Source: The Guardian

An Iraqi taxi driver was the source of the discredited claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, a Tory MP claimed today.

Adam Holloway, a defence specialist, said MI6 obtained the information indirectly from a taxi driver who had overheard two Iraqi military commanders talking about Saddam's weapons.

The 45-minute claim was a key feature of the dossier about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that was released by Tony Blair in September 2002. Blair published the information to bolster public support for war.

After the war the dossier became hugely controversial when it became clear that some of the information it contained was not true. An inquiry headed by Lord Butler into the use of intelligence in the run-up to the war revealed that MI6 had subsequently accepted that some of its Iraqi sources were unreliable, but his report did not identify who they were.


Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/de...

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I'm speechless. I honestly don't know what to say, except that it is absolutely fucking unbelievable that thousands of people have died for a lie based on what a taxi driver said.

Truth will out, as they say. The sad thing is, even though Britain is way ahead of the US in actually opening an inquiry into the illegal Iraq war, fuck all will come of it. Blair, together with Bush and Cheney, will live out his days in comfort as a rich free man, instead of rotting in a jail cell where he belongs. That makes me angrier than I could ever express.