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| We Won't Find WMDs: British Officials |
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| Thursday, July 10 2003 @ 05:49 PM GMT
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"U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted earlier on
Thursday that the U.S. had no fresh intelligence about weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq before going to invade Iraq
.."
LONDON - As Senior British officials virtually ruled out
the possibility of finding such weapons, British Prime Minister
maintained a defiant tone that "concrete evidence" of the products
of Saddam Hussein's weapons program would be unearthed.
The
BBC - which in late May reported that a British government dossier
on Iraq in September was "sexed up" to help justify military action
- quoted unnamed senior government officials Thursday, July 10, as
saying they no longer believed weapons of mass destruction will be
unearthed in Iraq.
"Senior government sources are telling me
that they no longer believe that physical weapons of mass
destruction are actually going to be found in Iraq," the BBC's
respected political editor Andrew Marr reported.
"They don't
think that there were no weapons program. They believe that
interviews with Iraqi scientists, perhaps documentation will be
uncovered which will reveal the extent of program that were then in
the past."
"But when it comes to physical evidence I have to
say that the belief that that will be found and can be paraded in
front of the cameras seems to be trickling into the sand," Marr said
on BBC television.
‘Dramatic Development’
Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said the admissions were
a "dramatic development" and ex-Prime Minister John Major has called
for a full independent inquiry into the basis for invasion.
"This is a dramatic development. Remember the government
told us that Saddam had real weapons, which made him a real and
present danger - and that's why we had to go to war there and then,”
said Cook, who resigned as leader of the Commons in the run-up to
the invasion.
Cook told the BBC that "Parliament voted for
war because it was told that Saddam did have real weapons of mass
destruction, adding that it would have been better to have given the
U.N. weapons inspectors more time to finish their job, rather than
rushing to the invasion.
"They said we could not afford the
time to let Hans Blix and the U.N. weapons inspectors finish the
job.
"We now know that was wrong and we could have let them
finish their task and they would have told us what we have now
discovered but we did not need to have a war to find out."
"We would now know what we're being told, that Saddam did
not have those weapons... and we'd have found out without a war in
which thousands were killed,” said Cook.
Defiant
Blair
On his part, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
still believes "concrete evidence" of the products of Saddam
Hussein's weapons program will be found.
“He is absolutely
confident that we will find evidence not only of weapons of mass
destruction program but concrete evidence of the product of those
programs as well,” said the prime minister’s spokesman.
Blair's spokesman would not be drawn on whether actual
weapons would be found.
"This is another BBC exclusive based
on another anonymous source,” he said.
Blair told MPs
earlier this week: "I have absolutely no doubt at all that we will
find evidence of weapons of mass destruction programs."
Number 10 insisted Blair had not shifted his language to
talk about programs, rather than weapons themselves, said the BBC.
Earlier, Downing Street said the prime minister stood by
what he told a Commons committee. Blair told MPs then: "I have
absolutely no doubt at all that we will find evidence of weapons of
mass destruction programs”.
As was the case in many of his
speeches and statements before the invasion, Blair had once stressed
that “Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has
continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military
plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be
activated within 45 minutes”.
But the BBC quoted a
government source who said that government's September dossier on
Iraq was "sexed up", against the wishes of intelligence chiefs, by
inserting the claim that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological
weapons within 45 minutes.
The statement put the BBC at
loggerheads with the British government, as a number of officials
called on the public broadcaster to apologize for reporting it.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted earlier on
Thursday that the U.S. had no fresh intelligence about weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq before going to invade Iraq.
“The
coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new
evidence of Iraq's pursuit" of weapons of mass destruction,”
Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"We acted
because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light -- through the
prism of our experience on 9-11."
Rumsfeld’s statements came
one day after the White House acknowledged that U.S. President
George W. Bush overstated ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's
alleged efforts to obtain uranium for nuclear arms.
-[IslamOnline & News Agencies: IslamOnline.net]
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