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SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC Radio)



 
 
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  #41  
Old February 7th, 2004, 08:12 PM
Jarg
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC Radio)


"john" wrote in message Why were they
released on Reagan's inaugrual day? It was because
Reagan's handlers secretly negotiated with the Iranians to WITHHOLD
release of the hostages until then so that Reagan would be elected.


Yet another conspiracy theory. I swear if the posts here are any indication
I must be the only person who isn't involved in one.

Care to prove this one?

Jarg


  #42  
Old February 7th, 2004, 08:41 PM
Tarver Engineering
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Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC Radio)


"Jarg" wrote in message
. com...

"john" wrote in message Why were they
released on Reagan's inaugrual day? It was because
Reagan's handlers secretly negotiated with the Iranians to WITHHOLD
release of the hostages until then so that Reagan would be elected.


Yet another conspiracy theory. I swear if the posts here are any

indication
I must be the only person who isn't involved in one.

Care to prove this one?


That conspiracy features an SR-71 trip by GHWB.

Quite hillarious.


  #43  
Old February 7th, 2004, 09:03 PM
john
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC Radio)

On Sat, 07 Feb 2004 19:12:42 GMT, "Jarg"
wrote:


"john" wrote in message Why were they
released on Reagan's inaugrual day? It was because
Reagan's handlers secretly negotiated with the Iranians to WITHHOLD
release of the hostages until then so that Reagan would be elected.


Yet another conspiracy theory. I swear if the posts here are any indication
I must be the only person who isn't involved in one.

Care to prove this one?

Jarg


http://www.tylwythteg.com/enemies/Bush/bush69.html
  #44  
Old February 7th, 2004, 09:31 PM
Jarg
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC Radio)


"john" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 07 Feb 2004 19:12:42 GMT, "Jarg"
wrote:


"john" wrote in message Why were

they
released on Reagan's inaugrual day? It was because
Reagan's handlers secretly negotiated with the Iranians to WITHHOLD
release of the hostages until then so that Reagan would be elected.


Yet another conspiracy theory. I swear if the posts here are any

indication
I must be the only person who isn't involved in one.

Care to prove this one?

Jarg


http://www.tylwythteg.com/enemies/Bush/bush69.html



I particularly like the Written by "Anonymous."

I can also find web pages swearing to that Elvis and Hitler are alive,
aliens are among us, Jackie shot JFK, etc. Just because something has been
written doesn't mean it is credible. The ability to distinguish between
good and bad information is a very useful skill, but one you have not yet
demonstrated.

Jarg


  #45  
Old February 7th, 2004, 09:38 PM
George Orwell
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Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: J F under fire for lying (BBC Radio)

J F Mezei trolled:

Oelewapper wrote:
Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying on Iraq - on BBC radio:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/audio/geoffhoon.ram
Sensational. Incredible stuff... !!!!


Well, there is nothing that is terribly new in that 20 minute broadcast. Just
confirms suspicions that
1- the intelligence knew there was no international threath
2- ministers and Bliar made sure they had deniability.

I think was was more telling was teh former speaker (his name espaces me) who
admitted in parliament yesterday that he knew about it and had personally told
Bliar prior to resigning his post.

Mr Bliar may claim his aides didn't tell him. But he can't deny that he wasn't
told by others, he can't deny he wasn't told by other world leaders, he can't
deny that he wasn't told by Blix and El Baradei that none of the so called
intelligence they were given panned out.

And all this happened before the illegal invasion began.

Both Bliar and Bush deserve to be tried for war crimes. Their invasion of Iraq
was just as legal as Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, or Argentina's invasion of the
Falklands. And you should include the leaders of spain and australia in that
war crime tribunal. They are personally responsible for more deaths than those
who perished on 9-11, especially outside the USA since these leaders did not
have any popular support for their crime.


























  #46  
Old February 7th, 2004, 09:56 PM
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC

On Sat, 7 Feb 2004 19:22:51 +0100 (CET), George Orwell
wrote:

JF Mezei trolled:

Oelewapper wrote:
The **** goes on,... as Tony Blair and his defence secretary keep sinking

Go listen to James Brown's "I Feel Good!"
  #47  
Old February 8th, 2004, 02:35 AM
Oelewapper
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Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC Radio)


"Dick Locke" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 5 Feb 2004 13:07:47 +0100, "Oelewapper"

wrote:

Original Interview (O5 FEB):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/audio/geoffhoon.ram
Clarification and exposure of the lies (O5 FEB):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/li...n_20040205.ram
MOD statement (pitty excuse) for the minister's shameless lies (O6 FEB):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/li...d_20040206.ram

Finally listened to it. American interviewers could take a large
lesson in how to aggressively interview government officials. So could
our government officials take a lesson in being more open.


Ever heard of Andrew Gilligan, The Today Program, David Kelly and the Hutton
report ???? They'd be better advised to watch out for their job, if not
their life !!!

