London's Sunday Times reports that a new BBC documentary to be
broadcast in Britain on the second anniversary of the war presents more evidence
that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair colluded two years
ago in launching the Iraq war based upon false manufactured evidentiary
claims. -- The documentary, to be shown in Britain on the evening of
Mar. 20 on BBC1's "Panaroma," claims that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6,
briefed Blair and a group of ministers in the summer of 2002 after attending a
briefing in Washington. -- Sir Dearlove told Blair that war was
“inevitable” and that “the facts and intelligence” were being “fixed round the
policy” of the Bush administration. -- The official narrative is, of
course, very different. -- Officially, George W. Bush and Tony Blair
acted in good faith, acting responsibly and doing the best they could with the
limited intelligence available when they decided to go to war with Iraq.
-- Even Hans Blix has said: "I think both Blair and Bush acted in
good faith." -- This point of view is constantly reiterated on the
right. -- One blogger writes, for example: "Don't believe the
phony mantra of [Joseph Wilson] and others on the left, bashing Bush as a
liar. More and more facts show that in fact Bush acted in good
faith. Indeed [Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" clearly backs up that
thesis. This was about assessing and defeating a threat to United
States. Nothing about oil, kowtowing to Saudis, or some neocon
rule-the-world plot (sorry, Mikey Moore, you're full of it). Just Bush and his
team trying to protect national security in a post-9/11 world, with [the] many
uncertainties and assumptions that necessarily entails." -- Another says: "Had Bush not done something, we still
wouldn't know where the WMDs were. Thanks to Duelfer, we can conclude with
near certainty that the weapons were destroyed after 1991. Bush acted in
good faith on bad intelligence and if he hadn't acted THE SAME PEOPLE CRUCIFYING
HIM FOR "LYING" WOULD BE CRUCIFYING HIM FOR NOT DISCOVERING THE WHEREABOUTS OF
THE WMD!! You know that I am 100% right" (emphasis in original).
-- These pious beliefs are necessary fictions of the neo-Orwellian U.S.
national security state, which could not function without a veneer of exalted
moral righteousness (note that George W. Bush has become a Christ figure in the
last quote). -- Kevin Phillips, the lifelong Republican who traced
the history of the Bush family in American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and
the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (Viking Press, 2004), notes that
for four generations this family, which has risen to power by specializing in
the areas of national security, intelligence, oil, and international finance,
has prospered by practicing systematic deceit. -- Philips goes so
far as to wonder whether these practices may not be consciously inspired by the
writings of the Machiavelli, who counseled: "It is necessary
. . . to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and
so ready to obey present necessities, that one who deceives will always find
those who allow themselves to be deceived. . . . [I]t is well to seem
merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but you must
have the mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you must be
able to change to the opposite qualities. . . . A prince must take
great care that nothing goes out of his mouth which is not full of the
above-named five qualities, and, to see and hear him, he should seem to be all
mercy, faith, integrity, humanity, and religion. And nothing is more
necessary than to seem to have this last quality, for men in general judge more
by the eyes than by the hands, for everyone can see, but very few have to
feel. Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are, and
those few will not dare to oppose themselves to the many, who have the majesty
of the state to defend them; and in the actions of men, and especially of
princes, from which there is no appeal, the end justifies the means. Let a
prince therefore aim at conquering and maintaining the state, and the means will
always be judged honorable and praised by every one, for the vulgar [that is,
the great mass of people] is always taken by appearances and the issue of the
event; and the world consists only of the vulgar, and the few who are not vulgar
are isolated when the many have a rallying point in the prince" (The
Prince, translated by Luigi Ricci and revised by E.R.P. Vincent, in Niccolò
Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses [New York: Modern Library,
1950], pp. 65-66; this passage appears in chapter 18, entitled "In What Way
Princes Must Keep Faith"). -- As of 1:00 p.m. EST on Mar. 20, only media sources outside the U.S. are reporting on the
news of the Dearlove briefing....
Britain
MI6 CHIEF TOLD PM: AMERICANS 'FIXED' CASE FOR WAR
By Nick Fielding
Sunday Times (London)
March 20, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1533385,00.html
The head of MI6 told Tony Blair that the case for war against Iraq was being “fixed” by the Americans to suit the policy, according to a BBC documentary that will reignite its battle with the government.
Blair followed the U.S. lead by failing to reveal publicly doubts about the quality of intelligence that he had requested to support the case for war, the program claims.
Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, briefed Blair and a select group of ministers on America’s determination to press ahead with the war nine months before hostilities began.
