Quote:
|
Originally Posted by StanT
The administration acted on information that was not credible and American citizens died as a result. Is that any more moral?
|
Tony Blair also likes to act on dodgy intelligence.
When a majority of the British people were against the war we were told through the press that Saddam could strike at us within 45 minutes. This became one of the main influences in bringing opinion round in favour of war. The story was obviously passed to the media by the government but it later turned out that it was actually 'British interests' that could be hit - army barracks on Cyprus were suggested. This got much less attention that the original 45-minutes-from-oblivion type of headline so opinion wasn't swung back. Shortly before the war started we learned that the furthest any of Saddam's weapons could reach was about 2 miles further than UN restrictions (about 90 miles), and that was only when you remove the guidance systems to make them lighter! I didn't hear any comment about what interests we had within 92 miles of Iraq's weapons bases. In the middle of all this was the David Kelly affair and resignations at the BBC for reporting that the 45 minute claim was false and was inserted at the request of Tony Blair himself.
Eventually the 45 minute claim was dropped by the government's Joint Intelligence Committee and it emerged that the intelligence so much had been made of came from an Iraqi exile living in South London. This leads us back to the topic of the elections because his name was
Iyad Allawi! Funny how it all worked out so well for him. Maybe the original headlines should have been 'Asylum seeker lies to government, gets given his own country to run.'