Or maybe it's just the BBC English that impresses Americans....;-)


Yep: perception, words, wordings, exact definitions and impressions is all
what this war is all about now: How is it that a little inaccuracy (read: an
"unsubstantiated" claim incorporated by the word "knowingly") in a 6 am
radio bulletin (The Today Program on BBC Radio4 on 18 May 2003), removed in
later bulletins, 'immediately' attracted enormous attention from the
government ?? How is it that the BBC Radio4 - Hutton saga enabled Tony
Blair to divert attention from the real issues at hand for over half a
year?? And how is it that a gross inaccuracy splashed across the front page
of the Sun - the nation's largest selling newspaper with a much larger
audience - attracts no government attention whatsoever ??? At the same time,
of course, Britain helped America to conduct an illegal spying operation at
the United Nations in New York in the run-up to the Iraq war. Once again, no
ministers were "properly informed", as the operation, which targeted at
least one permanent member of the UN Security Council (China), was clearly
in breach of the Vienna conventions on diplomatic relations, which strictly
outlaw espionage at the UN missions in New York. (see also: The Observer
newspaper, London 08 FEB -
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/polit...143550,00.html ).

As you may well know British journalists and their editors, especially those
working for the BBC and even more so those working for the BBC World Service
Radio / BBC Radio 4, are almost completely prohibited from reporting and/or
aggressively inquiring about many of these strategic intelligence-, defence-
or national security- related issues... (see also: the "Official Secrets
Act", the "D-notice" or "Defence-notice" system for editors, and the
legality of the so-called "press-lobby system"). Which makes the "live",
"not scripted" work of radio and TV editors, as well as their journalists,
all the more challenging...

In today's 'The Independent on Sunday' newspaper (London UK), there are a
number of interesting articles in which more government lies are being
exposed (08 FEB www.independent.co.uk ):
---

The 45-minute case collapses (Part 1)
JIC alerted Blair three times over unsafe WMD claim

Tony Blair was sent three intelligence reports in the six months during the
run up to the Iraq war, including one that warned him that information on
whether Saddam Hussein still held any chemical or biological weapons was
"inconsistent" and "sparse".

The revelation adds to the mystery of how the Prime Minister could tell
Parliament last week that, when war began, he still believed that Iraq held
weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed in just 45 minutes.

That 45-minute claim, highlighted in a dossier which Mr Blair presented to
the Commons in September 2002, inspired reports in the press that British
servicemen and tourists in Cyprus could be hit at any moment by long-range
Iraqi missiles.

In fact, John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC),
and the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, knew that it was only
"battlefield mortar shells or small-calibre weaponry" that could be deployed
that quickly - but seemingly nobody told the Prime Minister, who said in the
Commons last week that he did not find out until after 18 March, when MPs
voted to go to war.

Yesterday Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned as Leader of
the House in the run-up to the war, urged the committee of inquiry set up
under Lord Butler to investigate why a vital piece of information was
apparently withheld from the man who made the decision to send British
troops in to fight.

Mr Cook, who is due to be interviewed on the ITV's Jonathan Dimbleby
programme today, said: "One of the questions the Butler inquiry must ask is
why on earth the JIC sent up three assessments of Saddam's weapons capacity
without making it clear that they were talking about battlefield weapons,
not strategic systems."

The committee, chaired by the former chief whip Ann Taylor, supported Tony
Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction posed
a threat to Britain, and that - by implication - the Prime Minister was
right to take part in a war without UN sanction.

They gave two reasons: that the Iraqi army, with or without weapons of mass
destruction, might attack UK forces policing "no-fly zones", or that they
might fire Al Hussein missiles at British forces in Cyprus.

Last week the Government slipped out a follow-up document, with the clumsy
title Government Response to the Intelligence and Security Committee Report
on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, which was placed with minimal
publicity in the Commons Vote Office.

The document makes the startling revelation that the intelligence services
had already reported, before the war began, that Iraq's ballistic missiles
had probably been dismantled, and that the presence of UN weapons inspectors
in Iraq was making it difficult for Iraq to threaten anyone with weapons of
mass destruction.

The document added: "The JIC assessments produced in October and December
2002 and again in March 2003 reflected this point. In December 2002, the JIC
specifically pointed out that Iraq's ability to use chemical and biological
weapons (CBW) might be constrained by the difficulty of producing more whil.
UN inspectors were present.

"In March 2003, [the JIC] stated that intelligence on the timing of when
Iraq might use CBW was inconsistent and that the intelligence on the
deployment was sparse.

"Intelligence indicating that chemical weapons remained disassembled and
that Saddam had not yet ordered their assembly was highlighted. The JIC also
pointed out the intelligence suggested that the 750km-range Al Hussein
ballistic missiles remained disassembled and that it would take several days
to assemble them once orders to do so had been issued."

The Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, has defended his party's
decision to boycott the Butler committee, saying that it "allows the wrong
questions to distract attention from the real issues."

Writing in today's edition of The Independent on Sunday, he said: "What the
Prime Minister has really done this week is to tell us to take it or leave
it.

Forget inquiries - the people will be his judge."

Peter Hain, the Leader of the House, admitted last night that Mr Blair was
no longer "unassailable". After seven years in power, he said, Labour had
"hit our first very seriously choppy waters."

* Tony Blair has written to the widow of Dr David Kelly offering a private
meeting, according to her lawyers. Janice Kelly declines to say whether she
intends to accept his invitation.

---------------

The 45-minute case collapses (Part 2)
Revealed: the truth about the agent who led PM to war

The "reliable source" who provided MI6 with the information that Iraq could
deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes was an Iraqi exile
who had left the country several years previously, The Independent on Sunday
can reveal. That fact alone should have prevented the intelligence being
used in the Government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction.

The 45-minute claim, repeated four times in the dossier, is at the centre of
the dispute over Britain's case for war in Iraq. An IoS investigation has
established at the highest level that the "reliable source" obtained the
information at second hand from a serving officer in the Iraqi army, with
the rank either of full colonel or brigadier.

The Iraqi exile was in Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991, but later
fled, possibly to Scandinavia. He did not make contact with British
intelligence until he was outside Iraq; last summer Tony Blair and the
Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, both told Parliament he was not a defector
but "an established and reliable source". Mr Straw added he had been
"reporting to us secretly for some years".

Said to have "military knowledge", the source maintained contacts with
serving officers in Saddam Hussein's armed forces. But the fact that he was
not in Iraq meant that the information he provided, especially on such an
important point as whether Saddam had active plans to use chemical and
biological weapons, did not meet normal standards for assessing
intelligence, especially as it was unsupported by documentary evidence.
There was no definite information on whether chemical or biological warheads
were with front-line units, which would have made it feasible that they
could be used within 45 minutes, or back in secure bases which would make it
impossible.

The fact that the information was "single source", and was included in the
dossier at a late stage, first emerged after the BBC reporter Andrew
Gilligan reported what he had been told by the weapons scientist David
Kelly, setting off a furore which led to Dr Kelly's suicide and the Hutton
inquiry into his death.

Not until the inquiry did the public learn that the original information
passed on by the Iraqi exile referred only to battlefield weapons. "It
related to munitions, which we had interpreted to mean battlefield mortar
shells or small calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles," John
Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and author of the
dossier, told Lord Hutton.

Evidence at the inquiry showed, however, that Mr Scarlett never used the
word "munitions" in drafts of the dossier, allowing the claim to become
inflated to one of WMD. Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, told the
inquiry that the original information was "a piece of well-sourced
intelligence", though he admitted that the way it was "misinterpreted" could
mean that it had been given undue prominence.

The fate of the officer who provided the information remains a mystery.
There are rumours that he is dead or missing.

---------------

It comes down to this: What did Blair know?

The public thinks he is lying. The experts can't believe what he is saying.
How did Tony Blair get himself into such an unholy mess and this country
into such an unnecessary war?

For a moment Robin Cook was uncharacteristically tongue-tied when he rose to
speak in the House of Commons last week. The former foreign secretary could
not quite believe that he had just heard Tony Blair correctly.

During Wednesday's debate on Lord Hutton's report into the death of Dr David
Kelly, the Conservative MP Richard Ottaway had a question for the Prime
Minister. Did he know on 18 March last year, when Parliament voted to go to
war, that the chemical and biological weapons that Iraq allegedly had ready
for use in 45 minutes were battlefield munitions, not longer-range weapons
of mass destruction?

Mr Blair replied flatly: "No. I have already indicated exactly when this
came to my attention. It was not before the debate on 18 March." When he got
his breath back, Mr Cook said he had known then that Iraq had no WMD in the
true sense: he had said as much in his resignation speech. "I find it
difficult," Mr Cook went on, "to reconcile what I knew, and what I'm sure
the Prime Minister knew, with what he said."

If that was calling Tony Blair a liar in parliamentary language, Mr Cook
also had the evidence of his published diary, The Point of Departure, which
records a conversation with the Prime Minister about battlefield weapons on
5 March. The Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, said in the debate
that he knew the true position before 18 March, which led to questions about
why he had failed to tell Mr Blair.

By Thursday last week the Tory leader, Michael Howard, was demanding the
Prime Minister's resignation. Once again an apparent opportunity for Mr
Blair to set aside nagging questions about the case for war in Iraq, and
with it the doubts about his credibility and trustworthiness, had gone awry.

A week earlier Lord Hutton had resoundingly supported Downing Street in its
row with the BBC over the September 2002 WMD dossier, only for his report to
be seen as so one-sided that it hurt the Government.

