Blair Ought To Have WMD Chiseled On His Political Headstone
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By John Pilger
The Mirror
Tuesday 03 June 2003
But pressure's on for answers Blair ought to have WMD chiselled on his political headstone. It's clear to the most devoted courtier that he lied about the reason he gave for attacking Iraq
From OONAGH BLACKMAN, Deputy Political Editor, in Evian
RATTLED Tony Blair said yesterday he stood "absolutely 100 per cent" behind evidence in a Government dossier on Iraq's weapons programme.
Sweat beading his face, Mr Blair vehemently denied that intelligence was doctored to beef up the argument for war on Saddam Hussein.
He hit back as the row over the failure to find any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction reached a new peak. But it was not enough to stave off rising Labour fears that the public was duped into war.
Backbencher Malcolm Savidge said the allegation was potentially "more serious than Watergate".
Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook called for an independent inquiry, saying: "The Government has got it wrong." Former Defence Minister Peter Kilfoyle predicted "somebody will fall on their sword".
To add to Mr Blair's woes, it was revealed that furious US Secretary of State Colin Powell branded some CIA intelligence on Iraqi WMD as "bulls**t".
Meanwhile US senators announced they will investigate claims that the Bush administration exaggerated the threat of WMD to justify toppling the Iraqi regime.
Before the war, No 10 produced a dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy WMD in 45 minutes. Ministers admit the claim was based on information from a single source.
Yesterday, Mr Blair insisted that all the evidence was cleared by the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Speaking in Evian, where he is attending the G8 summit, he said: "I stand absolutely 100 per cent behind the evidence we presented.
"The idea that we doctored intelligence reports to invent some notion about a 45-minute capability of delivering weapons of mass destruction is totally false."
Drinking glass after glass of Evian water in the 100F temperature, Mr Blair then rubbished former International Development Secretary Clare Short in a savage attack.
Ms Short, who quit the Cabinet last month, claimed Mr Blair and President Bush decided at a secret September meeting on a date to invade Iraq whatever the outcome at the UN Security Council.
In a calculated move to destroy her credibility, Mr Blair said: "The idea, as apparently Clare Short is saying, that I made some secret agreement with George Bush that we would invade Iraq in any event, at a particular time, is completely untrue. Charges should have evidence and there is none." Rejecting demands for an inquiry, Mr Blair added in a clear dig at Mr Cook's claim that the Government messed up: "I think it is important that if people have evidence, they produce it.
"It is wrong for people to make allegations on the basis of so-called anonymous sources when the facts are precisely what we have stated."
The PM again appealed for patience and said Britain and the US will publish the results of interviews with Iraqi scientists to convince the public the Government has not lied. More than 50 Labour MPs have signed a Commons motion calling for full publication of Government evidence on Iraqi weapons.
MP Mr Savidge said yesterday: "The Prime Minister has got to understand the level of concern.
"I can't conceive of a more serious accusation than that Parliament and the people could have been misled into being brought into a war on false pretences. That to me is more serious than Watergate."
Mr Cook said: "We need the Government to admit the threat of Saddam was over-exaggerated. The Government has got it wrong. It should try and deny it or cover up."
The ex-minster, who quit as Commons leader in protest at the war, said the absence of WMD undermined the legal case for military action.
He told Channel 4: "We were told the whole purpose of this war was disarmament. That looks rather difficult to sustain when we haven't yet found a single WMD."
Mr Kilfoyle said last night he believed someone would be forced to resign over the controversy.
He declared: "I think somebody will fall on their sword. I don't think it will be the Prime Minister, but somebody will carry the can."
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw joined the damaging tit-for-tat by insisting the evidence of Iraqi WMD was "overwhelming". He failed to provide fresh evidence.
Secretary of State Mr Powell last night defended intelligence he gave the UN to justify war on Iraq.
He said in Rome: "There were WMD in Iraq. There was no doubt in my mind as I went throught the intelligence that the evidence Iraq had continued to develop these programmes was overwhelming."
But earlier it emerged Mr Powell was deeply suspicious of CIA information on Iraqi weapons.
After reportedly branding some of the intelligence "bulls**t" he formed his own team to check the facts, US News and World Report said.
He then argued with the CIA before outlining America's case against Saddam at the UN on February 5.
Mr Powell also allegedly binned several pages of what the White House wanted him to say, announcing: "I'm not reading this."
Two Senate committees are due to hold a joint public inquiry into how intelligence on Baghdad's alleged banned arms programme was gathered, assessed and presented.
Republican Senator John Warner said: "People are challenging the credibility of the use of this intelligence - particularly by the president, the Secretaries of State and Defence, the CIA director and others."
The CIA has already started an internal probe following claims that the administration overstated the risk posed by Saddam's chemical and biological weapons programme.
The man heading the new US-led administration in Iraq predicted yesterday WMD would be discovered.
Speaking in Baghdad, Paul Bremer said: "I think we'll find something at some point. It's hard to believe Saddam would have put his people through so much misery and given up millions of dollars if he didn't have something to hide."
Labour MP Ann Clwyd survived an ambush in northern Iraq yesterday when bandits fired shots at her eight-vehicle convoy.
The 10-strong gang were driven off by a US escort aided by local Peshmerga tribesmen. Ms Clwyd, Mr Blair's special representative on human rights in Iraq, said: "Shots were fired. But I'm not hurt."
Thousands of Iraqi soldiers sacked by the US-led administration yesterday vowed a wave of suicide attacks unless they were paid wages and compensation. More than 3,000 protested in Baghdad.
