Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
"The row over Iraq's missing weapons intensified in Washington yesterday as a leading Senate Democrat accused the CIA of deliberately misleading United Nations inspectors to help clear the decks for an invasion of Iraq," Rupert Cornwell writes in today's Independent. "The charge by Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, comes as Congress gears up for its own hearings into whether the Bush administration misinterpreted or manipulated pre-war intelligence on the scale of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein." The key paragraph is:
Mr Levin says that when the UN team under Hans Blix returned to Iraq last autumn, the CIA - contrary to what it claimed at the time - did not pass on its full list of 150 high or medium priority suspected weapons sites. This, in turn, enabled the US government to shut down the inspections quickly, opening the path for military action.
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"An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist," write Peter Beaumont, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff in Sunday's Observer.
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"TONY Blair deliberately deceived parliament and the public, using 'shoddy' intelligence reports to justify a war with Iraq, according to damning submissions by two former Cabinet ministers," Jason Beattie writes in tomorrow's edition of The Scotsman. "In damaging testimonies to MPs yesterday, Clare Short and Robin Cook questioned the extent of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programme as portrayed by the Prime Minister in the run-up to the Iraq war. Both the former ministers, who resigned in protest at the conflict and its aftermath, claimed that during their time in Cabinet they had been told by the security services that Iraq posed no imminent threat to Britain."
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I think it is safe to say Neil Clark has an opinion of Tony Blair.
