UK-Iraq Lie: "Charges more serious than Watergate"

Political firestorm has erupted in Britain: "Did Blair 'dupe' Britain into war?"

Monday, June 2, 2003

LONDON — A political firestorm has erupted in Britain over charges that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government doctored intelligence reports regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, "duped" people into backing the war and made a secret agreement with President Bush to invade regardless of how U.N. weapons inspections turned out.

One member of Blair's own Labor Party called the charges more serious than Watergate.

...calls for an independent inquiry came from nearly all quarters: Some members of the Labor Party, including former cabinet minister Robin Cook, who resigned over the war, and Malcolm Savidge, who compared the charges to Watergate, said an investigation was needed. So did a spokesman for the left-leaning Liberal Democrat Party.

Even the Conservative Party, which solidly supported Blair's firm stance on the war, said it was considering backing an inquiry, as well.

The calls echo similar complaints in the United States over a lack of evidence that Iraq posed the threat described by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his speech before the United Nations. Senators from both parties have asked for hearings into whether intelligence was exaggerated or shaped by the Bush administration, given that biological or chemical weapons or agents have not been found.

While the war was justified, said Conservative official Michael Howard, "there is a separate question, which is whether the government told the truth in the run-up to the war."

And Blair is certain to face aggressive questioning from members of parliament on Wednesday, during the freewheeling session known as "Prime Minister's Question Time."

A good portion of the controversy centers on a British intelligence finding published last Sept. 24. Its most alarming claim was that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons it could deploy within 45 minutes of an order being given.

Last week, an unnamed British civil servant told a radio interviewer that the claim had been included over the objections of senior members of Britain's intelligence community, who considered the information unreliable.

This week, the Sunday Times of London said it had seen documents that showed that the intelligence finding was published only after "extensive consultation" between the chairman of Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee and Blair's communications director.

Members of parliament have called for the original draft of the report to be released so they can how it was altered.

Over the weekend, Clare Short, who resigned from Blair's cabinet after the war was over, accused Blair on television of having lied to the cabinet.

She contended that Blair secretly agreed with Bush at Camp David last September to go to war — but told the cabinet he would try to restrain the United States.

She said that, while it was true that Iraq had laboratories and was trying to create chemical and biological weapons, the claim that such weapons could be quickly deployed was false.

"Where the spin came was the suggestion that it was all weaponized, ready to go, immediately dangerous, likely to get into the hands of al-Qaida, and therefore things were very, very urgent," she said.

And she accused Blair of saying that French President Jacques Chirac had said he would veto a second U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing war. She said her reading of Chirac's remarks showed that claim to be false.

All of that created an unnecessary rush to war that left inadequate time for post-war planning and helped engender the chaos now evident in Iraq, she said.

"I have concluded that the prime minister had decided to go to war in August sometime and he duped us all along," she said.

Cook, a former Labor foreign secretary, told a radio program, "It is beginning to look as if the government's committed a monumental blunder."

But the current foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told BBC radio that the evidence that Iraq under deposed President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction is "overwhelming."

And Blair launched a spirited and uncompromising defense.

"The idea that we doctored intelligence reports in order to invent some notion about a 45-minute capability of delivering weapons of mass destruction is completely and totally false," he said Monday.

"The idea, as apparently Clare Short is saying, that I made some secret agreement with George Bush back last September that we would invade Iraq in any event, at a particular time, is also completely and totally untrue," he said.

Blair added that the idea that Saddam obstructed U.N. weapons inspectors for 12 years when he had actually destroyed all his banned weapons was "completely absurd."

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