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.
People can preregister to receive their NT$10,000 (US$325) cash distributed from the central government on Nov. 5 after President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday signed the Special Budget for Strengthening Economic, Social and National Security Resilience, the Executive Yuan told a news conference last night. The special budget, passed by the Legislative Yuan on Friday last week with a cash handout budget of NT$236 billion, was officially submitted to the Executive Yuan and the Presidential Office yesterday afternoon. People can register through the official Web site at https://10000.gov.tw to have the funds deposited into their bank accounts, withdraw the funds at automated teller
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FRESH LOOK: A committee would gather expert and public input on the themes and visual motifs that would appear on the notes, the central bank governor said The central bank has launched a comprehensive redesign of New Taiwan dollar banknotes to enhance anti-counterfeiting measures, improve accessibility and align the bills with global sustainability standards, Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) told a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee yesterday. The overhaul would affect all five denominations — NT$100, NT$200, NT$500, NT$1,000 and NT$2,000 notes — but not coins, Yang said. It would be the first major update to the banknotes in 24 years, as the current series, introduced in 2001, has remained in circulation amid rapid advances in printing technology and security standards. “Updating the notes is essential to safeguard the integrity
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