posted 07-10-2003 11:00 AM            

10.7.2003

Last week I supported the BBC in its confrontation with the Blair
government. Today I was shocked to hear key BBC personnel imply
that Blair was NOT lying over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Andrew Gilligan even said this morning that `nobody` is suggesting that
Blair is a liar, a suggestion which was echoed minutes later by John
Humphrys.

The apparently concerted statements raise the possibility of a backroom deal
between the BBC and the Blair government.

In fact Clare Short, who resigned from the Cabinet on the issue, commanded the
main headline in Gilligan's old newspaper the Sunday Telegraph in June with
her claim that `Blair lied` to the cabinet. Later her phrase `honourable
deception` went all round the media.

The suggestion that Blair and Campbell are honest but mistaken has been
Blair's bottom line since before the war began. Its strongest media
proponent is BBC political editor Andrew Marr who depends on co-operation
from 10 Downing Street for his witty and mildly critical reports on BBC news
programmes.

As a barrister Blair knows that lying to the Cabinet, Parliament and the
public to create a false pretence for a war is a serious criminal act
especially as most of the world judged the war illegal from the start. It
would strengthen the case for the war crimes investigation which CND, Father
of the House Tam Dalyell and many others have already called for.

It is a matter for psychologists whether Blair is a liar, a fast talker who
does not care, or someone who does not know the difference between the truth
and a lie, but the criminal justice system makes little distinction.

Many people have noticed the close links that Blair has with the oil
companies, the unelected Bush regime, Silvio Berlusconi's mafia-linked
government, the Murdoch empire, and Sharon's Likud, all enemies of the
Labour Party. Blair admitted on the BBC before the invasion that he was a
prime mover in the seizure of Iraq, just as he was in the bombing of Serbia.
His statements echo the positions of the neoconservative cabal in Washington.

It is possible that the Labour Party will recognise in the coming months
that Blair is both a liability and firmly in the camp of its traditional
enemies, and will find a way to dump him.

I call on the BBC to recognise that any deal with the Blair government to
mislead the public on the question of Blair's integrity puts the BBC at huge
risk in the future. I earnestly hope that today's misstatements represent a
tactical retreat and that the BBC will continue to report the many figures
who believe that Blair has indeed been lying.

Notes:

Ian Henshall is also chair of INK the trade association for the UK's
alternative print media, publisher of www.911dossier.co.uk, and owner of The
Tea and Coffee Plant

The key lies

1. The Niger documents. Blair's claimed reason to target Iraq in the first
place in summer 2002 was the alleged nuclear threat. Blair stated he had
convincing intelligence that Iraq was trying to build nuclear weapons. When
the Niger documents were eventually handed over to the weapons inspectors in
February 2003 they ascertained within hours that the documents were crude
forgeries. In his state of the union address in January 2003 Bush said that
Blair had presented him with evidence of Iraq's nuclear capability.

A senior US official has gone public to state that he investigated the Niger
documents in spring 2002 for the CIA and informed Cheney that the Niger
documents were forgeries and that the US government warned the UK of this.
Blair now says he had other information but has refused to present it either
to the arms inspectors or to Parliament. In the last few days the US has
retracted the Niger lie and is now trying to suggest that it did not come
from Blair. It has been reported that the Niger documents originally came
from Blair's ally Berlusconi.

2. The 45 minutes assertion. Blair and Campbell have put up a smokescreen,
suggesting that the issue is whether they falsified intelligence reports.
But the issue is that Blair knowingly misrepresented an unreliable report
from a single uncorroborated source as a solid fact, lying to Parliament.

3. Blair has claimed that he had the full support of Whitehall civil
servants for
his assertions. But it was reported by the Commons Foreign Affairs Select
Committee that Cambell had chaired meetings of the Joint Intelligence
Committee. It has also emerged that the Cabinet Committee responsible for
the war preparations was rarely attended by Brown or Prescott and that its
power was in any case usurped by a smaller committee which consisted only of
Blair and a handful of special advisors.

4. The dodgy dossier. Blair's most recent is was that he stands by this
document but Cambell has apologised for it. Blair lied to Parliament by
stating that this document came from intelligence sources. In fact it was
mainly plagiarised from a years old document on the internet.

5. The French veto. In the days before the war Blair's henchmen,
led by Gordon Brown, made puerile attacks on Jacques Chirac and stated
that they were ignoring the UN because the French had promised to veto any
resolution for war. In fact the French said they would veto a resolution
before the arms inspectors had been given time to report. Chirac confirmed
that he would support a war if the inspectors reported they were thwarted.

6. The Iraqi non-compliance. Blair's people claimed in the days before the
war that Iraq was not complying with UN resolutions. But Hans Blix said that
all the outstanding issues had been resolved. Many suspect that it was
precisely because of this that the invasion went ahead.

7. The alleged chemical weapons stocks. Bush and Blair repeated figures of
massive alleged stocks of precursors and chemical weapons based on
unaccounted imports from around 1990. However they must have known that
these materials would have degraded and become unusable.

8. The second resolution. Blair implied for months that he would only go to
war if a second US resolution explicitly backed an invasion. This acted as a
smokescreen to avoid the question of whether a unilateral attack was
illegal. As recently as Janury 2003 Blair implied that he would only defy
the UN if there was an `unreasinable veto`, a term which as a lawyer Blair
knows is nonsense.

9. The democracy lie. Blair and Bush always claimed that their subordinate
motive was to bring democracy to Iraq. However the occupation forces have
now made threats against any Iraqi who calls for a US/UK withdrawal from
Iraq, even using peaceful democratic means. They have announced plans to
establish permanent bases in Iraq and stated thet they intend to stay there
for years.

9. The Afghan lie. Blair said in autumn 2001 during and after the Afghan
invasion that there would be an attack on Iraq only with `one hundred
percent proof` that Iraq wad s involved in the 911 attacks.