British Prime Minister Tony Blair was Saturday night at the center of an embarrassing row after the most senior US official in Baghdad bluntly rejected Blair's assertion that secret weapons laboratories had been discovered in Iraq.
In a Christmas message to British troops, Blair claimed there was "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine labor-atories." The Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) had unearthed compelling evidence that showed former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had attempted to "conceal weapons," the prime minister said.
But in an interview yesterday, Paul Bremer, the Bush administration's top official in Baghdad, flatly dismissed the claim as untrue -- without realizing its source was Blair.
It was, he suggested, a "red herring," probably put about by someone opposed to military action in Iraq who wanted to undermine the coalition.
"I don't know where those words come from but that is not what [ISG chief] David Kay has said," he told ITV1's Jonathan Dimbleby TV program. "It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me."
With confusion apparently growing between London and Washington over weapons of mass destruction, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said he would be pressing ministers when parliament returned in the New Year on what precisely the government knew.
"It is high time the prime minister cleared this matter up once and for all," he said.
Blair made his remarks in a pre-Christmas interview with the British Forces Broadcasting Service, heard by the 10,000 British troops stationed in southern Iraq. In recent days, senior Whitehall officials have raised the extraordinary possibility that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction after all -- but believed he did after being misled by his own advisors.
In his interview on Saturday, Bremer was forced to pull back when told the claims of hidden weapons laboratories were made by Blair.
"There is actually a lot of evidence that has been made public," he said, adding that this included "clear evidence" of ongoing biological and chemical programs, as well as rocket production that violated UN Security Council resolutions. Bremer also dismissed Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector, as "out of touch."
Earlier, Blix had ridiculed the prime minister's laboratories claim as "innuendo." It was "increasingly clear" that Saddam did not have any weapons of mass destruction left when US and British forces invaded Iraq, he said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS