It Was The Politicians Who Took Us Into War, and Not The Intelligence Services
by Robin Cook

If he were an angler, Alastair Campbell, former communications chief for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, could claim the gold cup for landing the largest red herring in the history of fishing.

He has single-handedly convinced half the media that the Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry was into the origins of his war with the BBC. He has traded ruthlessly on his knowledge that there is nothing the press loves more than news stories about itself, and brilliantly exploited it to divert attention from the government's woes over Iraq. Personally, I should be happy to leave Campbell and BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan to slug it out between themselves on a desert island, so long as the rest of us can get back to the real issue of how Britain ended up at war on a false premise.

At yesterday's news conference of the Foreign Affairs Committee, John Stanley made an observation that went to the heart of the government's embarrassment. All other modern wars stemmed from real world events -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo or the Taliban's complicity in 9/11. As the invasion of Iraq was intended as a pre-emptive strike, by definition it could not be a response to a real event, but depended for its justification on intelligence of "a real and present danger." That put colossal weight on the intelligence providing a cast-iron basis for war.

Unfortunately, the intelligence served up by the government in its September dossier is now buckling under the strain of that responsibility.
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Time to admit the obvious: there are no WMD

Ok, let's go through this simply:

No units have found any stores of shells, rockets or any production facilities that could be used to convert them into chemical weapons. Despite months of scouring Iraq during and after the war, despite special operators running around Iraq, not one chemical shell has been found. Not one chemical rocket has been found.

Now in a report from Capital Hill Blue, if true, shows exactly how George Bush made his decisions on Iraq:

An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.

"The report had already been discredited," said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. "This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings."

Bush's response was anger, Wilkinson said.

"He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."

He didn't want to hear the truth, he knew Saddam was guilty, regardless of the facts, which were murky at best.

And now an increasingly pressed Tony Blair is admitting as such:

He went on: "I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programmes."

Excuse me, but I was under the clear impression that Saddam had weapons poised to launch at our allies within 45 minutes of an order being given. That their arsenals were poised to be launched at the US and that the use of chemical weapons were part of their doctrine.

Ooops.
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Conservatives' core duty on WMD

There was a time when conservatives fought passionately to preserve America as a limited constitutional republic. That was, in fact, the essence of conservatism. It's one reason Franklin Roosevelt's vast expansion of government through the New Deal aroused such bitter opposition on the right.

But many conservative activists seem to have lost that philosophical commitment. They now advocate autocratic executive rule, largely unconstrained by constitutional procedures or popular opinions.
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  thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!