This is the moment when Jonathan Powell admitted that Downing St was set on war irrespective of whether Saddam had WMD or not. This admission contradicted all the carefully constructed lies of key war criminals David Manning, Alistair Campbell and Jonathan Powell himself.
The implications of this passage could not be more stark. The aim was war. Whether or not Iraq had WMD was irrelevant. There was no interest in knowing the truth about WMD. Indeed to know the truth would be negative.
A ten year old could understand the crucial importance of what Powell said here. But the hand picked committee of pro-war cronies failed completely to pick up on it.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: I mean, Sir David Manning and
8 Sir Jeremy Greenstock both said, but differently, that
9 they would have liked to have had more time, but you
10 don’t agree with that?
11 MR JONATHAN POWELL: No, we asked for more time repeatedly
12 from January onwards of the President, and we got more
13 time in each case. Eventually, by the time we got to
14 midMarch, he wasn’t going to give us more time and the
15 French veto knocked any chance
16 SIR RODERIC LYNE: He wasn’t going to give us more time. If
17 we had had more time, if the inspectors had had longer,
18 there had been longer to build up the picture and you
19 had continued these extraordinary diplomatic efforts
20 that you described, would there not have been a chance,
21 at that stage, of actually gathering the international
22 support that we had not managed to gather by then?
23 MR JONATHAN POWELL: No. I mean, if you think about it,
24 Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. We were
25 wrong. The intelligence was wrong. So, no matter how
82
1 long you had carried the inspections on, they weren’t
2 going to find anything, and, from what we know of
3 Saddam, it is extremely unlikely that he would have
4 cooperated. So we would have been in exactly the same
5 situation for months and months and months. There would
6 have been no discovery of weapons of mass destruction,
7 but 8
SIR RODERIC LYNE: But one way or the other they might have
9 built up a more convincing picture, if they had had more
10 time.
11 MR JONATHAN POWELL: A convincing picture of what?
12 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Well, a picture to convince the people
13 who weren’t not convinced by our arguments in March.
14 MR JONATHAN POWELL: But if there weren’t weapons of mass
15 destruction, we wouldn’t have been able you are
16 asking me in retrospect, “Would we have had more time?”
17 The answer is more time would have achieved nothing.
18 SIR RODERIC LYNE: Thank you very much.
Craig – you can’t complain that he hasn’t answered the question in a sufficiently peace loving way. You have said there is a smoking gun but by your explanation the smoking gun is what wasn’t said rather than what was said. Come on..
Then you claim that I am a “blind supporter of the war”. Why would you make up such a silly thing without any evidence? Ad hominem?
Larry,
The only thing I ever heard about the man was the press release which I published as the entry you referred to. The press release came to me from “AFP” which I took (wrongly as it turned out) to be Agence France Presse. I published it saying it was an accusation to be looked into and asking if anyone had the Police side of the story. That is the only time I ever heard of the man, and I had forgotten that until you mentioned it.
AJS
No. Powell’s whole argument in this passage only makes sense if he is positing an underlying presumption that going to war is a desirabloe end irrespective of whether or not Iraq had WMDs.
That is an essential point and any decent cross-examining lawyer would have picked him up on it. It is also a point which jumps out instantly to anybody who does not share the presumption that the war was a good thing anyway.
That is why I think it is a perfectly fair deduction that you supported the war. I note that you do not say I am wrong.
tony_opmoc
I really disagree with your analysis that somebody can’t be an agent of an Intelligence because what he writes is totally lacking in any Intelligence.
The best way to damage a blog would be to lower the level with stupid remarks so intelligent/deep thinking people will be put off.
Seems to me all you guys waxing lyrical re-the Iraq Inquiry are trying feebly to breathe life into one very dead parrot.
That’s the parrot called “British democracy”.It was always a chimera.Our system is an oligarchy dominated by an elite still be assured of ignorance and complete obedience from the public.
Unsurprisingly the leaders lost respect for the led long ago.They now treat us with contempt.
Wise up-Bilderberger sets the date for war.When Bush and Blair were ready to go at the end of 2002,Bilderberger insisted they wait till March 2003.They also agreed on increasing the price of oil not long after war had begun.
The idea that there is ever any public input into decisions around such issues as war and oil prices or who will be US or EU President,or Prime Minister is pure fantasy.
Do you think we should have had a vote on whether David Kelly should have lived or died? It was never going to happen.The system you believe in died eons ago.
Such issues are decided long in advance behind firmly closed doors in places like the CFR,RIIA,Trilaterals.
You guys have simply read too many official history books,gleaned phoney information from corporate film and media and therefore cannot see through the utter banality that is the Iraq Inquiry.