SUCH a high crime does not, and will not, melt away; the facts cannot be changed. Tony Blair took Britain to war against Iraq illegally. He mounted an unprovoked attack on a country that offered us no threat, and he shared responsibility for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The judges at the Nuremberg Tribunal following world war two, who inspired much of modern-day international law, called this aggression "the gravest of all war crimes".
With his media courtiers telling him he was "courageous" and even "moral" for having, with the Americans, crushed a defenceless and traumatised nation, almost half of them children, Blair's managers have since staged a series of unctuous stunts.
The first stunt sought to elicit public sympathy with interviews in the garden at Downing Street in which he related how he had to suffer the pain of telling his children that, "I almost lost my job". The second stunt was a tale about how his privileged childhood had really been "difficult" and hinted at lifelong scars. The third and most outrageous stunt saw him last week in Basra, in southern Iraq, lifting an Iraqi child in his arms, in a school that had been renovated for his visit, in a city where education, like water and other basic services, are still a shambles following the British invasion and occupation.
When I saw this image of Blair holding a child in Basra, I happened to be in a hotel foyer in Kabul in Afghanistan, the scene of an earlier "historic victory" over another stricken land. I found myself saying out loud the words, "ultimate obscenity". It was in Basra three years ago that I filmed hundreds of children ill and dying because they had been denied cancer treatment equipment and drugs under an embargo enforced with enthusiasm by Tony Blair. It was the one story Blair's court would never tell, because it put him, and his predecessors into the annals of perpetrartors of true crimes against humanity.
Up to July last year, $5.4billion in vital and mostly humanitarian supplies for the ordinary people of Iraq were obstructed by the United States, backed by Britain. All of it had been approved by the United Nations and paid for by Iraq. This epic scandal, verified with UN documents, was rarely reported. Professor Karol Sikora, head of the World Health Organisation's cancer treatment programme, who had been to the same hospitals in Basra that I saw, told me: "The excuse that certain drugs can be converted into weapons of mass destruction is ludicrous. I saw wards where dying people were even denied pain-killers."
Now come forward to a hot May day in 2003, and here is Blair in Basra - shirt open, a man of the troops, if not of the people - lifting a child into his arms, for the cameras, and just a few miles from where I watched toddler after toddler suffer for want of treatment that is standard in Britain and which was denied in the medieval siege approved and extended by Blair. Remember, the main reason that these life-saving drugs and equipment were blocked, which Professor Sikora and countless other experts ridiculed, was that essential drugs and even children's vaccines could be converted to weapons of mass destruction.
WEAPONS of Mass Destruction, or WMD, has become part of the jargon of our time. When he leaves or is pushed from Downing Street, Blair ought have WMD chiselled on his political headstone. Now he has been caught; for it must be clear to the most devoted courtier that he has lied about the primary reason he gave, repeatedly, for attacking Iraq.
There is a series of such lies; they range from Blair's "solid evidence" linking Iraq with Al-Qaida and September 11 (refuted by British intelligence) to claims of Iraq's "growing" nuclear weapons programme (refuted by the International Atomic Energy Agency when documents quoted by Blair were found to be forgeries), to perhaps his most audacious tale - that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "could be activated within 45 minutes".
It is now Day 83 in the post-war magical mystery hunt for Iraq's "secret" arsenal. One group of experts, sent by George Bush, have already gone home; and this week, British intelligence sources exposed Blair's "45 minutes" claim as the fiction of one defector with scant credibility. A United Nations inspector has ridiculed Blair's latest claim that two canvas-covered lorries represent "proof" of mobile chemical weapons.
It is ironic that the unravelling of Blair's position has come from the source of almost all his fables, the United States, where senior intelligence officers are now publicly complaining about being compelled to give the president lies. "Basically," said one of them, "you give him the garbage. And then in a few days when it's clear that maybe it wasn't right, well then, you feed him some hot garbage." Blair's tale about Saddam Hussein being ready to attack "in 45 minutes" was part of the "hot garbage".
It was all a charade. As Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, has now said, the invasion of Iraq was clearly planned long ago, and the issue of weapons of mass destruction rested largely on "fabricated evidence".
BLAIR has made fools not so much of the British people, most of whom were, and are, on to him, but of those Members of Parliament who remained silent, those journalists and broadcasters who channelled and amplified his nonsense as headlines and principal items on BBC news bulletins. They cried wolf for him. They gave him every benefit of the doubt, and so minimised his culpability and, above all, allowed him to set much of the news agenda.
For months, this charade overshadowed the real issue: that the United States intended to take control of the Middle East by turning an entire country, Iraq, into its oil-rich base. "Liberation" had nothing to do with it. This week, publication of a remarkable official map left little doubt that the British military had bombed urban areas with cluster bombs, many of which almost certainly will have failed to detonate on impact. They usually wait for children to pick them up, then they explode.
This was symptomatic of a cowardly war, "fought" against a country with no navy, no air force and with a demoralised army. Last month, HMS Turbulent, a nuclear-powered submarine, slipped back to Plymouth, flying the Jolly Roger, the pirates' emblem. How appropriate.
This British warship fired 30 American Tomahawk missiles at Iraq. Each missile cost £700,000, a total of £21million in taxpayers money. That alone would have provided the basic services that the British have yet to restore to Basra.
WHAT did HMS Turbulent's 30 missiles hit? How many people did they kill and maim? And why have we heard nothing about this? Perhaps the missiles had sensory devices that could distinguish Bush's "evil-doers" and Blair's "wicked men" from toddlers? The response came in the terrorist attacks in Saudia Arabia and Morocco: almost certainly a direct consequence of American and British violence in Iraq.
This cynical and shaming episode in Britain's modern story was enacted in your name. Should Blair and his collaborators be allowed to get away with it?
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John Pilger's updated book, The New Rulers of the World, is published by Verso.
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