The Commons debate on the report seemed to pose few risks, only for Mr
Ottaway's trap to leave the Prime Minister seeming either untruthful, or
worse, incompetent.

How has Tony Blair got himself into a position where 54 per cent of those
sampled in a poll in yesterday's Independent believe he is a liar? The
answer is that after 11 September 2001 he put his fate in the hands of an
administration in Washington which was determined to go to war in Iraq and
which now seems heedless of the collateral damage to him as it distances
itself from many of its past assertions.

On 24 February 2001 the newly installed US Secretary of State Colin Powell,
held a joint press conference at the Ittihadiya Palace in Cairo with Egypt's
foreign minister, Amre Moussa. Mr Powell declared in the clearest terms that
he was certain the near decade of international sanctions imposed in Iraq
had been effective in restraining Saddam.

"Frankly, [sanctions] have worked," he said. "[Saddam] has not developed any
significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is
unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."

Just under two years later, this time in the no less impressive setting of
the UN Security Council in New York, Mr Powell returned to the topic of
Iraq. This time, aided with photographs taken by satellite, audio clips and
testimony from supposedly high-level sources, he had a different story to
tell.

Iraq was now accused of deliberately refusing UN demands to disarm.
"Indeed," said American's most senior diplomat, "the facts and Iraq's
behaviour show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their
efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction." He concluded: "Leaving
Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more
months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world ... We
must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us."

As David Kay, the man leading America's search for WMD has now admitted upon
resigning, Mr Powell was correct when he spoke in 2001 and woefully wrong
two years later. Every major assertion he made that day has been proved to
be wrong.

Why? Was the intelligence wrong, or, rather, was it deliberately ignored?

George Tenet, director of the CIA, defended his agency last week, saying:
"Let me be clear: analysts differed on several important aspects of these
[WMD] programmes and those debates were spelled out ... in [a classified
report to the White House]. They never said there was an imminent threat.
Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a
brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build
programmes that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests."

As the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, has admitted, talk of
ousting Saddam started just days after the attacks of 11 September, even
though officials accepted there was no evidence that Saddam was involved.
Just when Tony Blair signed up for "regime change" in Iraq - whether it was
in the first weeks of 2003 when the "UN route" failed, or much earlier, in
2002 - remains obscure. But a clear picture has emerged in which the Bush
administration, in tandem with its friends in London, aggressively pursued
pieces of intelligence to support its claim that Saddam possessed WMD - and
was therefore in breach of UN resolutions.

Those analyses that did not support that view - notably the CIA's National
Intelligence Estimate in October 2002, which included 40 caveats about
claims regarding Iraq's WMD - were simply ignored. The White House preferred
the British dossier, produced the month befo in his State of the Union
address in January last year, George Bush approvingly quoted Britain's claim
that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons, ignoring
warnings from his own intelligence agencies that it was false.

American appreciation for British efforts in the information war went back
to Afghanistan, when Downing Street produced an eloquent dossier detailing
the crimes of the Taliban regime and its support for al-Qa'ida.

In his Security Council speech Mr Powell commended another British document,
produced a few days earlier, on Iraq's tactics of intimidation and
deception, before it became known as the "dodgy dossier". Large chunks had
been plagiarised from an old student thesis.

"I call it faith-based intelligence gathering," said Greg Thielmann, a
former analyst with the State Department's Intelligence Bureau. Some
analysts have claimed they were pressured into skewing the information to
provide the sought-after "product", but Mr Thielmann, now retired, believes
no arm-twisting was required: analysts and their managers were well aware
what was needed, and a form of self-censorship took place.

"Analysts want to maintain relationships," he said. "Tenet spoke to the
President six days a week [for his daily intelligence briefing]. If he went
and said, 'Mr President, you have misrepresented what my analysts said,' how
long would he keep going to the White House?"

But the senior officials in the Bush administration, their attention caught
by the neo-conservative voices calling for the ousting of Saddam Hussein, to
stabilise the Middle East and secure one of the biggest untapped oil
supplies in the world, did not simply rely on the established analysts to
provide them with information. They established their own units to analyse
and gather information and report directly to them without the usual process
of filters - "stovepiping" information straight to the White House.

Dick Cheney, US Vice-President, who is still unrepentantly making lurid
claims about Iraq, had his own team of cherry-pickers. The Pentagon had the
Office for Special Plans (OSP), which sponsored the Iraqi National Congress
(INC), a group of Iraqi exiles headed by Ahmed Chalabi, currently the chair
of the Iraqi Governing Council.

The exiles provided defectors and witnesses who told the OSP exactly what it
wanted to hear: that Saddam was producing WMD, that he was ready to use them
and that the people of Iraq would greet American troops with flowers should
Washington decided to oust Saddam.

