "Yet that is what the PM is doing." Another said: "What we have is a few strands of highly circumstantial evidence, and to justify an attack on Iraq it is being presented as a cast-iron case. That really is not good enough."
Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who first pointed out Downing Street's plagiarism, said ministers had claimed before the war to have information which could not be disclosed because agents in Iraq would be endangered. "That doesn't apply any more, but they haven't come up with the evidence," he said. "They lack credibility."
Mr Rangwala said much of the information on WMDs had come from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC), which received Pentagon money for intelligence-gathering. "The INC saw the demand, and provided what was needed," he said. "The implication is that they polluted the whole US intelligence effort."
Facing calls for proof of their allegations, senior members of both the US and British governments are suggesting that so-called WMDs were destroyed after the departure of UN inspectors on the eve of war - a possibility raised by President George Bush for the first time on Thursday.
This in itself, however, appears to be an example of what the chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix called "shaky intelligence". An Iraqi scientist, writing under a pseudonym, said in a note slipped to a driver in a US convoy that he had proof information was kept from the inspectors, and that Iraqi officials had destroyed chemical weapons just before the war.
Other explanations for the failure to find WMDs include the possibility that they might have been smuggled to Syria, or so well hidden that they could take months, even years, to find. But last week it emerged that two of four American mobile teams in Iraq had been switched from looking for WMDs to other tasks, though three new teams from less specialised units were said to have been assigned to the quest for "unconventional weapons" - the less emotive term which is now preferred.
Mr Powell and Mr Bush both repeated last week that Iraq had WMDs. But one official said privately that "in the end, history and the American people will judge the US not by whether its officials found canisters of poison gas or vials of some biological agent [but] by whether this war marked the beginning of the end for the terrorists who hate America".
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,944569,00.html Tony Blair's diplomacy of intolerance
Claims that the outcome in Iraq vindicates the British approach risk further damaging Britain's position in Europe.
Kirsty Hughes
Sunday April 27, 2003
Blair's intolerance of countries holding different views to his sank to new depths after the failure to get a second UN resolution. He and Jack Straw, led extraordinary insults and attacks on France to try to cover up this failure, ignoring the fact that they had no majority at the UN Security Council, and France was in line with international political and public opinion. At the same time the new myth was born, which Blair still repeats post-war, that the second resolution was a final ultimatum which could have prevented the war and not about providing a legal basis for it. As one Brussels official puts it with considerable understatement, these insults to France from top British politicians 'were not appreciated'. Blair and Straw's behaviour is not forgotten by many, and not only France, in the EU today. Nor does the imminent enlargement of the EU 25 member states rescue the UK. It is true that eight of the central and East European countries who will join the EU next year signed declarations of support for the US over Iraq, allowing the UK to claim a majority of 14 out of 25 future member states. But many of these countries felt highly pressured into their statements of support, given their twin applications for NATO as well as EU membership.
...
Meanwhile, plans for progress on a common European defence policy - pushed forward by France and Britain five years ago - will be taken forward at a mini-summit of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg on 29 April. They will hold the door open to encourage Britain to join them afterwards. But the message is clear - if we Europeans cannot move forward in unanimity on political integration, we will aim to do so in a smaller 'coalition of the willing'.
Britain has tried to caricature the French position as anti-American, to cover its own damaging marginalisation, arguing that France will have to shift its position to avoid isolation. Blair has called for a European 'reckoning' over transatlantic relations. But officials say that no such reckoning or postmortem is likely. Given the deep ongoing divisions, it is seen as too damaging a process. Nor would many EU countries, in such a reckoning, endorse the various myths that Blair is creating for the UK audience.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-658453,00.html Iraq
April 25, 2003
Foreign Editor's Briefing
Reports of weapons 'greatly exaggerated'
By Bronwen Maddox
Foreign Editor's Briefing
Blix never said they definitely existed. But Blair, Bush and their henchmen stepped repeatedly over that line, particularly in the frenetic and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to secure the backing of a second UN resolution.
In particular, Blair presented Parliament with a 'dossier' on September 24 last year, headlined Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction - The Assessment of the British Government. It said that "Intelligence has established beyond doubt . . . that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons".
The most dramatic claim of the dossier, much publicised, was that Saddam's "military planning allows for some of the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them".
...
What they said about weapons of mass destruction:
"If we know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction - and we do - does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him?" "It (Iraq regime) possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons . . . we know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX gas"
George Bush, October 7, 2002
"We are dealing with a very real threat today, that of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction"
Geoff Hoon, March 10, 2003
"His (Saddam Hussein's) regime has large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weaponsand he has an active programme to acquire and develop nuclear weapons"
Donald Rumsfeld, January 20, 2003
"Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.
