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Has Blair Sexed Up Saddam’s Atrocities, Too?

by John Laughland

08/06/03: (Mail On Sunday) As Tony Blair waltzed out of his final press conference and off to Barbados last week, he once again sidestepped crucial questions on Iraq. Indeed, faced with the collapse of his pre-war "intelligence" on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Tony Blair is falling back on human rights abuses committed by Saddam Hussein as the new justification for his war.

In the past ten days, Mr. Blair has said at least three times – including once on the floor of the House of Commons – that the United Nations is claiming that some 300,000 bodies lie in mass graves in Iraq, and that this alone justifies the US-UK invasion.

In making this claim, Blair is doing with this evidence exactly what he did with the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.

He is stretching it to the limit, and even telling a partial untruth; he is obscuring the bits which contradict his view of the world; and he is attributing an authority and a reliability to the information which it does not have....