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  Weapons of Mass Destruction June 8, 2003 Reporter : Ross Coulthart Producer : Ann Buchner  In his State of the Union address in January, President George W. Bush said: "The British Government has learned Saddam Hussein has recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."Those words helped justify a war, with the President fanning the flames of fear that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking nuclear weapons. And Tony Blair added fuel to the fire by claiming the Iraqi regime could deploy weapons of mass destruction within just 45 minutes. Now those words have come back to haunt both of them. Saddam's African uranium has proved to be a lie. As for that 45 minute warning — well, the intelligence supporting that claim appears to be dubious too. And despite more than two months of searching and George Bush's claims to the contrary, the U.S. has yet to find any of Iraq's alleged arsenal. Last week, President Bush said: "We have discovered a weapons system, biological labs that Iraq denied she had." But Bush's critics will need more than two half-empty trucks to convince them that a war based on disarmament has been justified. At last week's G8 summit, President Bush was busy mending fences with leaders he had clashed with over the war: "As we go forward we will show the world that friends can disagree .." But Tony Blair was fending off heated allegations his government had talked up intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the attack on Iraq. "I stand absolutely 100 per cent behind the evidence based on intelligence that we presented to people and let me make one or two things clear. Firstly the idea that we doctored intelligence reports in order to invent some notion about a 45 minute capability of delivering WMDs ... is completely and utterly false. Every single piece of intelligence was cleared very properly by the Joint Intelligence Committee. Secondly, the idea as apparently Clare Short (a Blair Cabinet Minister who resigned in protest against the war in Iraq) is saying that I made some secret agreement back last September that we would invade Iraq in any event at a particular is also completely and utterly untrue." Back home, the British PM continued to weather allegations that he'd manipulated the truth and misled parliament. The Tory Opposition Leader, Iain Duncan Smith, told Parliament: "The truth is - nobody believes a word the PM is saying." Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat Leader, said: "Who is the public to trust if the Government are letting it be known that they cannot wholeheartedly trust their security services?" And the former Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, who also resigned as Leader of the House over the war, asked Tony Blair in Parliament: "Could he not save the intelligence and security committee a lot of time of an enquiry by correcting the record now on the alleged uranium from Africa and the alleged weapons ready in 45 minutes and say that he regrets that he gave information to the House that turned out to be wrong.." While the British Parliament voted against an independent judicial inquiry, the CIA is conducting an internal review into intelligence gathering. And in Australia, Greens Senator Bob Brown was angry that the Opposition has allowed John Howard to cruise through the controversy, calling for a Senate inquiry. "I believe that the Howard Government deceived the Australian people ... I believe the PM selected the information to prosecute his engagement of Australian personnel and Australian Defence forces in Iraq — they are very serious charges and you cannot have charges like that met with a wall of silence or an inactive Opposition who says: 'Oh it sounds too hard or there might be barriers there, so let's do nothing.' Labor has to get off its backside and take the Government on on this one." As the Coalition continues to search Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, and US soldiers sift through tonnes of rubble to find a shred of evidence that Saddam Hussein is dead, retiring UN chief inspector Hans Blix, poured one last bucket of cold water on Allied intelligence (which may be a contradiction in terms): "The commission has not at any time during the inspections in Iraq found evidence of the continuation or assumption of programmes of weapons of mass destruction, or significant quantities of proscribed items whether from pre-1991 or later. ...As I noted before, this does not necessarily mean that such items could not exist, they might. There remains a long list of items unaccounted for, but it is not justified to jump to the conclusion that something exists, just because it is unaccounted for." And the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, came up with a classic bit of Pentagon logic: ""We haven't found Saddam Hussein and I don't know anyone running around saying he didn't exist. It takes time. Does that sound reasonable?" But now it seems the US public doesn't care whether weapons of mass destruction are found. In a recent Gallup Poll, more than two thirds of Americans said they didn't think they had been misled about the threat from Iraq. And at week's end, President Bush told his troops in Qatar: "One thing else we've done is we've made sure that Iraq is not going to serve as an arsenal for terrorist groups ... This is a man who spent decades hiding tools of mass murder. He knew the inspectors were looking for him. You know better than me he has a big country in which to hide them. We're on the look, we'll reveal the truth. One thing is certain: no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime because the Iraqi regime is no more." |
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