Posted on 07/17/2004 9:04:43 PM PDT by ejdrapes
LONDON (AFP) - Last week's damning report into British intelligence failures ahead of the Iraq war was amended at the last minute to make it less critical of Prime Minister Tony Blair, a report said. The changes were argued for by Downing Street, and helped Blair rebut the principal charge that he had shown bad faith in arguing that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) made war necessary, the Sunday Telegraph said. The report, issued on Wednesday by an inquiry team headed by former top civil servant Lord Butler, damned as unreliable most of the pre-war intelligence on WMDs but cleared Blair of deliberate distortion. The newspaper cited an unnamed member of Butler's five-strong inquiry team as saying Downing Street secured changes to a passage in the report dealing with a parliamentary statement on Iraq's WMDs made by the prime minister in September 2002. The alterations watered down the contrast between the seemingly compelling case for war made to lawmakers by Blair and the thinness of the intelligence he actually had at his disposal, the Telegraph said. It happened during an agreed process whereby individuals facing criticism in the report were allowed to see sections of the draft relating to this with a view to giving a response. The passage in question refers to a British government dossier on Iraq's weapons which reached conclusions at, the inquiry team said, "the outer limits" of what the intelligence allowed. Blair's parliamentary address "may have reinforced this impression", the Butler report concluded in its final version. However, according to the Sunday Telegraph, the original draft gave the opinion that Blair had personally masterminded this misleading impression, calling into question his good faith. Despite being cleared of deliberate deception, Blair -- who argued the case for backing the US-led war almost exclusively on the basis of the threat posed by Iraq's WMDs -- was criticised in the report. He was by no means in the clear, a member of the inquiry team was quoted as telling the Sunday Telegraph. "The whole thing points straight to the man in charge ... absolutely to where responsibility belongs, which is the prime minister, which is what we could not say." A series of reports have said that Butler, who headed Britain's civil service for a decade before his retirement in 2001, had felt it was not his place to produce a report so damning it could make Blair's position untenable. Inquiry into British WMD intelligence watered down to protect Blair: report
We need another panel to issue a report on this report...It has not been reported that the earlier report did not live up to the latter report
Well, if you don't like the truth, start hurling $hit and see what sticks. With the current status quo ( "my weiner dog that is currently eating cat turds out of the cat box is more intelligent than..."), this ought to really strike a chord with the Brit bronze foil hatters.
At the end of the day it will be discovered that it was misreporting by the Frog Press.
And, when dealing with rogue regimes, WMD and terrorists, isn't that exactly how responsible governments should react.
To act might mean political opprobium. But to temporize might mean a city incinerated and millions dead.
Given the stakes, Blair and Bush were duty-bound to go to the "outer limits", to preclude the "worst case".
The issue is too deep and complicated, however, for the blindly partisan media to even begin to understand.
AFP = Agence France-Presse. What has the London Telegraph got to do with this story?
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