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Originally posted by Strange Famous
If Blair did not know the 45 minute claim was false, then he is subnormally unintelligent, a complete dunce - but the statement made to the journalists is still an outright lie.
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And where exactly did you get the information that the claim was false? And more importantly, did you *know* that before the war started, or merely guessed it? You see, gut feelings alone aren't proof enough.
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It is reasonable to assume someone with Blair's background, education, and access to all the intelligence knew that the 45 minute claim was wrong - it is far more likely he intended to mislead people than he believed something that reasonably no sensible person could.
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It is reasonable to assume that Blair acted on the information he got from the US' and UK's intelligence departments, which did contain that 45 minute claim. How on earth do you suppose Blair should *know* that the claim is false? He has to make decisions on incomplete information, *without* access to "all the intelligence" - typically, most of what you'd know would be comprised of educated guesswork, and loads of patchy data. Sure, some of that data is true, other bits are false, but how on earth are you supposed to make the distinction??? Even highly educated people can get it wrong, FYI.
As an example of that last statement: I found the 45 minute claim to be reasonable at the time - are you suggesting I'm not a sensible person? I'd say, given the patchy knowledge that we had, and given Saddam's posturing, it was pretty unreasonable to assume he did NOT have WMDs. And if you believe he has WMDs, it's not so unreasonable to assume he can launch them in 45 minutes. (And yes, I am highly educated too.)
Just because you don't belief a certain idea does not make the idea unreasonable, nor the people that do belief it stupid. I'd suggest you stop advocating your cause so harshly - you don't have all the answers. Besides, in a few years time, we'll probably end up discovering that we were *all* wrong.