Justifying a war
Posted by Scott Winston,
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Blair says to the Liaison Committee of the House of Commons on 8th July 2003, in justifying statements made in the September 2002 dossier, "The evidence that we had that the Iraqi Government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from these so-called 'forged documents', they came from separate intelligence."
Think about that statement for a minute.
The implication is that Tony Blair did not believe the "so-called forged documents" should have formed part of the argument to go to war. Even though in the same breath, by the use of the phrase 'so-called' he appears to cast doubt upon the conclusion reached following a few minutes of forensic examination of these documents by ElBaradei's team of IAEA inspectors, and reported as fakes in the report to the UN on March 7th 2003.
The main point is this. Why is Tony Blair saying this only now?
And why then did he allow these 'so-called forged documents' to be the only shreds of 'intelligence' on this nuclear 'threat' that were initially handed over to the IAEA inspectors? (Despite the IAEA's pleadings to the UN to hand over whatever intelligence countries had to support this African uranium claim.)