- LONDON (Reuters) - Former
U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix on Thursday attacked the "spin
and hype" behind U.S. and British allegations of banned Iraqi weapons
used to justify war against Saddam Hussein.
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- Blix, who said this week he believed Iraq had destroyed
its weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago, told BBC radio that Washington
and London "over-interpreted" intelligence about Baghdad's weapons
programs.
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- Comparing them to medieval witch-hunters, he said the
two countries convinced themselves on the basis of evidence which was later
discredited, including forged documents about alleged attempts to buy uranium
for nuclear weapons.
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- "In the Middle Ages when people were convinced there
were witches they certainly found them. This is a bit risky," said
Blix, whose inspectors left Iraq on the eve of war in March after just
a few months of inspections.
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- Blix said a pre-war British dossier on Iraqi weapons
"lead the reader to the conclusions that are a little further reaching"
than was the case.
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- "What in a way stands accused is the culture of
spin, the culture of hyping...Advertisers will advertise a refrigerator
in terms that we don't quite believe in, but we expect governments to be
more serious and have more credibility," he said.
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- Allegations in the British dossier that Iraq could deploy
chemical and biological weapons at 45 minutes notice have come under scrutiny
at a judicial inquiry, which has revealed that the claim referred only
to short-range battlefield munitions, not long-range missiles as was widely
believed.
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- Before ordering the invasion that toppled Saddam, President
Bush talked of an imminent threat posed by Iraqi weapons as a prime justification
for war.
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- British Prime Minister Tony Blair put Saddam's alleged
weapons program at the heart of his case for supporting the U.S. invasion
of Iraq in March.
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- But five months after Saddam's overthrow, no banned weapons
have been found.
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- Bush and Blair have said the search will take time and
that evidence will eventually be uncovered.
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- "The patience that they require for themselves now
was not anything that they wanted to give to us," said Blix, whose
inspectors were forced to pull out of Iraq in March after just three and
a half months' work.
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- He said the few "minor things" which his teams
had uncovered in Iraq were more likely to have been "debris from the
past" than "tips of the iceberg" of an existing weapons
program.
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- Blix's comments have been echoed by his successor Demetrius
Perricos, who told Reuters it was becoming "more and more difficult
to believe stocks (of WMD) were there" in Iraq.
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