With few exceptions, all of the information provided by the INC defectors
was incorrect. A report issued last year by the Defence Intelligence Agency
(DIA) said defectors invented or exaggerated their claims to have personal
knowledge of the regime and its alleged weapons of mass destruction. The US
paid more than $1m for such information. And while Britain fed dubious items
of intelligence to the US, experts on this side of the Atlantic believe at
least some of the equally unreliable INC material made its way here. With
its intelligence headquarters in London, the INC had direct contacts with
British officials.

Each side steered clear of certain allegations made by its partner, however.
After one mention by Mr Bush on the day the British dossier was published,
the Americans never picked up on the notorious 45-minute claim. Britain,
meanwhile, was silent on attempts in the US to link Saddam Hussein with
al-Qa'ida, though that did not prevent vaguer warnings about the danger of
Iraqi WMD falling into the hands of terrorists.

Robert David Steele, a former CIA operative, said: "Yes, I think there was
an intelligence failure, but I don't think there can be an intelligence
failure without a preceding policy failure. In the absence of adequate
intelligence we allowed political mendacity to fill a vacuum."

Such suspicions, which have dogged the Prime Minister for months, are now
eroding support for George Bush in an election year, and he is not likely to
have much room for concern about his ally as he looks for an escape route.

The Independent on Sunday reported exclusively last week that Mr Blair's
allies feared he was about to be hung out to dry by the White House. The
newspaper had barely reached the shops before this prediction came true.
President Bush announced an inquiry into whether the intelligence services
got it wrong, something Mr Blair had resisted for months.

The Prime Minister hoped that Lord Hutton's hearings into the narrower
question of why Dr David Kelly killed himself would satisfy the British
public's appetite for inquiries. Lord Falconer, Mr Blair's oldest ally in
the Cabinet, said on Sunday that "little would be achieved" by any other
inquiry.

Hours later, Mr Blair found his reverse gear. When Washington announced it
would hold an inquiry, Downing Street conceded that Britain must have one
too. On Monday evening, the Conservative leader, Michael Howard, had a
telephone call from the Prime Minister asking if he would agree to let the
Conservatives be represented on the inquiry team.

Mr Howard insisted that the inquiry must look not just at the intelligence
gathered, but the use that the Government made of it. Mr Blair agreed to
that in principle, but was not willing to yield to the Liberal Democrat
demand for an inquiry which would judge whether the Government was right to
go to war.

While the Tories signed up to Lord Butler's inquiry, the Lib Dems have
decided to stay out. It may prove a wise choice for Charles Kennedy:
confidence in the inquiry, which will meet behind closed doors, was hardly
reinforced by the rush last week to elevate all its members to the Privy
Council, on the grounds that a PC after your name means you can be trusted
with a secret in a way that other people cannot. Ann Taylor, the former
Chief Whip, was the only existing PC, so the other four members - Lord
Butler of Brockwell, Michael Mates MP, Sir John Chilcot and Field Marshal
Lord Inge - all had to be raised to the same level.

As one fellow Privy Counsellor remarked: "The dear old Queen has been
kissing hands all week."

The Butler inquiry is due to report this summer, but Mr Blair may well have
more to fear from the parallel exercise being conducted in Washington, which
has been given a deadline to report next March - after the November
presidential poll, but uncomfortably close to the putative date of a British
general election. No one in the US will have anything to lose if as much
blame as possible can be shifted over here.

Whether the Prime Minister can escape being judged a fool or a liar depends
crucially on the "45-minute" claim. It was the strongest evidence the
Government offered before the war that Saddam Hussein was not merely defying
the authority of the United Nations, but presented a "serious and current"
threat to the West, as Mr Blair put it when presenting the dossier to the
Commons on 24 September 2002. The document alleged that Iraq had "military
plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons. Some of these weapons
are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them."

It resulted in headlines the following day such as "Saddam can strike in 45
minutes" in the Daily Express and "Brits 45 minutes from doom" in The Sun,
which said British troops and tourists on Cyprus were within range. Mr
Blair's statement in Parliament last week means that he would have believed
The Sun's report was correct. Mr Hoon, who would have known otherwise, said
he didn't see the news coverage until several months later.

The first official clarification of what the "45 minutes" referred to did
not come until the Hutton inquiry last August - four months after the war
had ended and nearly a year after the claim was first published. John
Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and author of the
dossier, said it referred, not to missiles for warheads, but to "battlefield
mortar shells or small-calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles". Mr
Hoon confirmed when he appeared before Lord Hutton that he knew this at the
time.

We now know that the Joint Intelligence Committee sent three assessments of
Iraqi weaponry to Downing Street between September 2002 and 18 March, when
MPs voted to send British troops to war. The last of those assessments
arrived just before the war, according to Mr Cook.

