A rchive Date
[ 10-07-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Britain ]
|
[http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2003/07/09/131015-ap.html
Blair denies misleading lawmakers
By ROBERT BARR
Wed, July 9, 2003
LONDON (AP) - Prime Minister Tony Blair denied Wednesday that he had misled legislators about intelligence contained in a dossier on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction published earlier in the year.
Opposition Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith had challenged Blair to apologize to the House of Commons, following a parliamentary report that concluded Blair had inadvertently misled the legislature about the origins of material released in February.
That report, as the government later acknowledged, included material from a student thesis copied from the Internet.
"I do not accept that Parliament was misled in any way at all," Blair said.
`
Questions about Blair's case for war in Iraq have grown as coalition troops have failed to find any banned chemical or biological weapons, or evidence of an active nuclear weapons program.
Blair insisted Tuesday he had been right to go to war to depose Saddam Hussein and said weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. He dismissed concerns that he had overplayed the threat posed by Saddam.
The British Broadcasting Corp. reported Wednesday night that senior government sources, whom it did not name, now believed that weapons of mass destruction would never be found in Iraq.
But a Downing Street spokesman said in response: "The authentic voice from the top of government spoke yesterday - the prime minister. His words are clear and they are on the record."
Two intelligence documents, one published in September and the other in February, have come under scrutiny.
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs committee, in a report issued Monday, said the second document - scornfully dubbed the "dodgy dossier" by the press - had undermined the government's case for war as it contained material plagiarized from a 12-year-old's graduate thesis.
Blair insisted that information in the dossier was correct, and any material represented as coming from intelligence sources had indeed come from those sources.
In a bitter exchange, Blair then attacked Duncan Smith.
"The intelligence on which was based both the September dossier and that February briefing was intelligence that was specifically shared with him by our intelligence services. So if he is now disputing any part of that intelligence, perhaps he would say so," Blair said.
Duncan Smith said he had not been given advance notice of the second dossier, "so he can retract that for a start."
"Until the prime minister accepts that he misrepresented the status of the second dossier to Parliament, and apologizes, his trust will plummet, and nobody will believe a word he says anymore," Duncan Smith shouted.
Blair said Duncan Smith had been briefed by the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee on Sept. 18 and Feb. 12 on the intelligence material included in the two dossiers.
"That intelligence was not, as his shadow foreign secretary (Michael Ancram) keeps saying, given orally by me to him, but actually by the intelligence services. Perhaps he would just confirm whether that is right or wrong."
Duncan Smith did not respond.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
Cross-Indexed:
|
|