Revealed! Tony Blair's secret weapon of mass deception

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March 13, 2007

LONDON: The former United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, has said the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, replaced "question marks with exclamation marks" in intelligence dossiers used to justify the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Dr Blix, who led the UN search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until June 2003, said a later discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programs had deliberately embellished the case for war.

Blair's Government published a dossier before the invasion which claimed Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and could deploy some within 45 minutes.

"I do think they exercised spin. They put exclamation marks instead of question marks," Dr Blix said in an interview with Britain's Sky News yesterday.

more
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/revealed-tony-blairs-secret-weapon-of-mass-deception/2007/03/12/1173548109962.html

scrolling at the top of Sky News
FORMER UN WEAPONS INSPECTOR HANS BLIX HAS TOLD SKY NEWS THE IRAQ WAR WAS ILLEGAL. DR BLIX CRITICISE TONY BLAIR, SAYING HE WASN’T STRAIGHT WITH THE PUBLIC
http://news.sky.com/skynews/uknews

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1. figurative

I would hope he's speaking figuratively rather than literally.