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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NOW who wrote (21289)	6/29/2003 6:22:57 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Respond to of 89467

London and Washington ignored Iraq weapons counter-evidence: press 1 hour, 26 minutes ago Add Politics - AFP to My Yahoo! LONDON (AFP) - London and Washington deliberately overlooked a pre-war report discrediting claims that Iraq (news - web sites) had sought to purchase uranium from Niger, the Independent on Sunday newspaper quoted a former US ambassador and CIA (news - web sites) investigator as saying. In a dossier submitted to parliament in September 2002 on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the British government had claimed that Iraq had sought to acquire large quantities of uranium from Africa, despite having no civilian nuclear program to justify the purchase. But the British newspaper's source, who asked that his name be withheld at this stage, claims to have established six months beforehand that two documents attributed to the government of Niger were forgeries. "My report was very unequivocal," said the paper's source, a former member of the US National Security Council under then president Bill Clinton (news - web sites). He said he had urged the US Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) to verify whether the British dossier rested upon the Niger allegations and if so to make the facts known to the British public, but that nothing had been done. "It is hard for me to fathom, that as close as we (Britain and the United States) are and (while) preparing for a war based on weapons of mass destruction, that we did not share intelligence of this nature," he said. Asked whether he believed that his findings had been ignored for political reasons, he replied: "It's an easy conclusion to draw." The documents in question carried a forged signature of Niger's president and that of a figure who last served in government in the 1980s, he said. The International Atomic Energy Agency later confirmed that the documents were fakes. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw strongly denied last week that the British government deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq under Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) in order to beef up the case for war. "It's completely untrue, totally untrue" that the September 2002 dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction had been doctored, Straw told a parliamentary committee probing the affair. The foreign affairs committee began hearings earlier this month after BBC radio broadcast an allegation by an unnamed source that a second dossier presented in February was "sexed up" by Downing Street despite the reservations of intelligence officials.