“I don't buy the argument the war was legalized by the Iraqi violation of earlier resolutions,” Blix

LONDON, March 5 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The Iraq invasion was illegal as the United States and Britain “hyped” intelligence to attack the oil-rich country, former Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said in an interview published Friday, March 5.

Blix’s scathing criticism came as press reports revealed that the pre-war claims that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories were based on second-hand information provided by an Iraqi defector and was not verified by U.S. intelligence.

“I don't buy the argument the war was legalized by the Iraqi violation of earlier resolutions,” Blix told The Independent.

Blix demolished the argument advanced by British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith three days before the invasion began, which stated that resolution 1441 authorized the use of force because it revived earlier U.N. resolutions passed after the 1991 ceasefire.

Blix said that while it was possible to argue that Iraq had breached the ceasefire by violating U.N. resolutions adopted since 1991, the “ownership” of the resolutions rested with the entire 15-member Security Council and not with individual states.

“It's the Security Council that is party to the ceasefire, not the U.K. and U.S. individually, and therefore it is the Council that has ownership of the ceasefire, in my interpretation,” he said.

He said to challenge that interpretation would set a dangerous precedent.

“Any individual member could take a view - the Russians could take one view, the Chinese could take another, they could be at war with each other, theoretically,”  Blix said.

Asked whether, in his view, a second resolution authorizing force should have been adopted,  Blix replied: “Oh yes”.

He repeated accusations the U.S. and British governments used “hyped” intelligence and lacking critical thinking.

“They used exclamation marks instead of question marks,” Blix said in the interview, ahead of the publication next week of his book “Disarming Iraq: The search for weapons of mass destruction”.

The threat allegedly posed by Iraq’s WMDs was the prime reason cited by the U.S. and British governments for striking the Arab country.

But not a single item of banned weaponry has been found in the 11 months that have followed the declared end of strikes, The Independent said.

In what seemed to be a prompt defense of Blix accusations, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a speech on the threat on terrorism Friday that Iraq’s banned weapons were not the only justification for invading it.

He claimed that similar decisive action will need to be taken in the future to combat the threat of rogue states and terrorists obtaining WMDs.

Blix had earlier accused the British government of “over-interpreting” intelligence on Iraq's alleged capability of deploying weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, lashing out at the "culture of spin and hyping" adopted by Downing Street.

Not Verified

Further to the bruising justifications of the Iraq invasion, the Bush administration's pre-war assertion that Iraq had a fleet of mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence office.

Citing current and former senior U.S. intelligence officials and congressional experts who have studied classified documents, the Washington Post said the Iraqi defector who provided the original tip never dealt with U.S. intelligence.

He passed his information along through a foreign intelligence service, said the paper, giving no details on the service’s identity.

“Touted by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell when he gave the reasons for attacking Iraq to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, no such mobile labs have been found in Iraq since the invasion ended last year.

After the invasion, two semitrailers unearthed in Iraq were publicly paraded by U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, as mobile laboratories capable of producing banned biological weapons.”

On January 22, Vice President Cheney told National Public Radio that Saddam had “spent time and effort acquiring biological weapons labs” and that the semitrailers “were, in fact, part of that program”.

He called the trailers “conclusive evidence, if you will, that he [Hussein] did in fact have programs of mass destruction,” the Post recalled.

On February 24, CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee that there was “a big debate” about the trailers among CIA analysts “who still believe that they were for” bioweapons.

The Post quoted Tenet as saying that he had talked to Cheney and learned that his January statement was based on “an older judgment”.