Hans Blix says Jack Straw lied to Iraq War Inquiry

Jack Straw Lied To Iraq War Inquiry Says Hans Blix

Posted by Jon King on Feb 08, 2010

Tagged with: conspiracy, hans blix, iraq war, iraq war inquiry, jack straw, saddam hussein, tony blair, UN, un weapons inspector, united nations, weapons of mass destruction, WMD

Former UN weapons inspector Hans Bilx tells BBC Straw ‘gave incorrect answers’ to Iraq War Inquiry…

Jack Straw Lied To Iraq Inquiry Says Hans Blix

By Jon King

“Incorrect Answers”

A report on the BBC website claims that Britain’s Foreign Secretary during the Iraq War, Jack Straw, gave “incorrect answers” to the Iraq War Inquiry.

In an interview with the BBC, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said he was “puzzled” by some of the answers Straw gave to the Inquiry.

In particular Mr Blix said he couldn’t understand why Jack Straw claimed UN weapons inspectors were forbidden from visiting some of Iraq’s potential weapon’s sites.

This was simply not true, he said.

He also said that Tony Blair was wrong to assume Saddam Hussein would have instigated an arms race with neighbouring Iran if the 2003 invasion had not gone ahead.

Jack Straw Lied To Iraq Inquiry

Weapons Of Mass Destruction

In the lead up to the Iraq War, Hans Blix was head of the UN’s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, but was unceremoniously dumped from this post when he refused to play ball with Bush and Blair over claims Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Despite mounting pressure from both sides of the Atlantic, Hans Blix’s team maintained throughout 2002, when the commission was searching for WMD in Iraq, that no such weapons existed.

And in a 2004 BBC interview Mr Blix stated his belief that George Bush and Tony Blair had deliberately ‘spiced up’ the WMD argument in order to justify the invasion.

No evidence of WMD was ever found in Iraq.

Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, said “approving Blix as chief UN weapons inspector was one of the biggest mistakes the United States ever made”.

Jack Straw Lied To Iraq Inquiry

A Case For War

In giving evidence to the Iraq War Inquiry last month, Jack Straw claimed that Mr Blix and his team were not being given access to weapons sites in Iraq in the months leading up to the invasion.

For this reason, Mr Straw said, he concluded that Iraq was not cooperating and that Saddam was concealing the truth about his alleged WMD program. On the basis of this conclusion Jack Straw made his case for war.

But according to Hans Blix, this was a blatant lie.

“[Jack Straw] did not focus at all on what I had said about the increased Iraqi co-operation,” he told the BBC. Rather Straw said “that the Iraqis are not allowing you to interview people and they are stopping you from getting to sites.”

“That was not true,” Mr Blix said.

Mr Blix also contested what he called Jack Straw’s “amazing” interpretation of the 2002 report, the so-called ‘cluster report’, which he claimed Mr Straw used to further strengthen his case for war.

“I think it was an amazing statement that the report, that we sent around at that time, the so-called ‘cluster report’, that this would have convinced him,” he said.

“That report … put the cases of unresolved issues in clusters, and lined out what Iraqis could do to help us to solve them. There was nothing sensationally new in this document.”

Jack Straw is due to give further evidence to the Inquiry later today. We wait with baited breath to see how he squirms his way through this time.

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