Veteran Labor lawmakers walks out of Commons after
accusing government of misleading public with Iraq dossier
Mon, Feb 10, 2003
45 minutes ago
<http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030210/ap_wo_en_po/eu_gen_britain_iraq_dossier_2>
By ED JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
LONDON - A veteran British lawmaker stormed out of the House of
Commons Monday after accusing the government of misleading Parliament
with its intelligence dossier on Iraq.
Tam Dalyell, who is the longest serving member in the Commons and a
member of Blair's governing Labor Party, left the chamber after an argument
with its presiding officer, Speaker Michael Martin.
Martin warned the respected lawmaker he was "on very dangerous ground"
and warned him he would be ejected — a highly unusual occurrence.
Dalyell, who has the title Father of the House, later said he thought he had
been kicked out.
"To plagiarize an out of date Ph.D. thesis and to present it as an official
report of the latest British intelligence information, surely it reveals a lack
of
awareness of the disastrous consequences of such a deception," the vocal
opponent of a war on Iraq told fellow lawmakers, as he called for an
emergency debate on the issue.
"This is not a trivial leak. It is a document on which is the basis of
whether
or not this country goes to war and whether or not young servicemen and
servicewomen are to put their own lives at risk and indeed thousands, tens
of thousands of innocent civilians," he added.
The dossier, titled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and
Intimidation," was posted on Blair's Web site last week and released to
delegates at the United Nations (news - web sites) in New York.
Following a report on Channel 4 television news, the government conceded it
had copied much of the material from published sources.
One was an article by California-based researcher Ibrahim al-Marashi which
appeared last September in the Middle East Review of International Affairs.
The dossier claimed to be based in part on "intelligence material" and
to
give "up to date details" of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s
security
and intelligence network.
A Blair spokesman said the copying did not "take away from the core
argument" of the dossier — that Iraq is blocking United Nations weapons
inspectors.
___
On the Net: