Now it can be told Harry Shearer mentioned this March 20 story from the Guardian:
Intelligence made it clear Saddam was not a threat, diplomat tells MPs
Government left 'paper trail' in build-up to war
More facts still to come to light, says former envoy
David Hencke, Westminster correspondent
The Guardian, Friday 20 March 2009
A former diplomat at the centre of events in the run-up to the Iraq war revealed yesterday that the government has a "paper trail" that could reveal new information about the legality of the invasion.This reminds me of a go-round I had with John C. McAdams, associate professor of political science at Marquette University a few years ago. McAdams had castigated people who claimed "Bush lied" in the Iraq war run-up on a Wisconsin Public Radio phone-in program:
Carne Ross, who was a first secretary at the United Nations in New York for the Foreign Office until 2004, told MPs: "A lot of facts about the run-up to this war have yet to come to light which should come to light and which the public deserves to know." ... He told the inquiry that the intelligence made it "very clear" that Saddam Hussein did not pose a significant threat to the UK, as was being claimed at the time by ministers ...
McAdams: People who, who, who use the "Bush lied" argument, it seems to me, are, are just completely heedless of any standards of, of, of telling the truth or making a plausible argument… um, you know, Let’s make a list of those who believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction: Russian intelligence, French intelligence, British intelligence, Tony Blair, the CIA, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, John Kerry. And somehow we’re supposed to believe…This was a popular conservative tactic that McAdams used here: assert that "everybody agreed" Saddam had WMD and follow that with an impressive list of countries whose intelligence services said he did.
The problem is, it's just an exercise in naming countries. The supposition that "intelligence" in these countries really "agreed" with Bush on Iraq is a canard.
At the time, HERE, I noted that German intelligence believed no such thing with regard to the fabricator Curveball, upon whose vaporous assertions Colin Powell's February 5, 2003 U.N. presentation was based. Now we have even more evidence that what the real intelligence high-level British officials kept secret in fact showed Saddam did not have WMD pointed at the U.K., contrary to the popular notion of a "45-minute" threat promoted by Prime Minister Blair and reiterated by President Bush during late 2002 and early 2003.
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