According to the Government, it highlighted "intelligence indicating that
chemical weapons remained disassembled and that Saddam had not yet ordered
their assembly". The JIC also said other intelligence showed that "the 750km
range Al Hussein ballistic missiles remained disassembled and that it would
take several days to assemble them". But Mr Blair still apparently did not
know what could be deployed in 45 minutes.

Mr Cook suggested yesterday that this discrepancy should be investigated by
the Butler committee. If Mr Blair is right, then the committee would surely
have to give the JIC a severe rebuke for withholding vital information from
the Prime Minister. But if it turns out that the correct information was
among the three assessments, Mr Blair could have trouble explaining his
answer to Mr Ottaway last week.

Another possibility is that he did not read the assessments, even though
Britain was on the brink of war. That would save him from the charge of
mendacity, at the cost making him appear irresponsible. With no experience
of defence or foreign affairs before arriving in Downing Street, one
Whitehall veteran pointed out, he might not have grasped the intelligence:
"I doubt whether we will ever find out what Tony Blair knew at any
particular time," he said, "unless he signed a piece of paper which turns
up. He believes what he is saying."

Mr Thielmann, the former intelligence analyst, expressed little optimism
that either British or American inquiry would get to the crux of the issue -
the politicisation of intelligence: "We are like-minded in whitewashes,
[twisting] intelligence, and going to war when it is not necessary."

The 45-minute claim sent the troops to war in Iraq, but expert after expert
questioned its validity
"Iraq's military forces are able to use chemical and biological weapons ...
The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of a
decision to do so"

Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: the Assessment of the British
Government, 24 September 2002

"The dossier... concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons...
which could be activated within 45 minutes"

Tony Blair, House of Commons, 24 September 2002

"45 minutes from attack"

Headline, Evening Standard, 24 September 2002

[Saddam's] "...weapons of mass destruction remained hidden as they are
hidden to this day. He did not have the time to recover the weapons ... to
reassemble the missiles and fire"

Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, 23 April 2003

"We were told Saddam had weapons ready for use within 45 minutes. It's now
45 days since the war finished and we have still not found anything"

Robin Cook, 28 May 2003

"Most people in intelligence weren't happy with the dossier because it
didn't reflect the considered view they were putting forward. The classic
example was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for
use within 45 minutes. That information was not in the original draft. It
was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn't reliable.
Most things in the dossier were double source but that was single source,
and we believe that the source was wrong"

'Senior British official', later revealed as Dr David Kelly, quoted by
Andrew Gilligan on Today, 29 May 2003

"The claim that the claim about 45 minutes provoked disquiet amongst the
intelligence community who disagreed with its inclusion in the dossier ...
is completely untrue."

Tony Blair, 4 June 2003

"I don't know exactly how they calculated this figure of 45 minutes... That
seems pretty far off the mark"

Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, 13 July 2003

"It related to munitions, which we had interpreted to mean battlefield
mortar shells or small-calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles"

John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, to the Hutton
inquiry, 26 August 2003

"The phrase 'within 45 minutes' that was included in the British report did
not correspond to reality"

Dimitris Perricos, UN chief weapons inspector, 31 August 2003

"The report from the Secret Intelligence Service did not specify the
specific delivery system to which the time of 45 minutes applied"

Tony Blair, House of Commons, 5 February 2004

"The question of what kind of system could deliver weapons of mass
destruction was not something of any great debate at the time"

Geoff Hoon, 5 February 2004

Andrew Johnson

The secrets of the little blue box that can alter the course of history

Tony Blair's astonishing admission last week that he was not aware that the
45-minute claim related to battlefield weapons raises the question: how are
Prime Ministers briefed?

Like Prime Ministers before him, Mr Blair receives his intelligence feed in
a blue box with a red stripe. Inside is "CX" material - classified
assessments sent to him by the Joint Intelligence Committee. The box is
presented at regular intervals, but not necessarily every day.

Although techniques such as electronic eavesdropping and satellite imaging
mean the methods used are more sophisticated, the nature of the final
intelligence assessments has changed little since the Second World War.

Historians have been frustrated, however, in their attempts to assess how
different occupants of No 10 treat the top-secret feeds.

Prime ministerial copies of JIC assessments are not among classified papers
released under the 30-year rule, so we cannot see the remarks scribbled in
their margins, although Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher are known to
have been assiduous in their attention to detail.

A senior figure who delivered intelligence assessments to a number of senior
ministers including at least one PM reported they were often simply ignored.

"You must always remember that when the CX material is given to them by
people like me, if it doesn't fit with what they already believe about the
world they may well disregard it."

Professor Peter Hennessy, the acknowledged world expert on the office of
Prime Minister, says Anthony Eden, pictured, was the last premier caught
disregarding a crucial JIC assessment.

Eden was told by intelligence chiefs 10 days after Nasser's seizure of the
Suez Canal in 1956 that a war without US backing would be a disastrous
mistake.

Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was also told that war
would lead to the collapse of sterling. "All very gloomy and no doubt true,"
he wrote on the assessment.

