WMD claims were lies says former envoy

By Nigel Morris, Deputy Political Editor

Monday, 12 July 2010

Britain was taken to war in Iraq on the basis of “lies”, scaremongering and deliberate exaggeration, a former UK diplomat told the Iraq inquiry.

Carne Ross claimed that Britain and the United States privately did not believe that Iraq's weapons programmes posed a “substantial threat” before launching the 2003 invasion.

Mr Ross, the former first secretary at the UK’s mission to the United Nations, told the Chilcot inquiry there was no “significant intelligence” to support claims that Saddam Hussein had amassed an arsenal of deadly weapons.

He argued that Saddam could have been contained through sanctions – and condemned the failure by the US or UK to close the Iraqi dictator’s bank accounts in Jordan.

Mr Ross, who resigned before the war, pointed to a document circulated to Labour MPs in 2002 as evidence of a “process of deliberate public exaggeration”, including the claim that Saddam could develop nuclear weapons within five years.

Director of NIST: Disclosure of WTC7 data "might jeopardize public safety"

http://cryptome.org/nist070709.pdf

FINDING REGARDING PUBLIC SAFETY INFORMATION
Pursuant to Section 7(d) of the National Construction Safety Team Act, I hereby find that the disclosure of the information described below, received by the National Institute of Standards and Technology ("NIST"), in connection with its investigation of the technical causes of the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11,2001, might jeopardize public safety. Therefore, NIST shall not release the following information:

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0712/israeli-flotilla-probe-live-fire-commandos-justified/

Israeli flotilla probe: Use of live fire by commandos ‘justified’

By Agence France-Presse
Monday, July 12th, 2010 -- 12:44 pm

Israeli flotilla probe: Use of live fire by commandos justified

Mistakes were made at a "relatively senior" level during Israel's deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid boat but the use of live fire by commandos was justified, the results of military probe showed Monday.

"Mistakes were made in the various decisions taken, including within relatively senior ranks, which contributed to the result not being as we would have wished," retired general Giora Eiland told reporters in Tel Aviv on Monday as he presented the results of the internal inquiry.

"In this inquiry we found that there were some professional mistakes regarding both the intelligence and the decision-making process," said Eiland, who chaired the panel tasked with examining how the operation unfolded and learning lessons from it.

Check out this excellent recent documentary, which has just been posted on the Internet, about Nato's secret armies that were set up across Western Europe after the Second World War. While these "stay-behind" armies were supposedly intended to help put together a resistance if the Soviet Union invaded their countries, they went on to commit terrorist attacks against their own populations, so as to influence domestic politics.