

PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
#1
Posted 22 July 2004 - 06:12 PM
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday July 18, 2004
The Observer
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by
Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves'
is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given
widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in
the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced
by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted
from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far,
the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'
On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by
Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted
on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human
beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'
The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week
in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler
report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence
reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by
Iraq.
Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over
precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror,
and the location of the bodies of the dead.
The Baathist regime was responsible for massive human rights abuses
and murder on a large scale - not least in well-documented campaigns
including the gassing of Halabja, the al-Anfal campaign against
Kurdish villages and the brutal repression of the Shia uprising - but
serious questions are now emerging about the scale of Saddam
Hussein's murders.
http://politics.guar...1263901,00.html
Unrecorded victims
Tony Blair and others claim 300,000 bodies have been found in Iraqi
mass graves. In fact, there have been no official exhumations - or
count
Brendan O'Neill
Wednesday July 21, 2004
The Guardian
We now know that the public was misled over Saddam Hussein's weapons
of mass destruction. But have we also been misled over the even more
emotive issue of Iraq's mass graves.
There are without doubt many mass graves in Iraq, into which the
bodies of thousands of Iraqis killed by the Ba'ath regime were dumped
over the past 25 years. Coalition officials have claimed that they
contain the bodies of 300,000 Iraqis. In November last year, Sandra
Hodgkinson, then head of the coalition's mass graves action plan,
told the press that 260 grave sites had been located, which contained
the bodies of "at least 300,000".
In comments and speeches, Labour ministers and MPs have repeated this
figure time and again. Tony Blair told the Today programme in
April: "We have found the mass graves of 300,000 people already in
Iraq. It doesn't get a great deal of publicity, but it's true." At
the end of last year, Stephen Ladyman, Labour MP for South Thanet,
declared: "We are rebuilding a nation where we found 300,000 bodies
in mass graves so far." According to Denis MacShane, minister for
Europe: "We've now uncovered 300,000 bodies in mass graves, there
because of [Saddam Hussein's] torture and tyranny."
Some journalists took such comments as evidence that thousands of
bodies had already been retrieved. In a press conference with a
senior US official on November 20, a journalist asked about Blair's
claim that "400,000 [sic] bodies have been exhumed from Iraq". The US
official said: "We've seen numbers that are in the hundreds of
thousands. It's certainly absolutely at least 300,000 or more; it
could be as high as ... 500,000."
For pro-war commentators, claims that there were at least 300,000
bodies in mass graves became the trump card in debates about the war,
overriding the anti-war lobby's concerns about the failure to find
WMD or the chaos caused by the coalition's military
intervention. "According to the latest estimates, the mass graves in
Iraq contain the remains of at least 300,000 people, but we're still
arguing about whether the war was 'justified'," wrote Mark Steyn in
the Daily Telegraph.
So what is the coalition's evidence to substantiate the numbers
cited? The coalition's claims are based less on investigation and
excavation than on guesswork.
http://www.guardian....1265520,00.html
Even one death caused by Saddam or his henchmen is a terrible thing, but I don't appreciate the lies and exaggeration our so-called leaders have been spinning to justify the war.
Shaun
Veni, vidi, vici
#2
Posted 22 July 2004 - 11:08 PM
Shaun, on Jul 22 2004, 06:10 PM, said:

And this type of bad estimate is nothing new... It happened in Kosovo and in East Timor. Guessing the number of people in mass graves is a hard task and really just finding the graves is hard.
-Fleet Admiral Nimitz
"Their sailors say they should have flight pay and sub pay both -- they're in the air half the time, under the water the other half""
- Ernie Pyle: Aboard a DE
#3
Posted 23 July 2004 - 07:20 AM
If the critics want Saddam Hussein restored as the "legitimate" president, why don't they just say so.
If the critics don't want Saddam Hussein restored to power, they should quit their whining already.
-Ogami
#4
Posted 23 July 2004 - 07:24 AM
#5
Posted 23 July 2004 - 07:41 AM
Ogami, on Jul 23 2004, 01:18 PM, said:
It is possible to both not support Saddam, and be upset about being dragged into a war on false pretenses.
#6
Posted 23 July 2004 - 09:02 AM
#7
Posted 23 July 2004 - 09:36 AM
#8
Posted 23 July 2004 - 09:42 AM
-Ogami
#9
Posted 23 July 2004 - 09:46 AM
Ogami, on Jul 23 2004, 03:40 PM, said:
-Ogami
Or can you tell me you have evidence that the 45 minute claim that Blair trumpeted was accurate?
If you do have that evidence, i'm sure Blair would love to hear about it, he's getting hammered domestically over that.
Defy Gravity!
The Doctor: The universe is big. It's vast and complicated and ridiculous and sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles... and that's a theory. Nine hundred years and I've never seen one yet, but this will do me.
#10
Posted 23 July 2004 - 09:50 AM
Funny how the peaceful pacifists didn't utter a word of protest at Saddam's atrocities, yet they jump all over Bush and Blair for putting a stop to that blood-soaked madman. Weird.
-Ogami
#11
Posted 23 July 2004 - 09:58 AM
Quote
Do you have any evidence to back up this claim that every single person who opposed Blair, supports Saddam? These two aren't polar opposites you know.
Quote
As someone who has been concerned with Saddams human rights abuses for a long time, i'm evidence against your claim. My feelings towards Blair and Bush have nothing to do with my opinions on Saddam Hussein, and it's disingenous to pretend that the only way one can be aggainst Saddam is by fully and without questions supporting Blair and Bush.
edited to add, i noticed you missed my question, so i'll restate it. Was the 45 minute claim factually accurate or not? Do you have evidence? If you do, why is it that Blair does not?
Edited by Cyberhippie, 23 July 2004 - 09:59 AM.
Defy Gravity!
The Doctor: The universe is big. It's vast and complicated and ridiculous and sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles... and that's a theory. Nine hundred years and I've never seen one yet, but this will do me.
#12
Posted 23 July 2004 - 10:15 AM
Ogami said:
Ogami, back off your blanket statements. Yeah, I tend toward pacifism, and no, I don't enjoy war, but you haven't a clue what I've protested in my life. You and G1223 tend to proclaim rubbish like the above, as if you've met all pacifists that ever existed and you just *know* that they all have the same opinions. *All* pacifists did one thing and there was no variation among them, so they're *all* bad.
You speak of "liberal arrogance" in another thread, "That is how his kind view the common man, ignorant sheep to be told what to do by their intellectual and moral betters." and "The arrogance of the liberal elite was never more disgusting as it is today." What about the arrogance of the way you post to almost everyone else around you? I guess you need to tell us how to think and what to do, to guide us in all endeavors.

