The great WMD hoax- and why David Aaronovitch owes Tony Benn an apology

BLAIR LIED LIED AND LIED AGAIN: MANDARINS REVEAL THAT 10 DAYS BEFORE IRAQ INVASION PM KNEW SADDAM COULDN'T USE WMDs.

says today's Daily Mail headline. Who'd have thought it eh? Tony Blair lying? I'm sure that news comes as a huge surprise to readers of this blog.

Reading the Mail's headline reminded me of the events of February 2003. Veteran socialist politician and peace campaigner Tony Benn travelled to Baghdad to ask Saddam Hussein if he did indeed possess WMDs. (you can watch part one of Tony's interview above, and you can watch parts two and three here and here).

For going to Baghdad and meeting with Saddam, Benn was savaged by the pro-war hawks in the media. David Aaronovitch, wrote this sneering, sarcastic piece poking fun at Benn in The Guardian. What a silly old naïve fool Tony Benn was the neocons and 'liberal interventionists' chimed, going to Baghdad and asking Saddam if he had WMD. Of course Saddam would say he hadn't and of course he was lying.

But it wasn’t Saddam Hussein who was telling porkies, but the British and American governments.

Of course, some of us said the WMD line was baloney. It wasn't a difficult call to make- for if Bush and Blair had genuinely believed Iraq possessed WMDs they would not have been so keen to attack the country, as I argued here.

But many, many journalists did swallow the lies about WMDs, hook, line and sinker.
As I said here, the pundits who parroted the U.S. and Britain's deceitful propaganda on Iraq have never been properly held to account.

Far from it, they've actually been rewarded for getting things so badly wrong.

Melanie Phillips, and not John Pilger or Seumas Milne, is on Question Time tonight.

UPDATE: Blair and Bush's Bush and Blair’s secret, illegal plan to ‘regime change’ in Iraq. Read all about it here and here.