"In fact, they (Iraqi regime) can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people. "Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions, and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents. If we consider just one category of missing weaponry, 6,500 bombs from the Iran-Iraq war. . . Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tonnes of chemical-weapons agent. Even the low end of 100 tonnes of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan"
Colin Powell, address to the UN Security Council, February 5, 2003
"It is right (going to war) because weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, are a real threat to the security of the world and this country"
Tony Blair, House of Commons, January 15, 2003
"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme.
His (Saddam Hussein's) military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them."
Tony Blair, Foreword to Iraq 'dossier'
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=400805 Revealed: How the road to war was paved with lies
Intelligence agencies accuse Bush and Blair of distorting and fabricating evidence in rush to war
By Raymond Whitaker
27 April 2003
The case for invading Iraq to remove its weapons of mass destruction was based on selective use of intelligence, exaggeration, use of sources known to be discredited and outright fabrication, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. "They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat," the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, "Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies", he added: "You can draw your own conclusions."
UN inspectors who left Iraq just before the war started were searching for four categories of weapons: nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles capable of flying beyond a range of 93 miles. They found ample evidence that Iraq was not co-operating, but none to support British and American assertions that Saddam Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the world.
On nuclear weapons, the British Government claimed that the former regime sought uranium feed material from the government of Niger in west Africa. This was based on letters later described by the International Atomic Energy Agency as crude forgeries.
On chemical weapons, a CIA report on the likelihood that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction was partially declassified. The parts released were those which made it appear that the danger was high; only after pressure from Senator Bob Graham, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the whole report declassified, including the conclusion that the chances of Iraq using chemical weapons were "very low" for the "foreseeable future".
On biological weapons, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the UN Security Council in February that the former regime had up to 18 mobile laboratories. He attributed the information to "defectors" from Iraq, without saying that their claims - including one of a "secret biological laboratory beneath the Saddam Hussein hospital in central Baghdad" - had repeatedly been disproved by UN weapons inspectors.
On missiles, Iraq accepted UN demands to destroy its al-Samoud weapons, despite disputing claims that they exceeded the permitted range. No banned Scud missiles were found before or since, but last week the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, suggested Scuds had been fired during the war. There is no proof any were in fact Scuds.
Some American officials have all but conceded that the weapons of mass destruction campaign was simply a means to an end - a "global show of American power and democracy", as ABC News in the US put it. "We were not lying," it was told by one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."
American and British teams claim they are scouring Iraq in search of definitive evidence but none has so far been found, even though the sites considered most promising have been searched, and senior figures such as Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, intelligence chiefs and the man believed to be in charge of Iraq's chemical weapons programme are in custody.
Robin Cook, who as Foreign Secretary would have received high-level security briefings, said last week that "it was difficult to believe that Saddam had the capacity to hit us". Mr Cook resigned from the Government on the eve of war, but was still in the Cabinet as Leader of the House when it released highly contentious dossiers to bolster its case.
One report released last autumn by Tony Blair said that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, but last week Mr Hoon said that such weapons might have escaped detection because they had been dismantled and buried. A later Downing Street "intelligence" dossier was shown to have been largely plagiarised from three articles in academic publications. "You cannot just cherry-pick evidence that suits your case and ignore the rest. It is a cardinal rule of intelligence," said one aggrieved officer. "Yet that is what the PM is doing." Another said: "What we have is a few strands of highly circumstantial evidence, and to justify an attack on Iraq it is being presented as a cast-iron case. That really is not good enough."
Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who first pointed out Downing Street's plagiarism, said ministers had claimed before the war to have information which could not be disclosed because agents in Iraq would be endangered. "That doesn't apply any more, but they haven't come up with the evidence," he said. "They lack credibility."
Mr Rangwala said much of the information on WMDs had come from Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC), which received Pentagon money for intelligence-gathering. "The INC saw the demand, and provided what was needed," he said. "The implication is that they polluted the whole US intelligence effort."
Facing calls for proof of their allegations, senior members of both the US and British governments are suggesting that so-called WMDs were destroyed after the departure of UN inspectors on the eve of war - a possibility raised by President George Bush for the first time on Thursday.
This in itself, however, appears to be an example of what the chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix called "shaky intelligence". An Iraqi scientist, writing under a pseudonym, said in a note slipped to a driver in a US convoy that he had proof information was kept from the inspectors, and that Iraqi officials had destroyed chemical weapons just before the war.
Other explanations for the failure to find WMDs include the possibility that they might have been smuggled to Syria, or so well hidden that they could take months, even years, to find. But last week it emerged that two of four American mobile teams in Iraq had been switched from looking for WMDs to other tasks, though three new teams from less specialised units were said to have been assigned to the quest for "unconventional weapons" - the less emotive term which is now preferred.
Mr Powell and Mr Bush both repeated last week that Iraq had WMDs. But one official said privately that "in the end, history and the American people will judge the US not by whether its officials found canisters of poison gas or vials of some biological agent [but] by whether this war marked the beginning of the end for the terrorists who hate America".
frank talking