Posted on 01/21/2004 6:54:23 AM PST by areafiftyone
LONDON, Jan 21 (Reuters) - David Kelly, the weapons expert whose suicide rocked the British government, believed Iraq did pose an immediate threat, the BBC said on Wednesday, just days before a critical report into his death.
Kelly told the BBC before the war that Iraq's weapons could have taken "days or weeks" to deploy. But he did not back Prime Minister Tony Blair's notorious claim that they could be fired in 45 minutes.
The failure to find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- the primary Anglo-American motive for war -- has eroded public trust in Blair, putting him in the most precarious position of his six-and-a-half-year premiership.
Next week is crunch time for the beleaguered prime minister.
Judge Lord Hutton will release his potentially explosive report into Kelly's suicide on Wednesday, one day after a make-or-break parliamentary vote that Blair could lose.
Kelly slashed his wrist in a deserted copse last July after being revealed as the source for a BBC reporter's claim that Blair's team inflated the threat posed by Iraq, to justify war.
Blair was again forced to defend his motives for the Iraq war before parliament on Wednesday.
Charles Kennedy, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats, accused Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush of downgrading their assessment of Iraq's armament from "weapons" to "weapons programmes" and now to "weapons of mass destruction-related programme activities" -- a phrase used by Bush on Tuesday.
But a defiant Blair responded: "There can be no doubt at all that those weapons existed, absolutely no doubt."
Nevertheless, he has acknowledged that weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq.
BBC TAKES A HIT
Kelly's comments on Iraq's weapons -- never previously broadcast -- were to be aired on Wednesday evening in a BBC "Panorama" programme that reconstructed the run-up to his death and Hutton's inquiry.
Asked if Iraq was an "immediate threat", Kelly, a former United Nations weapons inspector, said: "Yes."
"Even if they're not actually filled and deployed today, the capability exists to get them filled and deployed within a matter of days and weeks," he said in the October 2002 interview with the BBC, which was submitted to Hutton.
Kelly was outed last July as the source behind an explosive report by BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan.
Gilligan reported that the government included in a September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons the claim that some weapons of mass destruction could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order to do so, knowing it to be wrong.
Hutton's long inquiry last summer found no evidence that the government knew that claim to be wrong. But it did show the government helped make Kelly's name public.
In its conclusions, the Panorama programme was highly critical of Gilligan and of BBC chiefs for backing their reporter to the hilt, without checking the facts of his story.
"The (BBC) director general and its senior executives bet the firm on a shaky foundation," the programme said.
IN is the operative word here.
I felt the same way. Did you see the second time they showed the witch? I am sure she had an earpiece with someone telling her when she was "on". The first second her ugly mug filled the screen, she looked tired and draggy, then a smile exploded across her face and she looked like a freaking christmas tree, all lit up.
"Hillary, your on!"
I fail to see the logic in this, therefore I can only conclude he was trying to protect them.
TRUSTING BYRD
When it comes to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or lack thereof, it's too bad President Bush didn't read a page from the January issue of Military magazine when he delivers his crucial State of the Union address Tuesday night.
The magazine's military-minded editors, who know more about WMDs than the rest of us, have an intriguing item surrounding what certain politicians said in the not-so-distant past about former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's possession of these deadly weapons.
Let's start with critics who continue to charge that it was Mr. Bush who said Iraq's WMD program was an "imminent threat."
"Sorry, he never said that," says Military's editors. "He wanted to get them 'before they become an imminent threat.' It was instead Senator Jay Rockefeller, West Virginia Democrat, now a Bush critic, who said, 'I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat.'"
It gets better, at least for defenders of Mr. Bush.
President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, for instance, warned Feb. 18, 1998: "He (Saddam) will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has 10 times since 1983."
While House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, added Dec. 16, 1998: "Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons-inspection process."
Then there was Mr. Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine K. Albright, stating Nov. 10, 1999: "Hussein has . . . chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."
Finally, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia Democrat, declared with utmost certainty Oct. 3, 2002: "We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities."
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