Hutton Whitewash : No WMD Found Yet Blair Wasnt Lying About 45 Minute Claim?

Far from providing an impartial analysis of the reason we were taken into war, we have a report of over 700 pages which can only be called a whitewash. We believe that millions of people in Britain will be astonished and dismayed that this report criticises everyone except the government.

Hutton's remit was always narrow, but he has made a clear decision to believe the politicians rather than anyone else.

The major questions about the war remain unanswered. Why were we lied to about the imminent threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Where are the weapons? Did Tony Blair and George Bush agree secretly to go to war as far back as spring 2002?

We accept Tony Blair's challenge to debate fully the reasons behind the decisions to go to war, including the discredited claim of weapons of mass destruction, and call on him to set up a full an independent inquiry into reasons why the UK entered a war that broke international law.

For all the aforementioned reasons the Stop the War Coalition has called a protest outside 10 Downing Street this Saturday 31st January, from 12 noon to 2pm.

Lindsey German, National Convenor of the Stop the War Coalition

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/release.asp?id=280104

Iraqi who gave MI6 45-minute claim says it was untrue
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1131993,00.html

Kay Urges Inquiry into Wmd Intelligence Failure
Dr Kay stepped down on Friday from his role as head of the Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching for WMD since the end of the war.
“I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense.
“And it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarised chemical and biological weapons there.”
Dr Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee that intelligence failures were to blame for the conclusion that WMDs were hidden in Iraq.
“It turns out we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that’s most disturbing,” he said.
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2464394

Now unburdened of his official duties, David Kay has also unburdened his mind. The resigned head of the American search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq offers this short, pithy conclusion: They don't exist; Iraq got rid of them in the 1990s. Iraq did maintain an interest in the poison ricin, in missiles and in nuclear weapons. But its nuclear program wasn't nearly as advanced as Libya's or Iran's, both of which were rudimentary.

Thus evaporates the central justification for going to war with Iraq: that its WMD stockpiles and programs posed an imminent threat to the United States and the world.

Kay paints a picture of Iraq falling apart from 1998 onward: Saddam Hussein was in la la land, writing bad novels even as the nation was on the eve of war. Corrupt Iraqi weapons scientists would go to Saddam with WMD schemes, get a big bankroll, then spend it on other things. Most of Iraq's WMD materials had been destroyed because Iraq believed U.N. weapons inspectors would find them and because they feared disclosures by Saddam's son-in-law following his defection in 1995.

The large question is why American and British intelligence didn't know these things. Kay says it was because intelligence officials grew complacent during the years of U.N. weapons inspections. They could evaluate a satellite image, then ask inspectors to check out anything suspicious. But when the inspectors left in 1998, there were few indigenous sources to fill the gap.

That sounds plausible, but there is more to the story. The Clinton administration was getting the same intelligence, yet it, reasonably, did not head off to the United Nations to warn that Iraq needed to be invaded yesterday. It wanted to take out Osama bin Laden; Saddam was a secondary concern.

That suggests someone in the Bush administration made an early decision to put the most dangerous possible spin on what Iraq intelligence was available. Information that was tentative became certain; equipment that might have numerous uses became certified WMD material; rumors became fact.

Recall what was happening at the U.N. Security Council prior to the war. France, Russia and Germany weren't denying that Saddam might pose a risk; they disputed that the risk was imminent; they disputed that war -- especially immediate war -- was the only alternative.

The Bush administration was having none of it; Saddam had 12 years to comply with U.N. demands and had not; years of inspections had failed. Iraq needed to be invaded.

Adopting that unyielding line was a political decision, not an intelligence judgment. It came from the neoconservatives in the administration and was pushed most actively by Vice President Dick Cheney.

He's still at it. Last week, Cheney continued to assert that the United States had discovered two mobile biological weapons labs. That is simply false. Ask Kay; he'll tell you the two mobile trailers were just what the Iraqis said they were: hydrogen generators for weather balloons.

Cheney also continues to spread the tale that "there's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between Al-Qaida and the Iraqi government." That, too, is false. There is no such evidence, as Secretary of State Colin Powell and others have acknowledged.

What the American people are hearing from Cheney now is just what the world heard from other prominent administration officials before the war. It's all wrong, and Cheney's responsibility for that can't be neatly off-loaded onto intelligence agency scapegoats.

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4343079.html

Blair's defense of war puzzling

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's defense of the war in Iraq is becoming more baffling.

His arguments were never wholly persuasive, but they amounted to a case that could be disagreed with. Now, his insistence that the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was right is beginning to look detached from reality.

It is inconsistent with his apparent shift of position two weeks ago, when he told David Frost, "I don't know" if illegal weapons would ever be found in Iraq. And it is inconsistent with the same line adopted by Colin Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, who accepted this past weekend that it was an "open question" whether Saddam had had any stocks of chemical or biological weapons.

It is possible to explain why Blair chooses to risk looking ridiculous but it is not an explanation that helps him much. It would be more credible for him to say that he acted in good faith, believing the evidence at the time that Saddam did have illegal weapons, but now accepts that he -- along with most serious commentators -- was wrong. He could have done more to try to move the argument on to the potential gains to the Iraqi people of finally getting rid of a terrible dictator, which he always insisted was an important secondary factor in his decision.

Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, has offered this escape route to Blair several times. It would do a great deal to heal the divisions in the country and the Labor Party, he has said, if Blair would simply admit: "I got it wrong."

Blair cannot bring himself to do that, although the failure to find weapons of mass destruction is having a corrosive effect on his authority. (More surprising, it is also beginning to erode the standing of President Bush.) But for Blair to accept what David Kay, the outgoing head of the U.S. inspectors, said last week, namely that there was no "large-scale" production of banned weapons in Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, would require him to ask searching questions of the quality of British -- and U.S. -- intelligence.

Before the war, the only evidence that Saddam posed a threat, to either his neighbors or to the West, came from intelligence. When Blair published that evidence, in the famous dossier that is indirectly the subject of this week's Hutton report, it was not conclusive, despite the efforts of his staff to make it so. The Independent newspaper was not persuaded; as Cook said in his resignation speech, with the added benefit of years of reading intelligence reports, it seemed probable that Saddam's army had a few "biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions but it has had them since the 1980s."

But it was not proven, and it has turned out that the intelligence was deeply, deeply flawed. Even more flawed than alleged by David Kelly, the government scientist who thought Alastair Campbell had exaggerated the threat.

Yet Blair cannot say the intelligence at the time has turned out to be untrue, because that would require him to concede the demand for an inquiry into why the intelligence services got it so wrong. The whole of Blair's defense in the run-up to war and the arguments over the death of Kelly after the war has been that our intelligence services are the world's finest. He needs to keep them onside at least until after the publication of the Hutton report, because he does not want them drawing people's attention to the fact that, sometimes, as was also revealed during the Hutton hearings, they warned of the dangers of worsening the terrorist threat by going to war.

Hence Blair's insistence, "I believe the intelligence was correct," and his perplexing comment, "I think in the end we will have an explanation." Was he saying that the weapons were smuggled to Syria? That they were stolen by Martians? Or is he simply whistling in the wind?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/158130_blair27.html