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US 'created' weapons facts
24/02/2004 12:43 - (SA)
Berlin - The United States and Britain "created facts where there were no facts" in the run-up to last year's invasion of Iraq, the former head of the United Nations' weapons inspections team in the country said in an interview published on Tuesday.
Hans Blix, whose teams did not make significant weapons finds during months of searching Iraq before the war, has repeatedly criticised, in recent weeks, US and British handling of information ahead of the war.
"Our inspectors had a fixed phraseology. If something was missing, then the official formulation was 'yet to be established'," Blix was quoted as saying by the German weekly Stern. "But the Americans and British persistently read 'exists'. So they created facts where there were no facts."
Inspectors
Blix acknowledged that inspectors would not have gained access to Iraq in late 2002 without US military pressure - but he added that "men such as Vice President (Dick) Cheney, Defence Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld and his deputy (Paul) Wolfowitz said the inspections were, at best, useless".
"During a meeting at the White House at the end of October 2002, six months before the beginning of the war, Cheney told us he would not hesitate to discredit the inspections," Blix was quoted as saying.
Blix, who headed the UN inspection teams from 2000 to mid-2003, also said that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had "absolutely no interest in cooperatin".
"We know today that Saddam (Hussein) was a danger to his own people - but not the world," he told Stern.
"The war was not justified," he said. "The United States needed weapons of mass destruction to be able to wage the war."
Blix's book, "Disarming Iraq", which recounts the process of weapons inspections in the country, is due out in March.
- AP
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