Posted on 05/31/2003 4:38:05 PM PDT by Pokey78
Prime Minister Tony Blair last night insisted he had secret proof that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq in his strongest signal yet that coalition forces believe they may have begun to uncover leads to Iraq's alleged deadly arms cache.
Stung by claims that the Government exaggerated the threat from Saddam, Blair said he was waiting to publish a 'complete picture' of both intelligence gained before the war and 'what we've actually found'.
Asked if he knew things he could not yet reveal, he said: 'I certainly do know some of the stuff that has been already accumulated as a result of interviews and others... which is not yet public, but what we are going to do is assemble that evidence and present it properly.'
His words, in an interview with Sky TV, came as Downing Street moved to halt damaging leaks over its handling of the evidence by heaping praise on the intelligence services. 'The Prime Minister hugely values the work of the intelligence agencies,' his spokesman said in St Petersburg, where heads of state were celebrating the Russian city's tercententary, yesterday.
The pointed comment followed a week of furious rows over whether the intelligence dossier on Iraq published by the Government last September was 'sexed up' to convince a sceptical public that they were in danger from Saddam.
It will fuel speculation that private assurances have been given to the intelligence community that they will not be left to carry the can over the failure to find WMD after a week of briefing against senior Blair officials by intelligence officials over the alleged ramping up of intelligence.
Labour backbenchers, increasingly convinced they were misled, are unlikely to be impressed by Blair's argument that they must trust in proof they cannot see. According to intelligence sources the new leads have been provided by Iraqi scientists and a member of the State Security Organisation who are currently being debriefed by MI6 and the CIA. This follows a week in which Government and intelligence sources appear to have changed their story on the likelihood of finding WMD on an almost daily basis.
One source claimed mid-week that British intelligence suggested Saddam had destroyed his WMD even before UN inspectors visited Iraq, a version of events that had changed by yesterday morning to the claim that chemical weapons may actually have been deployed in the field and then destroyed as American troops advanced.
Yesterday the US announced that another 1,400 experts will join the hunt for banned weapons - a signal that Washington has accepted the political significance of the issue.
In Britain it is thought that Ministers want eventually to publish a checklist of claims made before the war alongside subsequent discoveries which they believe vindicate the warnings. So far the only publicly announced discovery has been that of two trailers thought to have been part of a mobile laboratory system.
Blair said in his interview that claims that the existence of WMD was 'a great big fib got out by the security services' would be proved wrong. He said he had 'absolutely no knowledge' of an alleged meeting between the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell, in a New York hotel to discuss concerns over whether the evidence on WMD would be strong enough. Leaked transcripts suggested Straw had warned the issue could 'explode in our faces'.
The Foreign Office insisted the two men had not met on the date given in February.
Downing Street has been hampered in its argument by repeated suggestions from the Bush administration that WMD may never be found. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy to the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, suggested last week that WMD were a bureaucratic pretext to start a war.
Blair told Sky that WMD were the basis in law for taking military action - but 'that's not the same as saying it's a bureaucratic pretext'.
The Prime Minister was due to leave Russia early this morning for the G8 summit in Evian, France, which is expected to agree new measures to stop WMD falling into the hands of terrorists.
Well of course that's what they are doing or at least should be doing.
Think about it. If you were interviewing high ranking Iraqi leaders and scientists one on one over an extended period and expected to get new high level "recruits" into this process would you want to let on to the new folks what you knew to be true and what you knew to be the storyline?
Given the large number of interviews that must have taken place by now the CIA and the military probably have a good idea where the truth lies, who is telling the truth and who is not. I wouldn't divulge any of this until I knew I had milked the system for all it is worth.
For example: assume that filtering the lies from the truth leads you to believe that at least some of the WMDs managed to get into terrorist hands. Would you tell the world before you had gathered all the intelligence you could to help you locate them? I don't think so.
OTOH once you find a real cache of the real stuff or verifiable proof that at least some were destroyed late in the game (a likelihood in my opinion) then that info is very likely to be released, much to the embarrassment of the libs currently attacking the Administration.
A little birdy told me this story: Says Carl Rove to W: "Good news closer to the election is good for our side and bad for the Dems. Time is on our side. Let the libs dig themselves in a little deeper and we will lay it all out for the American people and the world when the time is just right."
My recommendation: Patience.
Translation: It's those idiots in the State Department and their leader who forced us into this stupid "bet it all on the WMDs" strategy.
A cop on the street does not need to pull over a car to enforce the law---his presence causes people to slow down. Likewise, whether Saddam was making these or not, our presence now ensures that he won't . . . ever!
Secret proofs are the best!
Yes, definitely it must be a part of the plan to surprise Democrats.
"Politicians lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print."
In less gentile circles, this is known as "bait and switch." I believe there is a better than even shot the Prez and Tony have the goods in hand and are waiting for the opportune moment to spring the trap.
Never play poker with a cowboy from Midland, TX!
Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two. . . . The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his U.N. presentation.
In short, Wolfowitz made the perfectly sensible observation that more than just WMD was of concern, but that among several serious reasons for war, WMD was the issue about which there was widest domestic (and international) agreement.
If you have studied the NVA "take" on Linebacker II and the "Christmas bombing" you get the sense that the NVA have conceded that the bombing nearly lost them the strategic war.
Nixon's secret strategy was to fight to win. This is one lesson that Republican presidents have applied repeatedly.
Both the U.N. AND SH have stated the existence of WMD in Iraq .......
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