Scotland Sunday Herald calls on Blair to resign

http://www.sundayherald.com/39427

Sunday's lead editorial:

Now we know. We were lied to about WMD. So now Blair should go

It is now entirely appropriate to put a capital I in front of WMD when we look back on the war in Iraq. I standing for imaginary. With the resignation last week of the top US official charged with leading a 1000-strong team of experts to hunt for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, saying that they can’t find any, we now must face the shocking truth that we were taken to war on false pretences. Did the Prime Minister, knowing the shaky foundations of the intelligence he was being offered, nevertheless decide to massage the facts to make the case for war alongside the US? The verdict of this week’s report by Lord Hutton will not necessarily address this issue head on, since his remit was to look into the causes of the death of the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientist, Dr David Kelly. That took him into the contents of the government’s two dossiers of “evidence” against Saddam Hussein. But it was tangential, rather than direct. Now far more is required in terms of a wider judicial probe that has the potential to be even more politically explosive than Hutton.
As head of the Pentagon’s Iraq Survey Group, David Kay had more than nine months inside Iraq where his CIA-backed investigation team turned up nothing. His conclusion after the months of searching was not shrouded in the diplomatic fog which befuddled the explorations of the UN team of inspectors led by Hans Blix. Kay said he did not think there had been a large-scale weapons programme inside Iraq since 1991. Blix has said much the same thing to the UN. Even the new head of the ISG, Charles Duelfer, believes his search will come up with another zero.

It is now time for Tony Blair to end the verbal sophistry. Blair can no longer offer his often repeated excuse of wait-and-see.

... Let’s hope that instead of trying to imagine himself out of this nightmare, Blair will at long last tell us the truth and properly accept responsibility for misleading parliament and the nation. He should then do the only honourable thing and go.

more

It's time for Labour to flush Blair. :hurts:

a crashing and humiliating fall from power, disgrace among his own, a turning away of his friends one by one, and a weakening of the unity in Labor that he brought.

why did he do it? We'll never know, but at least others may learn from his errors.

$5.4 billion in vital and mostly humanitarian supplies for the ordinary people of Iraq were being obstructed by the United States, backed by Britain. Professor Karol Sikora, head of the World Health Organisation's cancer treatment programme, who had been to the same hospitals in Basra that I saw, told me: "The excuse that certain drugs can be converted into weapons of mass destruction is ludicrous. I saw wards where dying people were even denied pain-killers."

That was more than three years ago. Now come forward to a hot May day in 2003, and here is Blair - shirt open, a man of the troops, if not of the people - lifting a child into his arms, for the cameras, and just a few miles from where I watched toddler after toddler suffer for want of treatment that is standard in Britain and which was denied as part of a medieval siege approved by Blair. Remember, the main reason that these life-saving drugs and equipment were blocked, the reason Professor Sikora and countless other experts ridiculed, was that essential drugs and even children's vaccines could be converted to weapons of mass destruction.

Just prior to Wednesday's (Jan. 28) release of the Hutton Report,

MI-6 spys have made a pre-emptive attack against Blair's political spinners,

charging the Blair government with "Cherry Picking" intelligence to promote war.

The report can be found by going to the Sunday Herald link provided by Newsjock.

another snip

Although Washington and the Pentagon will care less about Kay’s verdict than will Downing Street, President Bush continues to play word games. In his State Of The Union address last week, he said that the war to overthrow Saddam had been necessary, and if action had not been taken then the “dictator’s WMD programmes would continue to this day”. Bush may feel that whatever he says, his re-election is in the bag. But that kind of lie and arrogance may yet turn out to be a potent debate in this US election year. In Britain, if there have been lies, then the time for them to stop is now. What appeared in the so-called dossiers of evidence was not the truth. What Blair told parliament about Saddam’s WMD was not true. And still the prospect of the truth seems remote. Taking a country, this country, into war on a lie is the greatest crime a Prime Minister can carry out. In order to remove the now growing doubts over his integrity, Tony Blair has no option but to order a full inquiry to establish the truth. Anything less and what is left of his reputation will vanish quicker than he can write a letter of resignation.

</snip>

Let's hope this gets some play over here...do we have any mainstream media with this much courage to say the emperor has no clothes?

s_m

On edit: Here's another story from the same edition of the Sunday Herald:
http://www.sundayherald.com/39548
<snip>
Spy chiefs warn PM: don’t blame us for war
.EXCLUSIVE.
By Neil Mackay, Investigations Editor

BRITISH intelligence chiefs launched a pre-emptive strike against Tony Blair last night, ahead of the publication of the Hutton report, and blamed the government for pressurising them into cherry-picking intelligence to justify the war on Iraq.
The UK’s leading spies believe the political fallout from the publication on Wednesday of the Hutton Inquiry’s report will result in an attempt by the Prime Minister and his senior Cabinet colleagues to blame the intelligence services for the shoddy information which was used by the government to convince the British people and parliament that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were a threat to the UK.
</snip>
more...

And this morning, I believe on CNN, I am sure I heard that Cheney said this weekend that Bush does not owe an apology to the American people, but that the intelligence community owes an apology to Bush!!
That will go over great! Geeeeeeez.

s_m