British intelligence agencies accepted false information even after a source told them of a supposed chemical weapon that was remarkably similar to one from the 1996 movie The Rock, my colleague Ewen MacAskill has learned from the report.
The incident is just one of a series of blunders described by the Chilcot report committed by Britain’s overseas spy agency, the Secret Intelligence Service in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In the incident, the report describes a source providing details about spherical glass containers allegedly filled with chemical weapons at an establishment in Iraq.
MI6 at the time defended the authenticity of the source and the material, according to the Chilcot report. “However, it drew attention to the fact that the source’s description of the device and its spherical glass contents was remarkably similar to the fictional chemical weapon portrayed in the film The Rock,” the report says.
In the 1996 movie, Nicolas Cage, playing an FBI chemical warfare specialist, joins Sean Connery, playing a former British spy, to prevent chemical weapons being launched against San Francisco.
The similarity between the movie and the source’s alleged device had been noted when the MI6 report was first circulated on 11 and 23 September 2002, well before the Iraq invasion in March 2003.
But this and other bogus claims were not formally withdrawn by MI6 until 29 July 2003, four months after the invasion, Chilcot reports.
In a devastating finding, Chilcot said: “SIS did not inform No 10 or others that the source who had provided the reporting issued on 11 and 23 September 2002 about production of chemical and biological agent had been lying to SIS.”
Forgive my ignorance, but is there any such inquiry going on stateside which would see Bush et al criticised in similar terms?
If you had paid attention to the primary campaign in 2008 and 2016, and the rest of the general campaign this year, you would recognize that the be all end all arbiter of all judgment of the past twenty years of American politics was Hillary's decision to vote in favor of the Iraq war. Its literally the first thing some of the Sanders/Trump/Republican people bring up as some kind of proof of her judgment or anything related to the Iraq war. You would have no idea any other person had any kind of responsibility except for the Junior Senator from New York State.
no. we don't reflect on things.
plus, washington is too busy trying to crucify hillary.
The moral problem for the left is that it is impossible to have a system in which aggression is punished, whether by execution of those held responsible or some other means, without the aggression needed to secure it.
The moral problem for the left is that it is impossible to have a system in which aggression is punished, whether by execution of those held responsible or some other means, without the aggression needed to secure it.
From Blair's press conference:
“Nowhere in this report do they say what they believe would have happened if we had taken the decision [not to invade].
We might have had the same situation in Iraq today as we have in Syria[
In Syria today more than double the amount of people who died in Iraq died in Syria*”
* This is approximately correct when using the figures from body counts. Other methodologies produce higher fatality figures, but given that we are comparing Iraq and Syria it is important to use the same methodology. Also, per capita this disparity is even more severe.
This is the point I made when me and Droid were having our Iraq debate earlier in the year.
I'm not sure that justice and punishment have to be the same things.
Also I don't think that a moral opposition to the death penalty is necessarily a left wing position. A liberal one certainly. It should not be used on an industrial scale against the working class / black population as is the case in the USA. Best used sparingly, if at all.