A dossier was published on 24 September 2002 which claimed that (this was one of the claims) "the Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so". The dossier was supposedly based on the intelligence agencies' assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. However, David Kelly (one of the weapons inspectors) claimed that this information was added by Alasdair Campbell. The government has been officially cleared in relation to Kelly (by its own ‘Hutton Inquiry’), except for Lord Butler, who admitted that the Government's presentation of the intelligence evidence had been subject to a degree of exaggeration. However, many people still aren’t satisfied with this conclusion, and Kelly ended up dead (he supposedly committed suicide but the circumstances have been called suspicious by many, i.e. the paramedics who found him etc etc).
Concerning the government’s efforts to fabricate reasons for the war, it is also worth considering the case of Lord Goldsmith, who initially argued that the war was illegal, before inexplicably changing his mind. Accusations of pressure from the top of the government are supported by the resignation of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office, who claimed that her department had consistently argued against the legality of the war, but that Goldsmith suddenly reversed his opinions.
Also, in a similar vein there is the example of Colin Powell who addressed the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003 to argue in favor of military action in Iraq. He claimed that "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.", but went on to retire in 2004. He appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" and stated that "It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading," and “for that I am disappointed, and I regret it.". He has called his misleading testimony before the UN a ‘blot on [his] record’. This undoubtedly echoes what has been happening in British politics surrounding the war.
In February 2003 there was another UK briefing on Iraq’s supposed WMD. It has turned out that much of the paper’s content was taken from a PhD thesis – a thesis that hypothesized about the existence of WMD but the paper presented it as fact.
Another document (the infamous ‘Yellowcake forgery’), was relied upon by the US administration, as it claimed that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from Niger. The document later turned out to be fake, and documents have since emerged showing that the US were aware of its dubious nature, but used it anyway.
No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.
The supposed links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein have remained equally elusive.
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