Professor Hennessy is perplexed at what appears to be similar inaction by Mr
Blair on receiving the crucial JIC assessments in the run-up to war with
Iraq.

"Tony Blair is a Prime Minister who is legendary in his capacity to focus on
the issue of the hour.

"Claims of weapons of mass destruction and their possible use were not just
the issue of the hour, they were the issue of his premiership, because the
legality of the Government's claims to go to war without another UN
resolution turned on the urgency indicated by the intelligence feed," he
said.

"For this famously focused PM not to have lingered long and carefully on
this utterly crucial issue is very hard to absorb.

"Future historians, I am certain, will linger long and hard over just that."

Francis Elliott

The questions Butler must ask: why were the UN inspectors pulled out? And
why did we rely so heavily on disaffected Iraqi defectors?

The Government has set up an inquiry under Lord Butler to look into the
accuracy of the intelligence that led us into war in Iraq, but it needs to
go much wider than simply examining the claims made in the September 2002
dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Between the issue of the dossier and the start of the war in March last
year, United Nations weapons inspectors returned to Iraq, then left again
amid public claims from Britain and the US that they were not proving
effective in uncovering Saddam Hussein's WMD activities. Was there
intelligence to this effect?

The Intelligence and Security Committee, appointed by the Prime Minister,
commented last September that the presence of UN inspectors must have
inhibited production and storage of chemical and biological agents and
munitions, and complained that this was not fully reflected in the
intelligence it had seen. But last week the Government said that the Joint
Intelligence Committee, the clearing body for all the agencies, had
specifically pointed out in December 2002 that "Iraq's ability to use CBW
might be constrained by the difficulty of producing more while UN inspectors
were present."

Which view of the intelligence agencies is correct? Was the Government told
the inspectors were unable to contain Iraq, and is that why they were pulled
out? The inquiry needs to find out.

Lord Butler and his colleagues must also examine the sources of
intelligence, on which there were very widely contrasting views,
particularly in the US.

Some say the intelligence assessments relied mainly on previous UN
inspection reports, while others, including the former head of the Iraq
Survey Group (ISG), David Kay, placed far more emphasis on the claims of
Iraqi defectors.

The inquiry should examine the extent to which the British Government relied
on "human intelligence", much of it from people with political ambitions,
including people now given positions of power in Iraq by the occupation
authorities. Although Britain did not place the same emphasis as the US on
alleging links between Saddam and al-Qa'ida, the Prime Minister frequently
invoked the dangers of a future alliance between Iraq and terrorists.

Since the ISG began its work, it has become clear that Baghdad was highly
suspicious of Islamist groups, and denied them access to its territory and
to its work on sophisticated weapons.

What was British intelligence on this point at the time? We need to know to
what extent Mr Blair's comments were based on the assessments put forward by
the Joint Intelligence Committee.

The Butler inquiry has to examine the discrepancy between what intelligence
told us at the time about Iraq's WMD and what the ISG is now discovering.
But as it begins its work, it should bear in mind that the ISG is far from
being a neutral body. The group has reported, for example, that Iraq's work
on missile technology was in breach of UN Security Council resolutions, but
it is by no means clear that the ISG's interpretation of the resolutions is
correct.

The ISG's members, including Mr Kay himself, were appointed by the CIA and
the Pentagon, which were themselves responsible for many of the disputed
claims about Iraq.

The ISG went into Iraq assuming that weapons would be found, and the Butler
inquiry must examine the group's work as critically as that of the
intelligence agencies.

Glen Rangwala
Glen Rangwala is a Cambridge University expert on WMD and Middle East
politics

--------

Iraqi exile admits he never checked WMD intelligence
Technical experts were baffled by weapons data that 'did not fit in'

The Iraqi exile who passed on the controversial "45-minute" claim about
Iraqi chemical and biological weapons to British intelligence has insisted
he did so in good faith, but had no means of checking it himself, The
Independent on Sunday has learnt.

With Britain striving in September 2002 to produce as convincing a dossier
as possible on the alleged threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,
the late arrival of this information, known as a CX report, was one of the
items of intelligence indicating Saddam Hussein might use WMD.

The fact that it came to MI6 from a single source was not necessarily a
problem. The head of the agency, Sir Richard Dearlove, told the Hutton
inquiry: "CX reports as produced by my service are essentially single
source; and much high-quality intelligence which is factual or proved to be
factual is single-source material."

The difficulty with the material was that although the intermediary had a
long track record of reliability with MI6, he was not in Iraq, and was
passing on information from a previously unknown officer in the military
who, he believed, was in a position to know what he was talking about.

