'Witch Hunt' Don't forget Hans Blix, witness to the 'Iraq deception'

[G_j]

Blix's take on the dishonesty of rushing to invade Iraq bookends well with Clarke's allegations.


http://www.truthout.com/docs_04/030904F.shtml

Hans Blix: Bush and Blair Behaved as if
They Were on a 'Witch Hunt' Over Iraqi Weapons
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm
Independent UK

Monday 08 March 2004

The Monday Interview: Retired Chief UN Weapons Inspector

<snip>
What Mr Blix still cannot understand is why his doubts and those of his professional teams of trained inspectors failed to make an impression on Mr Blair and President George Bush, who continued to mislead the public with categorical assertions about the existence of WMD with the fervency of religious crusaders. He accuses the British and US governments of "distorting" the reports of the weapons inspectors, who had said that amounts of chemical and biological weapons remained unaccounted for. This became an accusation that Iraq "retained" chemical and biological weapons.

Worse, he says, the Bush administration actively sought to undermine the inspectors, accusing them of playing down the threat from Saddam's WMD, particularly after Mr Blix refused to brand the discovery of an Iraqi drone as a "smoking gun". He adds: "I still find it insulting if they believed that our assessments were prompted by a wish to avoid finding incriminating evidence."

He also feels insulted by the lack of consideration with which Americans treated the inspectors.
<snip>

Mr Blix's doubts increased further after the war, when Saddam's chief weapons expert, Amer al-Saadi, was taken away in a US Jeep, still insisting on the official Iraq line that all the WMD had been destroyed after the first Gulf War in 1991. "It was only then that I said to myself, 'There is nothing there'."
<snip>

...After a conversation with John Wolf, Assistant US Secretary of State for Non-proliferation, who is accused of obtaining secret information from his office, he says: "I understood his formulations to say, 'The witches exist; you are appointed to deal with these witches; testing whether there are witches is only a dilution of the witch-hunt'."
<snip>
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A scathing interview with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air"

http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml?todayDate=03/17/2004


Listen to Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix


In his new book, Disarming Iraq, Blix writes about what happened in the months leading up to the war in Iraq last year. Blix, formerly the head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, has been named chairman of the newly formed International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which began its work in January 2004.

[G_j]

1. I'd like to put together quotes

from Clarke, Blix, O'Neil, Woodward, Wilson, Kwiatowski and others concerning the rush to invade Iraq and the deliberate distortion of evidence.

any contributions?