Do you want to argue for hours re-auditing the Fed/the Bank of England.You might just as well.Neither of those things are going to happen either.Just like Blair and Campbell are never going to be prosecuted in the Hague or anywhere else.
They have the system entirely sewn up.Most of that is down to your incredible naivety.You still view the world and your place within it through a hopelessly anachronistic left/right paradigm.
Look,the Fed bank-rolled both Trotsky and Hitler.Either system works just fine for the international synarchy who who pull the strings of the puppets you take seriously.
You have been conditioned to believe this is all “conspiracy theory”.No,the bullshit they’ve brainwashed you lot into believing is conspiracy theory.Only the “conspirators” in the official conspiracy theories are the patsies and useful idiots used at operational level.The real conspirators remain hidden.Though it should be obvious by now that they have become increasingly up front about their plans.
What with the EU President hard on the heels of his election referring to 2009 as the first year of “global government”.
David Rockefeller long ago at Bildergerger 1991 thanked the official media present-it goes without saying that the press never report on what was discussed-for their silence on the Group’s activities over the previous forty years.This,Rockefeller said,had helped condition the public into imminent acquiescence with the global government agenda Bilderberger had long been working to achieve.
You would be better filling your time by trying to follow the tracks left by these real conspirators rather than the ones that work for them.
Take a look at the Hague ICC set-up it’s paid for by Rothschild agent, George Soros.That means you guys can witter on forever about who should be prosecuted but you will never know how much Rothschild and Soros made on the back of the take-down of Yugoslavia and the geopolitical subversion of the Great Lakes region in central Africa.
No,all you’ll ever know is the official Serb and Hutu genocide accounts of those conflicts.
Sadly the world is not as black and white and Hollywood-friendly as these accounts would have you believe.
The conditions for ethnic conflict and war in Yugoslavia were created by the IMF.In geopolitical terms Yugoslavia was an impediment to the corporate looting operation the Rothschilds and their allies had begun in the former Soviet Union and were keen to extend to Yugoslavia.
In Rwanda the Tutsi RPF were encouraged to invade from Uganda by Britain and the US.The plane shoot-down that killed the Habyrimana and the Hutu President of Burundi that precipitated the genocide has never been investigated. It was Boutros-Ghali’s view that there had been CIA involvement.
On the back of that conflict the Great Lakes region has been racked by war that has facilitated the removal of regimes unwilling to play ball with the international synarchy’s corporate looters.
Are the RPF or the KLA war criminals going to be prosecuted any time soon?
No they were the ones on side with the corporate warmongers.
Forget talking and going on marches.
Educate yourself.
Craig, come on. Can any serious person buy your Agence France Presse claim? You typed the words “American Free Press” and then linked to RBN, a nutty right-wing American Internet radio station.
Apparently you do have company in espousing this anti-Semitic nutjob’s cause:
http://www.davidduke.com/general/christopher-bollyn-abused-by-chicagos-zionist-police-force_900.html
“It’s good that you confirmed that you think of these conspiracy thinkers as conspiraloons”.
Larry: I don’t think Craig quite said that, but I’m glad you finally got an answer to the question you’d been pestering him for and that you’re satisfied with it. I’m satisfied with it too. That’s a bit odd isn’t it?
I think Craig should have been a diplomat.
Well, when a BNP member starts quoting from indymedia, we know we are all safe.
“It is also a point which jumps out instantly to anybody who does not share the presumption that the war was a good thing…”
Sorry but it doesn’t jump out at me, and considering none of the other commentators in the media have spotted this alleged smoking gun I suspect it hasn’t jumped out at them either.
Powell is saying that asking for more time would have served no purpose because there was nothing to find. That’s what he thinks now. For your interpretation to work it would mean he believed that at the time i.e. he knew there were no WMD. As I said earlier, I believe Blair & Co. were as shocked as anyone when the WMD failed to materialise.
Tend to agree, but in fact can’t remember who Blair’s inner coterie was at the time, and whether Powell was part of it. Must re read Blair’s Wars. The ‘inner coterie’ (as I remember from Kampfner, around 5 people) knew very well that taking part in the attack, as the US’s second lieutenant, was inevitable, and that they therefore had to sell it to the public, whatever it took. Whether they ‘believed’ in WMD’s, and hoped they would find them or not, was irrelevant.
Surely Powell must have known of the over-riding imperative. In fact, he makes it very clear that he did, in what seems to be almost a cry for help.
Ruth,
I agree with you completely. I have seen it happen on numerous other blogs, such that they were totally trashed.
There are few defences against such censorship of free speech, by those determined to destroy by posting extremely large volumes of mindless crap, such that all sensible discussion is drowned.
