Alastair Campbell Reviews 'Desicion Points' (Dubya's Spelling) By George Bush

Campbell's bizarre review of Dubya's book is here. As Craig Murray has pointed out, it is a bit like Goebels reviewing 'Mein Kampf'. Below is a well-researched response by Duncan McFarlane of In Place of Fear. Worth a visit.


DuncanMcFarlane


19 November 2010 6:44PM



'the view of every intelligence agency in the world that Iraq had WMD' - Alistair Campbell.


An untrue claim that misdirects attention away from the real issue


Tha analysis of pretty much every intelligence agency (including the CIA and MoD intelligence analysts) was that Saddam might have some chemical weapons and the defunct remnants of a no longer active nuclear programme left over from the 1980s - and that he would be highly unlikely to use what he had left unless attacked and on the point of being overthrown. Leaked emails show Jonathan Powell, Blair's aide, had the "unless attacked" removed.


Unfortunately the heads of the CIA and MI6 - George Tenet and John Scarlett - under political pressure, gave their bosses some of what what they wanted in reversing some of the assessments made by the actual intelligence analysts. Even then the assessments did not say what Bush or Blair said they did (see Ron Sukind's 'The One Per Cent Doctine').


The UNMOVIC weapons inspections under Hans Blix confirmed these assessments.


Blair's and Powell's politicised claims on supposed 'mobile biological weapons labs' in Iraq were rubbished by the UK's foremost expert on biological weapons - Dr. David Kelly, who, while a supporter of war on Iraq (why we'll never know now) was not prepared to collude in lying to the public - which is why you or your associates leaked his name to the press by a process of elimination and began a witch hunt of everyone in the BBC who had quoted Kelly, on the grounds that one quote from Gilligan paraphrased rather than exactly quoted him, despite it not changing the meaning of his words - which was ironic as you and your associates were actively changing the meaning of intelligence reports through the politicised Joint Intelligence Committee so published statements said the opposite of what the intelligence analysts had meant.




You then told a radio interviewer that the day of Kelly's death "was a day like any other" in which you enjoyed a good lunch with some friends and basically didn't give a toss.


You also colluded in distracting attention from the real question, which was not whether Saddam had any WMDs remaining, but whether he would be likely to use them on us, our allies or Iraqis or Iranians. Of course the 1991 Gulf War had already shown that when Saddam had chemical warheads for his scud missiles he wasn't prepared to use them on Israel or Coalition forces, using conventional warheads instead to avoid nuclear retaliation. So whether Saddam had WMDs or not was largely irrelevant, as he wouldn't have used them in any case (and the intelligence assessments before you helped re-write them all showed he had very little anyway).


After his use of chemical weapons on the Iranians and Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s the British and American governments continued funding his wars on a large scale and providing him with dual-use equipment. Your boss Tony Blair at the time refused to sign a single Early Day Motion condemning Saddam's genocide and calling for an end to British and US government support for Saddam.


Then twenty years later, when there was no chance of Saddam repeating this atrocity (as the US would have then jumped on it as a pretext for invasion) - and so any war would be bound to cost far more lives than it saved - you and your superiors suddenly decided, twenty years too late, to start a war that continues to cause deaths to this day on a far greater scale than Saddam's regime had at any time after 1991.


Coalition forces then used chemical weapons on Iraqis.