This was a tenuous basis for a claim which was to cause such trouble for the
Government, the BBC and for David Kelly, the weapons expert. He committed
suicide after being revealed as the source for Andrew Gilligan, the Radio 4
Today reporter, who reported on his doubts about the dossier. The Iraqi
officer had said some chemical and biological munitions could be ready for
use in 45 minutes, but because it was believed that the information could
reveal the source, it was "compartmentalised". This meant that the CX report
could not be seen by other intelligence agencies.

Once John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, had dropped
the report's reference to munitions in the dossier, transforming it into a
bald claim that some Iraqi WMD could be deployed in 45 minutes, it was
difficult for other analysts to assess.

Technical experts who worked with Dr Kelly in the Defence Intelligence Staff
were particularly baffled, saying the claim did not fit in with any
processes or weapons systems they knew of. One of them, a chemical warfare
specialist known only as "Mr A", told Lord Hutton: "It was a statement which
seemed to rather beg more questions than it answered; and for those of us
without access to the source intelligence, it really made us ask further
questions. Since we did not have access to that intelligence, no assurances
about its origins or its implications could be given.

"I think all those of us without access to that intelligence immediately
asked the question: well, what does the 45 minutes refer to? Are you
referring to a technical process? Are you referring to a commander control
process? And if your assessment causes you to immediately ask questions,
then we felt that it was not perhaps a statement that ought to be included."

Dr Brian Jones, the head of the section where Dr Kelly and Mr A worked,
formally complained about the dossier to his superiors, but the Hutton
inquiry heard that nothing happened as a result. Last week, Dr Jones called
for the "compartmentalised" intelligence to be published, saying he had
since spoken to someone familiar with the contents of the CX report and had
been told the information was too thin to contradict the opinion of all the
technical experts.

---------------

The Independent, 08 February 2004


  #48  
Old February 8th, 2004, 03:30 AM
john
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC Radio)

On Sat, 07 Feb 2004 20:31:28 GMT, "Jarg"
wrote:


"john" wrote in message
.. .
On Sat, 07 Feb 2004 19:12:42 GMT, "Jarg"
wrote:


"john" wrote in message Why were

they
released on Reagan's inaugrual day? It was because
Reagan's handlers secretly negotiated with the Iranians to WITHHOLD
release of the hostages until then so that Reagan would be elected.

Yet another conspiracy theory. I swear if the posts here are any

indication
I must be the only person who isn't involved in one.

Care to prove this one?

Jarg


http://www.tylwythteg.com/enemies/Bush/bush69.html



I particularly like the Written by "Anonymous."

I can also find web pages swearing to that Elvis and Hitler are alive,
aliens are among us, Jackie shot JFK, etc. Just because something has been
written doesn't mean it is credible. The ability to distinguish between
good and bad information is a very useful skill, but one you have not yet
demonstrated.

Jarg


Get your freaken head out of the sand.

So you don't believe the Iran-Contra scandal?

So you don't believe that North and Poindexter were convicted of
crimes for there leadership in this scandal?
  #49  
Old February 8th, 2004, 05:09 PM
Nik
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC Radio)


"devil" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 05 Feb 2004 23:14:53 +0000, Jarg wrote:


The dirty trick that Reagan played with Iran helped too. But at the end
of the day, the perception that the economy was terrible did it.


Honestly I never understood why Regan was so incredible popular in the US.
He left the Federal economy in such a bad shape that it took the present
president to do worse. And still people from the US I have met get tears
running out their eyes when his name is mentioned. Beyond my comprehension!


Nik


  #50  
Old February 8th, 2004, 05:39 PM
Michel Boucher
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default SHOCKING: Britain's Defence Minister under fire for lying (BBC Radio)

"Nik" wrote in
:

Honestly I never understood why Regan was so incredible popular in
the US. He left the Federal economy in such a bad shape that it
took the present president to do worse. And still people from the
US I have met get tears running out their eyes when his name is
mentioned. Beyond my comprehension!


As an outside observer, all I can say is that it seems irrational.
Some in this group have even made claims for Reagan that he was an
economist and that it was he in person who "destroyed kamminizum",
not the state of the world at the time.

Republicans tend to view their presidents as demigods from the moment
they step into office. No matter what damage the incumbent wreaks
upon humanity, that's ok by them. They'll even claim that these
people are representatives of the common man. An actor, a very rich
man who ran the CIA and his idiot son...these are their
representatives of the common man. Good luck!

Democrats prefer to elect more human persons with flaws and foibles
that make them interesting. But when a Democrat is in office (and
even afterwards), the Republicans will do everything they can to
revile him, talk about the size of his wife's behind (as though that
was a policy statement) and indulge in the basest ad hominems.

It is an observable fact that left of the right-wing government are
more fiscally responsible, but Republicans refuse to believe that and
blame Democrats for the damage the previous Republican did. And they
even push the limits of good taste by calling the theft of an
election "winning an election".

I'm so happy I don't live there...believe me.

--

"I'm the master of low expectations."

GWB, aboard Air Force One, 04Jun2003
 




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