Apostate,
Great post, but I thought Daniel Estulin’s book on Bilderberg poor, and the leaked comments of the attendee’s dire – as if despite their enormous wealth, they were complete blithering idiots.
I think the whole sorry mess will eventually self destruct, and people with integrity and courage will stand up to these psychopaths and say NO – we are Not going to go along with your lunatic Genocide.
Climategate and the Copenhagen farce were a good start.
These people are not shape shifting reptillians, they are just extremely rich, evil humans.
Tony
“Letter to Lord Advocate calls for arrest of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair”…
http://tinyurl.com/ykwfooa
KingofWelshNoir,
While you are perfectly entitled to your opinion, I was a British Ambassador at the time, not to mention a former Head of the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre set up specifically to monitor Iraqi weapons procurment.
I KNOW they knew there were no WMD.
You are quite correct in saying that:
“Powell is saying that asking for more time would have served no purpose because there was nothing to find. That’s what he thinks now”
Can you not see that if Powell’s objective was to find the truth, finding that Iraq had no WMD would have been most helpful and avoided a war? It can only be not useful if your object is to have a war rather than to ensure that Iraq has no WMD.
One of the Amazon reviews for Blair’s Wars (Kampfner, 2004):
This is a fascinating book, extremely well written, and most satisfyingly, the author remains constantly neutral in the face of all the facts. He only ever presents facts or source information…
…Some of the revelations in the book are astounding – Blair’s link to Halliburton is fascinating and worrying, as are plenty of the Alastair Campbell moments.
You also get a very clear view of the Britain-US relationship. From the dramatic events of the 11th of September, the main players in the relationship are detailed. The Doves v Hawks situation in the US is considered, and their influence on Blair and Bush (who genuinely comes across as a man unfit to preside, not through any deliberate effort on Kampfner’s part) is all interesting stuff.
actually, kingofwelshnoir, scrub that. We all knew they knew there were no WMD’s. It was insulting to be lied to so badly.
Craig,
“former Head of the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre set up specifically to monitor Iraqi weapons procurment”
So are you suggesting that Hussein did not have chemical weapons in 1990-1991?
MJ,
Bless him I can understand his modus operandi – probably to get some peace after all that hounding and the heart wrenching break from Annie whom he loved dearly. So yes he had an emotional breakdown, that together with holding still valid secrets (I presume he was cleared to ‘Top Secret’ as an agent. So many people are obsessed with 2012 as a key milestone – OK December 2012 marks the ending of the current b’ak’tun cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar – Hmmm maybe David sees it as a key date for the ‘end game’ in the middle East?
Lets play a game – can anyone see a ‘pincer movement’ with around 120,000 soldiers in Iraq, 80,000 in Afghanistan and oh say 20,000 right on the Pakistan border and 1000 or so special forces scattered from Ashgabat, Sheshtalan down to Tamp Kuh all working out of Kandahar and looking towards Multan.
As I say – just a game…
No, he definitely did, and I helped stop him getting more.
Even I knew, that they knew there were no WMD’s by a simple web search of the US & UK Govt and UN websites – which stated the facts quite clearly. If I could find that information, then any journalist could.
I did post the links several times, and could probably find my original posts if I spent some time searching for them but I can’t be bothered.
I Did March down Whitehall in Protest Though – which is the only time I have actually taken part in such a Political Event.
I did use to March when I was an Altar Boy in Oldham though. We had some amazing Processions in support of our Holy Pope – Far bigger than the Protestants.
But now I think we need to bring back Oliver Cromwell (with apologies to the Irish)
Tony
I’m glad someone finally brought up the upcoming events in December 2012! We should all get ready!
Cromwell? Never!
George,
That tinyurl redirect to sacc appears to be broken?
Major – is that John or rank? (lol)
I think we are ready – are we not?
No – it’s just a nickname! I’m getting a survival pack ready – what are you doing to prepare?
Out of order – but just seen Mrs Brown on the box – what a fab speech – Bless you darling – well done!
Major,
Anderson shelter in the garden!
Mark
Try it again.
OK Craig, I apologise, I get it now. JP in his final remark says ‘More time would have achieved nothing.’ But obviously that’s not true. More time could have definitively established there were no WMD and thus avoided the war. Sorry.
I didn’t know, by the way, that they knew there were no WMD all along. I always knew it was a pretext but assumed they believed the weapons existed. I mean, what were they expecting to happen once they took over Iraq and found nothing?
Apostate,
From what I know I entirely agree with you. In the UK there is a ‘government’ which directs the main policy of the government that we know. The secret government uses taxpayers’ money to fund their agenda.
Ruth, don’t agree with you. Have you read Mark Curtis’ Web of Deceit? It’s bad enough as it is.