Blair’s Iraq war lies ‘based on taxi driver’s gossip’

This video says about itself:

This is a video highlighting the propaganda and lies told by the Bush administration in order to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

These lies included:

– Iraq supported Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups
– Iraq was developing nuclear weapons
– Iraq had huge quantities of chemical and biological weapons
– Iraq had a fleet of unmanned vehicles to deliver these weapons
– Iraq has failed to destroy its chemical and biological weapons
– Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Africa
– Iraq was amassing these weapons to use against the USA and its allies
– The US security services knew where these weapons were
– The insurgency would be short lived
– The US military were wrong about the number of troops required and Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney knew best

There were plenty of others …

Next, quotes from the British Conservative party. Which supported the Iraq war, based on the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Published in the London Times. Owned by Rupert Murdoch, who, before the Iraq war started, did more than anyone else to ram pro-war lies down people’s throats.

December 8, 2009

Gossiping taxi driver source of Iraq 45-minute WMD claim

Michael Evans, Defence Editor

An Iraqi taxi driver who overheard two military commanders talking about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was allegedly the “intelligence sub-source” quoted in the Government’s dossier to prove that chemical missiles could be fired in 45 minutes, according to a report by a Tory MP.

Adam Holloway, a former army officer and Conservative MP for Gravesham, told The Times last night that he had been given information that the taxi driver’s recollections of the conversation in the back of his taxi had helped to form part of the dossier. The controversial dossier was published in September 2002 and supported the Government’s case for invading Iraq the following March.

When the information was acquired by MI6, a footnote was written on the page of an intelligence report sent to No 10 stating that the claim was “verifiably inaccurate”. “But the footnote was ignored by Downing Street,” Mr Holloway claimed.

During the review of intelligence behind the Government’s case for invading Iraq, carried out by Lord Butler, the former Cabinet Secretary, it was revealed that MI6 had accepted that some of the sources and subsources of information in the dossier were regarded as no longer credible.

Mr Holloway said that one of the sub-sources was the taxi driver who had eavesdropped on Iraqi military officers while they chatted in his car two years before the invasion.

The Butler report was scathing about the way in which the intelligence was used in the dossier but absolved Tony Blair’s Government of deliberately misleading the public about Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Holloway claimed that the taxi driver had fed his information to an MI6 source — a senior Iraqi military officer. The information was then presented to Downing Street for inclusion in the dossier, heavily footnoted to indicate its lack of credibility.

The claim that Saddam could fire chemical weapons at British troops in Cyprus at 45 minutes’ notice was one of the most controversial components of the 2002 dossier. The Butler report said that the Government should have made clear that the weapons were battlefield systems, not missiles that could have been targeted at the United Kingdom. …

The allegations are due to be published in a report on the Iraq war by Mr Holloway …

Mr Holloway says that pressure was put on MI6 to come up with intelligence after Mr Blair met President George W Bush in Texas in April 2002. The Chilcot inquiry has heard that this was the meeting at which a plan for Iraq was first discussed.

In his report The Failure of British Political and Military Leadership in Iraq, Mr Holloway writes: “Under pressure from Downing Street to find anything to back up the WMD case, SIS [MI6] were squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all.”

See also in another Conservative paper, here.

Boris Johnson has received a formal letter of warning after using public money for party political purposes after using his official mayoral Twitter account to celebrate the fact that the Sun had ditched Labour and decided to back the Tories: here.

Blair informed Iraq had been disarmed, still invaded: here.

JUST before Jack Straw appeared before the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday, he released a 25-page memorandum which explained that his decision to support the Iraq war was the hardest of his life: here.

A little-known loophole in UK company law is being used by Tony Blair to keep his finances secret, the Guardian can disclose: here.

US Bush relied on ‘drunken liar’ to justify war. ‘Crazy’ Iraqi spy was full of misinformation, says report: here.

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• Video of the Day: Bill Hicks on the Iraq War (libertyblitzkrieg.com)
• Tam Dalyell – ‘Blair should face war crimes trial’ (scotsman.com)
• UK Spy Warns of Iraq War Disclosures (consortiumnews.com)
• Colin Powell Calls Out Cheney For Iraq Mistake (pbs.org)
• Report: U.S. Knew Of Saddam Hussein’s Use Of Chemical Weapons And Supplied Intelligence Used In Attack (jonathanturley.org)
• Britain can’t act on Syria till it faces up to the spectre of Iraq | John Kampfner (theguardian.com)