Airstrip One

Official - They have no shame

I really do not want to intrude into private grief (you know that someone's going to be smug when they start off like that), so I refrained from mentioning the plagirised dossier. Not even to laugh, that's how good I am.

However the discredited smear (I always thought that Saddam was too nasty to smear, but it seems that the incompetence of our government knows no bounds) is available in all its glory here. That's right, they haven't taken it off line.

So if you want to know where they got all the information on pages 6-16 of the word document, it's here (and the publishers seem furious). So does the British government have any independent information on Iraqi internal politics, seems not.

If I were a hawk I'd be furious at the ineptitude shown here, and to a lesser extent by Colin Powell's ultimately insubstantial indictment. I know that many in the peace movement were really feeling that last week was going to be tough as all this new information was going to be coming in the public domain at once. Instead they've been heartened by these unexpected gifts from the British and American governments. It now turns out that nothing new was conclusive, and nothing conclusive was new. In effect the situation is still, it seems, where it was circa 1996 when the was no pressing need for invasion.

NOTE. The full text of the e-mail on which this post was based is available here.