{"id":840,"date":"2006-12-16T19:08:05","date_gmt":"2006-12-17T00:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=840"},"modified":"2006-12-17T17:35:32","modified_gmt":"2006-12-17T22:35:32","slug":"the-other-whistle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2006\/12\/16\/the-other-whistle\/","title":{"rendered":"the other whistle…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Diplomat’s suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n

The Government’s case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n

A devastating attack on Mr Blair’s justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain’s key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act. In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] assess that Iraq’s WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests."<\/div>\n
…<\/div>\n
\"CarneHe also reveals that British officials warned US diplomats that bringing down the Iraqi dictator would lead to the chaos the world has since witnessed. "I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed)," he said. "At the same time, we would frequently argue when the US raised the subject, that ‘regime change’ was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos."<\/div>\n
… <\/div>\n
It shows Mr Ross told the inquiry, chaired by Lord Butler, "there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW [chemical warfare], BW [biological warfare] or nuclear material" held by the Iraqi dictator before the invasion. "There was, moreover, no intelligence or assessment during my time in the job that Iraq had any intention to launch an attack against its neighbours or the UK or the US," he added. Mr Ross’s evidence directly challenges the assertions by the Prime Minster that the war was legally justified because Saddam possessed WMDs which could be "activated" within 45 minutes and posed a threat to British interests. These claims were also made in two dossiers, subsequently discredited, in spite of the advice by Mr Ross.<\/div>\n
… <\/div>\n
Mr Ross said in late 2002 that he "discussed this at some length with David Kelly", the weapons expert who a year later committed suicide when he was named as the source of a BBC report saying Downing Street had "sexed up" the WMD claims in a dossier. The Butler inquiry cleared Mr Blair and Downing Street of "sexing up" the dossier, but the publication of the Carne Ross evidence will cast fresh doubts on its findings. Mr Ross, 40, was a highly rated diplomat but he resigned because of his misgivings about the legality of the war. He still fears the threat of action under the Official Secrets Act.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
On May 1st<\/sup>, 2003, President Bush flew onto the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and made his "Mission Accomplished" speech when the war in Iraq was a scant 41 days old. But all was not well. The anticipated caches of deadly weaponry we’d gone to disable were nowhere to be found, and the uneasiness over their absence was beginning to mount. In the U.S., Ambassador Joseph Wilson<\/strong><\/a> was beginning to ask questions. He’d been sent to Niger in 2002 to check out claims of Uranium sales to Hussein, and found nothing. His frustration at being ignored would lead to his New York Times<\/strong> whistle-blowing op-ed<\/strong><\/a> piece on July 6th<\/sup> questioning the integrity of our prewar intelligence.<\/div>\n

\"DavidAt the same time in England, there was a less well known incident involving Dr. David Kelly<\/strong><\/a>, a British Weapons Expert. Dr. Kelly had been a U.N. Inspector in Iraq after the first Gulf War. In reviewing a British dossier prior to the war, he had doubted the claims being made about Hussein’s military capabilities. In May of 2003, he went to Iraq to inspect a possible mobile chemical\/biological lab. He thought it was a truck for inflating balloons. He met with a reporter and suggested that the prewar dossier had been "sexed up." When the article came out, at first he didn’t feel that he was the source, because of what was written, but he turned himself in anyway as a contact for the reporter. Rather than keep his confidentiality, he was publicly "outed" as the source and later publicly questioned by Committees of the House of Commons. In that hearing, he was tense, almost inaudible, and obviously very troubled. Within days of his testimony, he wrote<\/strong><\/a> Judith Miller then of the New York Times<\/strong> [he’d been a source for her book, "Germs"]:<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

Shortly after writing the email, he went for a walk in the woods and did not return. The next day he was found dead from an overdose of pills with a cut wrist. An extensive investigation, the Hutton Inquiry<\/strong><\/a>, ruled his death a suicide, but widespread suspicions of foulplay remain.<\/p>\n

Perhaps with Carne Ross’s revelations, Dr. Kelly’s final whistle will be heard…  <\/p>\n

I sometimes wonder if Bush and Blair worked their deceit in tandem, or independently. Usually the British reports are like this, "We told the U.S. what was going to happen – chaos" [So, why did you join us?].But then Bush’s famous 16 words were, "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Truth? No heros in this story, other than the whistle-blowers.<\/sup><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diplomat’s suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war The Government’s case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. A devastating attack on Mr Blair’s justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}