New Report Shows Tony Blair Lied About WMD To Support Bush

This isn't exactly news, but what we see now is how widespread and coordinated was the system of lies to get us into a war with Iraq. Again from The Carpetbagger Report:

It’s been several years, and by now we all know the weapons-of-mass-destruction story pretty well. Except, once in a while, a new tidbit will come to light, such as this one. (via Ron Chusid)

The Government’s case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

A devastating attack on Mr Blair’s justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain’s key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.

In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, “at no time did HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] assess that Iraq’s WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests.”

Mr Ross revealed it was a commonly held view among British officials dealing with Iraq that any threat by Saddam Hussein had been “effectively contained”.

Ross suggests that British officials pushed back against Bush administration officials, arguing that Saddam’s ouster would lead to chaos, but eventually, “inertia” led the U.K. to endorse the U.S. policy.

Ross added that he asked how the government that believed Iraq had no WMD came to believe otherwise, but there was no evidence. “What had changed was the Government’s determination to present available evidence in a different light,” he said