Thursday 5 June 2003

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but...

When all three major US newsweeklies - Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report - run major features on the same day on possible government lying, you can bet you have the makings of a major scandal.

And when the two most important outlets of neo-conservative opinion - The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal - come out on the same days with lead editorials spluttering outrage about suggestions of government lying, you can bet that things are going to get very hot as summer approaches in Washington.

The controversy over whether the administration of President George W Bush either exaggerated or lied about evidence that it said it had about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq before the US-led invasion has mushroomed over the past week.

"This is potentially very serious," said one Congressional aide. "If it's shown we went to war because of intelligence that was 'cooked' by the administration, heads will have to roll, and not just little heads, big ones."

The administration was already on the defensive last week as the controversy took off in Europe, particularly in Britain where Prime Minister Tony Blair found himself assailed from all directions for either willfully exaggerating the intelligence himself or being "suckered", as his former foreign minister Robin Cook called it this weekend, by Washington's neo-conservative hawks, who started agitating for war even before the dust settled in lower Manhattan after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Full story...