THE LIAR, LIAR PANTS AFIRE Report: PM Blair squirmin' like a worm
nytimes.com
Angry Blair Denies Iraqi Weapon Reports Were Inflated
By SARAH LYALL
LONDON, May 30 — Responding to growing concerns about the accuracy of the information he relied on to make the case for the Iraqi war, Prime Minister Tony Blair angrily denied today that his government had exaggerated intelligence reports showing that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction.
Speaking at a news conference in Warsaw, where he was meeting Polish officials to discuss the future of the European Union, the prime minister said he had "absolutely no doubt" that such weapons existed.
"Saddam's history in relation to weapons of mass destruction is not some invention of the British security services," Mr. Blair said. "There are 12 years of United Nations resolutions about the weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq."
The BBC reported on Thursday that an intelligence dossier asserting that Mr. Hussein had the capacity to deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, which was made public by Mr. Blair's government last September, had been "transformed" on the orders of No. 10 Downing Street against the judgment of the intelligence services.
"That information was not in the original draft," a senior intelligence official told the BBC. "It was included in the dossier against our wishes. Most things in the dossier were double-source, but that was single-source, and we believe that the source was wrong."
According to the BBC, the intelligence official nonetheless added that he believed that Iraq had had a weapons of mass destruction program, and that there was a "30 percent chance" it had had a chemical weapons program.
Mr. Blair reacted with fury to the claims that his government had altered the report in question, and said that people who had criticized the war from the beginning were trying to stir up trouble after the fact.
"The idea that we authorized, or made, our intelligence agencies invent some piece of evidence is completely absurd, and what is happening here is that people who have opposed this action throughout are now trying to find a fresh reason for saying why it wasn't the right thing to do," he said.
Alastair Campbell, Downing Street's chief spokesman, told reporters that "not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies."
Members of Parliament who opposed the war — a great many of them from Mr. Blair's own Labor Party — are indeed growing more insistent in their criticism of Mr. Blair, and of President Bush, for failing so far to produce evidence of the weapons they said would be found in Iraq.
Peter Kilfoyle, a former defense minister who is organizing a protest of Labor backbenchers on Iraq, said Mr. Blair should publish the intelligence on which the government based its case for war, or face accusations he misled Parliament.
"The only cogent reason that was offered for the war was weapons of mass destruction, which the government said could be utilized within 45 minutes," Mr. Kilfoyle told The Times of London. "It seems to me that, at the very least, evidence was used selectively from intelligence reports to fit the case."
The war of words today points up to what appears to be increased tension between Downing Street and the intelligence services over the political uses of intelligence.
Intelligence officials were already embarrassed about an earlier dossier, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation," which was made public by Downing Street in February and praised by the American secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, for its "exquisite detail."
Presented as the work of the intelligence services, the 19-page report had in fact been cobbled together from other sources by junior aides at Downing Street. Long passages were copied almost verbatim — and sometimes exaggerated — from a paper written by a Ph.D. student in California; other information came from Jane's Intelligence Review.
"There have been concerns voiced about the political manipulation of intelligence, and how No. 10 wants facts to fit their ambitions," Dan Plesch, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a research group that studies defense and security issues, told The Times of London.
"The British public would like to believe that the information they were given was dictated by James Bond to Miss Moneypenny," he said. "In fact, it is more likely it was cooked up by Mike Myers and Rowan Atkinson."
Meanwhile, the prime minister said that although the West's current priority in Iraq was to "rebuild the country," he had no doubt that evidence of Mr. Hussein's weapons program would come to light, eventually.
"We have only just begun the process now of investigating all the various sites," he said.
"We have already found two trailers, both of which we believe were used for the production of biological weapons, but this is a process that is going to go on over the coming weeks and months. It is not the most urgent priority for us now that Saddam has gone. So you are just going to have to have a little bit of patience."
He added: "I have absolutely no doubt at all, when we present the full evidence after we have investigated all the sites, after we have interviewed all the experts and scientists — and this will take place, as I say, over the coming weeks and months — that evidence will be found. And I have absolutely no doubt that it exists." |
