Sunday, May 08, 2005
"supposedly" From the Washington Post editorial, An Ally's Victory (emp add) Mr. Blair spent much of the past month on the defensive, attacked for supposedly misleading the nation into war in Iraq ... supposedly def: Presumed to be true or real without conclusive evidence. Here's your conclusive evidence of "misleading the nation": - The official British Iraq report that was "an internet cut-and-paste exercise largely lifted from a Californian post-graduate thesis focused on evidence from the invasion of Kuwait 13 years ago."
- The yellowcake assertion.
- Robin Cook's resignation speech: "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target."
- The assertion that "Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45-minutes," which was cited in the March 18, 2003 parliamentary motion moved by the prime minister, committing Britain to war.
posted by Quiddity at 5/08/2005 10:30:00 AM
6 comments
It's not just the anonymous editors. From today’s Sebastian Mallaby column on Tony Blair:
His optimism, embrace of multiculturalism and willingness to espouse policies on frankly moral grounds have been a tonic for his country's cynical culture, even if his perceived dissembling on Iraq has brought the cynics out in force again recently.
Mallaby’s own power of perception is palpably precarious.
Elton Beard criticised Mallaby for saying "his perceived dissembling on Iraq". Mallaby is correct. Until the flurry of leaked documents in the two weeks before the election most of the UK knew the bastard was lying but we couldn't prove it, so it was truly a "perception."
I knew Blair was a liar, a crook, unscrupulous and without morals after the Millennium Dome fiasco. The majority of the country didn't want it. The majority of MPs didn't want it. It turned out that the majority of his cabinet didn't want it. He had the perfect excuse to drop it because it had been a Tory idea. Instead he used Thatcher's tactics to bully his cabinet into going along and they bullied the rest of his party. It turned into the white elephant everyone said it would be. Who profited? One of Tony's old school chums who had the contract to complete the construction.
Blair is every bit as bad as Bush and DeLay. A crooked liar who uses bogus religiosity to try to convince the public that he's honest. Which reminds me - he constantly goes on about how honest and ethical he is. Honest and ethical people don't do that, only dishonest and unethical people who want to try to con others (and, according to New Scientist a couple of months ago, the tactic works).
The sooner Blair faces war crimes charges, the better. A lot of evidence will come to light then, maybe enough that even the Republicans will want to impeach Bush.
We in the US have learned that the Washington Post is supposedly a news source.
The US media may be picking this up from the UK media, who are careful not to call Blair a liar, and pour scorn on political opponents, like Tory chief Michael Howard, who do call Blair a liar. This may have something to do with the fact that since the Hutton report which exonerated Blair (dishonestly) about 2,500 BBC staff working for current affairs have been, or are to be made redundant. This represents about one third of all BBC current affairs staff.
Supposedly, the non-American press is not bought and paid for.
I'm not sure what anonymous is talking about. Every paper that isn't owned by Murdoch has been calling Blair a liar for at least the last year. The Mail, Express and Independent have been doing so for even longer.
And uggabugga's examples aren't the half of it. This is the Joint Intelligence Committee's assessment in March 2002: "Intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programmes is sporadic and patchy."
This is the JIC's assessment in August 2002: "We have little intelligence on Iraq's CBW [chemical and biological weapons] doctrine, and know little about Iraq's CBW work since late 1998."
This is Tony Blair addressing Parliament in September 2002: "The intelligence picture that they paint is one accumulated over the last four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative. It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability."
It's hard to conceive of a more blatant case of lying to parliament.
Ginger Yellow
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