[casi] Blair: I Have Secret Proof Of Weapons

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Blair: I have secret proof of weapons
Gaby Hinsliff, Nick Paton Walsh in St Petersburg and Peter Beaumont in London
Sunday June 1, 2003
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,968164,00.html
Prime Minister Tony Blair last night insisted he had secret proof that weapons of mass destruction 
will be found in Iraq in his strongest signal yet that coalition forces believe they may have begun 
to uncover leads to Iraq's alleged deadly arms cache.

Stung by claims that the Government exaggerated the threat from Saddam, Blair said he was waiting 
to publish a 'complete picture' of both intelligence gained before the war and 'what we've actually 
found'.

Asked if he knew things he could not yet reveal, he said: 'I certainly do know some of the stuff 
that has been already accumulated as a result of interviews and others... which is not yet public, 
but what we are going to do is assemble that evidence and present it properly.'

His words, in an interview with Sky TV, came as Downing Street moved to halt damaging leaks over 
its handling of the evidence by heaping praise on the intelligence services. 'The Prime Minister 
hugely values the work of the intelligence agencies,' his spokesman said in St Petersburg, where 
heads of state were celebrating the Russian city's tercententary, yesterday.

The pointed comment followed a week of furious rows over whether the intelligence dossier on Iraq 
published by the Government last September was 'sexed up' to convince a sceptical public that they 
were in danger from Saddam.

It will fuel speculation that private assurances have been given to the intelligence community that 
they will not be left to carry the can over the failure to find WMD after a week of briefing 
against senior Blair officials by intelligence officials over the alleged ramping up of 
intelligence.

Labour backbenchers, increasingly convinced they were misled, are unlikely to be impressed by 
Blair's argument that they must trust in proof they cannot see. According to intelligence sources 
the new leads have been provided by Iraqi scientists and a member of the State Security 
Organisation who are currently being debriefed by MI6 and the CIA. This follows a week in which 
Government and intelligence sources appear to have changed their story on the likelihood of finding 
WMD on an almost daily basis.

One source claimed mid-week that British intelligence suggested Saddam had destroyed his WMD even 
before UN inspectors visited Iraq, a version of events that had changed by yesterday morning to the 
claim that chemical weapons may actually have been deployed in the field and then destroyed as 
American troops advanced.

Yesterday the US announced that another 1,400 experts will join the hunt for banned weapons - a 
signal that Washington has accepted the political significance of the issue.

In Britain it is thought that Ministers want eventually to publish a checklist of claims made 
before the war alongside subsequent discoveries which they believe vindicate the warnings. So far 
the only publicly announced discovery has been that of two trailers thought to have been part of a 
mobile laboratory system.

Blair said in his interview that claims that the existence of WMD was 'a great big fib got out by 
the security services' would be proved wrong. He said he had 'absolutely no knowledge' of an 
alleged meeting between the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell, in a 
New York hotel to discuss concerns over whether the evidence on WMD would be strong enough. Leaked 
transcripts suggested Straw had warned the issue could 'explode in our faces'.

The Foreign Office insisted the two men had not met on the date given in February.

Downing Street has been hampered in its argument by repeated suggestions from the Bush 
administration that WMD may never be found. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy to the US Defence Secretary 
Donald Rumsfeld, suggested last week that WMD were a bureaucratic pretext to start a war.

Blair told Sky that WMD were the basis in law for taking military action - but 'that's not the same 
as saying it's a bureaucratic pretext'.

The Prime Minister was due to leave Russia early this morning for the G8 summit in Evian, France, 
which is expected to agree new measures to stop WMD falling into the hands of terrorists.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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