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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (415572)	6/17/2003 5:12:50 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

<font color=orange>Coming soon to your improperly elected president. LMAO!<font color=black> ____________________________________________________________ 2 Former Cabinet Members Say Britain Exaggerated Iraq Claims By WARREN HOGE LONDON, June 17 — Robin Cook and Clare Short, the two members of Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet who resigned their posts over Iraq, told a House of Commons committee today that Britain made selective use of intelligence to make the case for weapons of mass destruction and justify going to war. Mr. Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit his job as leader of the Commons in March, and Ms. Short, the secretary for international development who left the government in May, said they had been told by security sources before the war that Saddam Hussein's weapons did not pose an immediate threat. "I think that is where the falsity lies, the exaggeration of immediacy," Ms. Short told the House foreign affairs committee. Mr. Cook said that his experience convinced him that "instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base a decision about policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which to justify a policy on which we had already settled." He said that he had always doubted Mr. Blair's claim that Iraq had unconventional weapons ready for use and that the lack of evidence since the war ended confirmed his suspicions. "Such weapons require substantial industrial plants and a large work force," he said. "It is inconceivable that both could have been kept concealed for the two months we have been in occupation of Iraq." While Mr. Cook said he did not question the "good faith" of Mr. Blair, Ms. Short accused the prime minister of misleading the public with a "series of half truths, exaggerations, reassurances that weren't the case." She said she imagined he thought it an "honorable deception." Their testimony came at a time when Mr. Blair, the principal ally of President Bush, is under growing criticism over the failure to find any unconventional weapons. The attacks are coming from the opposition Conservatives, dissidents within his own party, critics of the war and even some people who backed him. The fact that the Tories, who gave him unquestioning support during the war, have now turned against him over arms points up Mr. Blair's particular vulnerability on the issue. A majority of the British public were against going to war up until the moment that British troops entered Iraq, and to try to win them over, Mr. Blair relied almost exclusively on the weapons claim. In press conferences and appearances in Parliament in recent weeks, he has tried to shift the rationale to the humanitarian argument that the removal of Mr. Hussein and the subsequent discoveries of mass burial sites and other signs of his regime's barbarity provide sufficient reason for having gone to war. He has also pleaded for patience while, he says, teams of American, British and Australian experts search for the arms. This case is hard to make in Europe, where there is greater stress and a stricter interpretation than in the United States on whether or not the war was legal and whether the justification cited going in is the same one coming out. Also, public opinion throughout Europe, even in those countries like Italy and Spain whose leaders supported Mr. Bush, was against the war. Mr. Blair has been undermined by controversies from two intelligence reports, put forth at the time with great fanfare, that sought to swing public opinion behind his conviction that Mr. Hussein and his unconventional arms were an immediate threat. At the time, Britain took on the assignment of disclosing intelligence findings because, the thinking then went, the information would be more credible to critics of the military preparations and in the Muslim world if the source were London rather than Washington. The first report, published in September, is now under question because of its central claim that Iraq's chemical and biological weapons were in such a state of readiness that they could be launched within 45 minutes. The second, a dossier produced by Downing Street officials in February, turned out to be a combination of real intelligence, sections from a Jane's Intelligence Review report on Iraq and parts of a graduate thesis based on 12-year-old public information and downloaded from the Internet, with its typographical errors intact. The document is referred to in the British press these days as the "dodgy dossier." Downing Street said last week that Mr. Campbell had assured Britain's intelligence chiefs that in the future "far greater care would be taken in dealing with anything that might impact on their reputation or their work." The language appeared to confirm widespread reports that intelligence officials were angry at the pressures the government was putting on them. Neither Mr. Blair nor Mr. Campbell have agreed to appear before the House panel whose mission is determining whether the government gave Parliament "accurate and complete information." Foreign Secretary Jack Straw will be the highest ranking witness, and Mr. Blair will appear before another panel, the committee on intelligence and security that takes testimony behind closed doors and submits its conclusions to the prime minister's office for approval before publishing them. Mr. Blair's dilemma over the missing weapons of mass destruction is contributing to a larger problem he and his government have been facing an erosion of trust among the British public. While this does not threaten his leadership of the country, it does shake his authority in a critical area. Since coming to office six years ago, Mr. Blair has repeatedly depended upon direct appeals to the British public to accept his conviction that what he is doing is right for them to, in effect, trust him. A poll in the Times of London said that 58 percent of the public now suspects that the United States and Britain exaggerated the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to win public support for the war. And the same survey reported that a third of the voting public say that the Iraq war has lowered their trust in Tony Blair.