NYT~~British Minister Defends Assessment of Risks From Hussein
By WARREN HOGE
June 28, 2003
nytimes.com
ONDON, June 27 — Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said today that he stood by the accuracy of government intelligence on Iraqi weapons, but a new poll indicated that public disenchantment over the matter had cost the Labor Party its lead over the Conservatives.
Mr. Straw told the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs that a disputed claim in an intelligence dossier that Saddam Hussein could unleash an unconventional attack within 45 minutes had come from a "credible" source.
He also denied allegations that it had been added to the document to embellish the findings and support Prime Minister Tony Blair's argument that Iraq represented an immediate threat.
The committee is investigating charges that the government manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the menace that Iraq posed and to justify military action. At issue are two assessments put out in September and February.
The 45-minute claim, the highlight of the September document, has come under scrutiny since the BBC reported that a senior British intelligence official said it had been inserted into the September dossier at the last minute on orders from 10 Downing Street to "sex up" the findings.
Mr. Blair's communications director, Alastair Campbell, who supervised the compiling of the dossiers, testified on Wednesday that the BBC report was false, and he demanded an apology. "It is a lie, it was a lie, it's a lie that's continually repeated, and until we get an apology for it, I will continue making sure people know it's a lie," Mr. Campbell said during a combative session with the committee.
Intensifying the battle with the network today, Mr. Campbell sent off a letter demanding that the BBC respond within 24 hours to 10 questions about its reporting standards and its reliance on anonymous sources.
Clashes between British governments and the state broadcaster are traditional in British politics, but the BBC's director of news, Richard Sambrook, said he felt that this time around, Downing Street was applying "an unprecedented level of pressure." He accused Mr. Campbell of waging a diversionary "vendetta."
Mr. Campbell, a former tabloid journalist, is the most outspoken figure in Mr. Blair's government and has focused on the dispute over the 45-minute claim because of the apparent harm it has done to the government's credibility.
That damage became apparent today in a YouGov Ltd. poll published in The Daily Telegraph that found Tory support rising to 37 percent of the electorate, an increase of one point since the end of May, and Labor support falling two points, to 35 percent. The figures, which showed the third party, the Liberal Democrats, with 21 percent, were based on a sample of 2,288 electors across Britain interviewed online between Tuesday and Thursday.
Apart from a momentary shift in the two parties' fortunes after a rash of fuel-tax protests in September 2000, Labor, which came to power in 1997, has led the Conservatives in the polls since the fall of 1992, when John Major was still prime minister.
The failure to locate any chemical or biological weapons in Iraq has politically hurt Mr. Blair, America's principal ally, more than it has President Bush. The British public was less supportive of the war than Americans were, and Mr. Blair based his argument for the need for immediate action almost solely on the danger of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons.
Mr. Blair has found the trust earned in his first term ebbing in his second, and his problems over weapons have been compounded by domestic political disputes over taxes, school financing, the state of public services and badly handled proposals for constitutional changes affecting the judicial system.
The most frequent general complaint from critics, many of them in the Labor Party as well as the opposition, is that Mr. Campbell and his information apparatus have manipulated the public by distorting the news. The public misgivings over the way the government puts out its information have undermined faith in the government's credibility.
Measuring what it called "the trust factor," the YouGov poll said only 25 percent of respondents thought the government was "honest and trustworthy," while 66 percent thought it was not. Those numbers had been 56 and 30 the other way at the time of Labor's second landslide election victory, in June 2001.
Mr. Blair has maintained the highest popularity ratings of any British prime minister and was considered unassailable until his advocacy of the war and his unswerving allegiance to the Bush administration.
At the same time, today's findings did not firmly suggest a Conservative victory in the next election, expected in 2004. Asked which man would make the better prime minister, 34 percent chose Mr. Blair while only 21 named the Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith. Charles Kennedy of the Liberal Democrats was the choice of 18 percent.
Today was Mr. Straw's second appearance before the committee this week. While on Tuesday he had criticized as an "embarrassment" the February dossier compiled by Mr. Campbell — one now known as the dodgy dossier for its mingling of a plagiarized scholarly article with real intelligence — today he came to the communications director's defense over the first dossier. "Nobody sexed up, exaggerated, that September dossier, no one at all, and that includes Mr. Campbell," he said.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top |
