Ex-inspector says Blair, Bush lied about Iraq
CTV.ca News Staff
ctv.ca
A former UN weapons inspector says British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George Bush lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- and unless they prove otherwise, history will judge them harshly.
"We were lied to by the British government and the Bush government, and they knew they were lying," Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector for Iraq, told CTV's Canada AM.
"History is going to judge Tony Blair and George Bush and their respective nation states very harshly for what they've done in Iraq."
Bush and Blair have been facing increasing criticism over their claims that Iraq was producing weapons of mass destruction. They also alleged that Saddam Hussein's government had links to the al Qaeda terrorist organization, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Ritter said there is no terrorist link. He added that when he was in Iraq -- between 1991 and 1998 -- there was no "certainty of knowledge" that Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction. He wants to know what changed between the time he left Iraq and now.
"We need to find out why it is the president and Tony Blair felt comfortable in misleading not only their people but their legislative branches," he said.
"This is fraud on a massive scale and it has to be dealt with."
The situation became inflamed recently, when the White House admitted a statement in Bush's State of the Union address in January was wrong. That statement claimed that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa.
Ritter said the uranium issue "is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The fraud goes all the way throughout everything they've ever said about weapons of mass destruction," he said.
Blair continued to defend himself, telling the U.S. Congress on Thursday that the March invasion in Iraq was justified. He said only inaction on the war on terrorism would be unforgiven.
"Can we be sure that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together? Let us say one thing. If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive," Blair said on a visit to Bush.
Ritter said the U.S. didn't go to war to liberate the Iraqi people and topple Hussein.
"We went to war to free the American people and the British people, and indeed the international community from a threat to their security posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which we now see didn't exist." |