I never supported what Saddam did and don't regret the fact that he was stopped -- although I do wish that he'd been stopped in the first Gulf War, so we didn't have to do this all over again. I'm tired of talking about it now, since no one listened the first time.
Now, Ogami, since Saddam was hardly the only atrocity-freak, there are a lot of other miserable countries under terrible leadership. Don't we need to go after all of those, too? Just a thought (and said pretty sarcastically, so don't lecture me about how difficult it would be to take out, say, Iran and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and, well, numerous others)...
- Marvin the Paranoid Android, "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"
Rules for Surviving an Autocracy
Rule#1: Believe the Autocrat.
Rule#2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
Rule#3: Institutions will not save you.
Rule#4: Be outraged.
Rule#5: Don't make compromises.
Rule#6: Remember the future.
- Masha Gessen
http://www.nybooks.c...s-for-survival/
#13
Posted 23 July 2004 - 10:18 AM
Do you have any evidence to back up this claim that every single person who opposed Blair, supports Saddam? These two aren't polar opposites you know.
I think I covered this question quite nicely on the thread where I posted a link the Irish protesters there to greet Bush and Blair the other week.
Where was a single one of these protesters during Saddam's reign, protesting his abuses and murders? They were silent.
The pacifists, from all appearances, are simply expressing their hatred of democratic leaders. They clearly are not guided by principles. If they were, they would have been horrified, not annoyed, by these reports of mass graves.
Evidence corroborating Bush and Blair is seen as unwelcome, and a lie. Why is that?
-Ogami
#14
Posted 23 July 2004 - 10:19 AM
#15
Posted 23 July 2004 - 10:21 AM
Ogami, on Jul 23 2004, 03:16 PM, said:
By the way, you misspelled, "They clearly are not guided by my principles."
#16
Posted 23 July 2004 - 10:22 AM
What is it that makes perfectly sane people take the word of a blood-soaked dictator, yet disbelieve anything our democratic leaders say? That's out of whack.
-Ogami
#17
Posted 23 July 2004 - 10:31 AM
It takes time to prepare for these things. or would prefer we just start bombing with napalm and cluszter bombs all the musluims in Sudan?
You ask us to consider that their are innocent folks on that side as well. Then want us to go everyway at once.
Yes I have no problem after we get thigns done in Iraq and have time to refit to go into Sudan and start killing everybody we have to in order toget them to stop. I would put the whole of the governemnt to the sword as a first step but right now we are in the middle of fixing Iraq.
I favored going into Bosnia long before Clinton finally started to. I saw Europe sitting on it's ass uncaring that someone was killing people in a death camp style right in their backyard. I was willing to accept killing the wounded serbian soldiers at clearly marked Red Cross hospitals.
Why becasue the bad guys do not play by the rules why should we. Espically when those rules are getting our guys killed in droves or the civilians we are suppose to be guarding murdered.
I favoered Clinton in 98 going into Iraq becasue it was the right thing to do based on the INTEL (same Intel folks today are poo pooing)
And if you want to save these shores. For Pity sake Don't Trust them.
paraphrased from H. "Breaker" Morant
TANSTAAFL
If you voted for Obama then all the mistakes he makes are your fault and I will point this out to you every time he does mess up.
When the fall is all that remains. It matters a great deal.
All hail the clich's all emcompassing shadow.
My playing well with other's skill has been vastly overrated
Member of the Order of the Knigths of the Woeful Countance.
#18
Posted 23 July 2004 - 10:38 AM
Quote
Did you notice they weren't carryng 'We

Quote
dunno, i haven't seen it as either unwelcome or, after verification, a lie. So where is this evidence that the 45 minute claim was accurate. I've asked three times now.
Quote
When did the pacifists take every claim made by Saddam as a absolutely true? Do you have any evidence for this statement?
Defy Gravity!
The Doctor: The universe is big. It's vast and complicated and ridiculous and sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles... and that's a theory. Nine hundred years and I've never seen one yet, but this will do me.
#19
Posted 23 July 2004 - 10:38 AM
#20
Posted 23 July 2004 - 10:41 AM
G1223, on Jul 23 2004, 04:29 PM, said:
If we act like the people we are supposed to be trying to stop, then you cease to have that moral high ground.
Defy Gravity!
The Doctor: The universe is big. It's vast and complicated and ridiculous and sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles... and that's a theory. Nine hundred years and I've never seen one yet, but this will do me.
Also tagged with one or more of these keywords: UK, Tony Blair, Mass graves, Lie, Politics-World
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