After attending a briefing in Washington, he told the meeting that war was “inevitable.” Dearlove said “the facts and intelligence” were being “fixed round the policy” by George W. Bush’s administration.
The allegations against Blair just weeks before a general election are likely to reopen the feud between the government and the BBC that came to a head over the death of Dr. David Kelly, the former weapons inspector. It led to the resignations of Gavyn Davies, its chairman, and Greg Dyke, its director-general.
The documentary -- to be shown on BBC1’s "Panorama" tonight -- reveals that Britain and America were anxious to present a united front on Iraq despite a paucity of new data on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
It quotes from a leaked memo on the presentation of intelligence sent by Peter Ricketts, political director of the Foreign Office, to Jack Straw, foreign secretary, in March 2002.
The memo says: “There is more work to ensure that the figures are accurate and consistent with the U.S. But even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years.”
The program argues that Blair had signed up to follow Bush’s plans for regime change in Iraq as early as April 2002. It quotes Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned as leader of the Commons over Iraq, arguing that the threat of WMD was not Blair’s true reason for going to war.
Cook says: “What was propelling the prime minister was a determination that he would be the closest ally to George Bush and they would prove to the United States administration that Britain was their closest ally. His problem is that George Bush’s motivation was regime change. It was not disarmament. Tony Blair knew perfectly well what he was doing.
“His problem was that he could not be honest about that with either the British people or Labor MPs, hence the stress on disarmament.”
The intelligence services had little evidence to show that Iraq was a serious threat. At the meeting with Dearlove in July, Straw was still not entirely convinced. But, the program claims, Blair had to keep talking up the threat posed by Iraq to justify his policy of supporting Bush. MI6 was then tasked to seek new information from its limited Iraqi network to make the case for war.
The little intelligence that could be gathered was seized upon by Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, and John Scarlett, the official leading a team drawing up the now notorious intelligence dossier.
The new material came mostly from two sources. The first, who was new and untried, reported that Iraq had restarted chemical agent production. The second, who had never previously provided details on WMD, was the source of the claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMD within 45 minutes.
When Dearlove briefed Blair on the first source, only days before he presented his dossier to parliament, the MI6 chief told him “the case is developmental and the source remains unproven.” Nonetheless, Blair told MPs two weeks later on September 24, 2002: “The intelligence picture they paint is one accumulated over the past four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative.”
The evidence was vital in reducing parliamentary opposition to the decision to go to war. Only much later, after the fall of Saddam and the dawning realization that Iraq possessed no WMD, was it revealed that the intelligence from both agents had been withdrawn.
However, Blair’s immediate problem of justifying the war against Iraq had been solved. He went on a diplomatic offensive to swing the United Nations behind a vote for war.
"Panorama" interviewed Adolfo Zinser, former Mexican ambassador to the U.N., who recalls a briefing with MI6 as Britain was trying to shore up support in the Security Council for the second resolution on Iraq.
Zinser says: “I asked them, ‘Do you have full proof of the existence of these weapons, at any one of these particular sites that you are referring to?’ The MI6 officers told me, ‘No, we don’t.’”
The program says Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, was not convinced the invasion would be lawful without a second U.N. resolution. It was not until two days before the war that Goldsmith told the cabinet that this, after all, was not absolutely necessary. This was after Britain had failed to secure a second resolution.
“We stretched the legal argument to breaking point and the fact that we didn’t have that authority does set a dangerous precedent,” says Sir Stephen Wall, Blair’s former European affairs adviser.
The program also reveals Blair deliberately misrepresented the views of Jacques Chirac, the French president, to strengthen support in parliament. When Chirac said on the eve of war in March 2003 that France would veto a second U.N. resolution, Blair seized on it. He claimed Chirac was planning a veto “no matter what” and failed to make clear that France would in fact back an invasion if Iraq impeded the efforts of U.N. weapons inspectors.
Senior civil servants became alarmed by Blair’s rhetoric. Carne Ross, the diplomat responsible for Iraq policy at the British mission to the U.N. from 1998 to 2002, tells the program he can no longer trust Blair: “I’m afraid that the government did not tell the whole truth about the alleged threat that Iraq posed, that’s why I think it’s a tawdry story.”
The program will be seen as an attempt by the BBC to reassert its editorial independence after it was criticized by the Hutton report into Kelly’s death. The BBC row with ministers was ignited by a report by Andrew Gilligan claiming the government dossier on Iraq’s weapons had been “sexed up”.
Kelly was revealed as the source for the story and committed suicide two years ago.
Thousands of protesters marched in London yesterday on the second anniversary of the start of the war. Police put the number on the Bring the Troops Home march at 45,000; organizers put it at nearer 100,000.
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