| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Sogobia" |
| Date: |
24 Oct 2004 11:55:16 PM |
| Object: |
Former Deputy Prime Minister calls Blair a liar. |
Heseltine attacks Blair over Iraq
Sun Oct 24 2004
Former Deputy Prime Minister Lord Heseltine has accused Tony Blair of
"lying" to take Britain into war with Iraq.
Fellow Conservative veterans Lord Hurd and Kenneth Clarke have joined Lord
Heseltine in a broadside against the Prime Minister's handling of the crisis
in the Middle East.
Former Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd and ex-Chancellor Mr Clarke stopped short
of claiming the PM lied about his fears over Iraq's supposed weapons of mass
destruction, but Lord Hurd suggested he had "deceived himself" over the case
for war.
The attacks from the three heavyweights of the Thatcher and Major
administrations go beyond the official position of Michael Howard's current
Conservative frontbench. All three opposed the decision to go to war last
year.
All three ex-Cabinet ministers, interviewed for ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby
programme, rejected Mr Blair's account of the redeployment of the Black
Watch to the US-administered zone around Baghdad.
Lord Heseltine, a former Defence Secretary, said the move was far too big to
be a purely operational matter, as the Government has suggested. He linked
it to the upcoming presidential elections in the US, and denounced the
commitment to remove the 850 men by Christmas as "militarily extraordinarily
ill-judged".
Lord Hurd described the redeployment as "a highly political decision", while
Mr Clarke said it was "absurd".
Asked whether he regarded Mr Blair as a liar, Lord Heseltine responded: "I
think he has lied about the situation in the Middle East.
"We were told that there was a threat. We were told there were weapons of
mass destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction; there was no
threat."
Mr Blair's insistence that he honestly believed intelligence that has since
turned out to be faulty was dismissed as "semantics" by Lord Heseltine, who
said the PM was "trapped" into going to war by his desire to stand by his
American allies.
http://www.itv.com/news/index_1739899.html
--
They Knew...
Despite the whitewash, we now know that the Bush administration was warned
before the war that its Iraq claims were weak
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/they_knew_0802/
--
www.iraqbodycount.net
www.costofwar.com
http://icasualties.org/oif/
.
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