Blair dismisses dossier claims
The Prime Minister Tony Blair has dismissed as ‘completely absurd’ allegations that a government report on Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was rewritten for political purposes.
The allegations arose from comments made to the BBC by an unnamed senior British official, who reportedly claimed that a document on Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities was rewritten to make it ‘sexier’.
The dossier was published last September and memorably warned that the Iraqi leader had the capability to unleash his biological and chemical weapons in just 45 minutes.
However, the 45-minute figure had not appeared in the original dossier because the source of this information was deemed unreliable, the source maintains.
The Prime Minister, speaking at a press conference in Poland this morning, strongly denied accusations that Number Ten insisted on changes to be made to intelligence dossiers regarding the apparent extent of the Iraqi threat.
‘The idea that we authorised or made intelligence agencies invent some type of evidence is completely absurd’.
‘What is happening here is that people who have accused this action throughout are now trying to find a fresh reason for saying why it wasn’t the right thing to do’, he insisted.
Despite such assurances, the row over the decision to invade Iraq has been exacerbated by the apparent admission by Donald Rumsfeld earlier this week that WMD were conceivably destroyed prior to the war in Iraq, remarks on which the US defence secretary has since rowed back. As of yet, no weapons of mass capability have been found.
However, addressing reporters at a press conference in Warsaw, in which the PM was joined by his Polish counterpart Leszek Miller, Tony Blair defended the decision to press ahead with military action against the Middle Eastern state.
‘The evidence of WMD is evidence of the truth – of which I have absolutely no doubt about at all’.
And he added: ‘I’m telling you if you go to Iraq and speak to people there and see the freedom and liberation they have, then you’ll see it was empathically the right thing to do.’
Tony Blair became the first Western leader to step foot in post-war Iraq yesterday when he visited the southern city of Basra and the port town of Umm Qasr.
