BBC News: Iran bombs link: retraction or non-retraction?
A dispute has developed over a claim by Britain last October that Iran had provided the technology for bomb attacks on British troops in southern Iraq.
Two British newspapers - The Times and The Independent - now say that British officials have dropped the claim.
(Times articles here and here. Independent article mirrored here. Blair’s remarks on the matter here.)
Posted on January 12th, 2006 at 8:17 am
the thing that still amazes me about all this is that blair had the temerity/contempt to stand up and say..
“There is no justification for Iran or any other country interfering in Iraq.”
and keep a straight face
Media manipulation at it’s finest; a damning briefing from an anonymous official followed by Blair’s ambiguous statement the next day. The Iran/bomb link is established. When the claims are, apparently, shown to be politically motivated, the government announces a statement saying “we didn’t say it so it can’t be retraction” only it sounds like they’re saying “we still think it was Iran what done it”. Evil genuis really. A sarcastic jibe at Blair’s “open government” would go here but they’ve all been said so many times already.
Kim Sengupta’s refusal to play ball is pretty impressive though. Can we have more journalists like him please?
tubthumper, perhaps he’s above drawing childish verbal equivalancies and thinking they’re meaningful.
here’s the sequence of events.
The US and UK invade Iraq (ooh look, that’s interfering), remove vicous dictator and try to establish democracy.
You may doubt their motives, you may doubt their competency, you may think it was a terrible idea. That’s not relevent in this context.
Iran interferes with the political process inside Iraq. Or perhaps you think Iran is not intefering in southern Iraq. Tony Blair says “there is no justifaction for Iran interfering in Iraq”
and guess what .. that makes perfect sense! ‘Interfering’ to remove a dictator and establish a democracy is NOT THE SAME THING as interfering with the democratic process in another country. The rights and the wrongs of each are entirely different. Only a mental teenager could think “ooh look, how can he complain about interfering after we’ve just interfered ourselves in a big way!”
that’s about as bright as “Israel has nukes, how can we say Iran ought not to ?”
I’m-going-to-call-someone-a-mental-teenager-but-post-anonymously - the big, mentally teenages error you have made their is you erroneous quote of Blair.
Blair said: “There is no justification for Iran OR ANY OTHER COUNTRY interfering in Iraq”. You see the difference between the semi-quote you gave, which was “”there is no justifaction for Iran interfering in Iraq”?
Nice, honest, not-mentally-teenaged-at-all-there ommission, I must say.
And then I go and commit the sin of typing ‘their’ instead of ‘there’ - a teenage error that I never made as a teenager. Oh dear.
also, there is more than a reasonalbe amount of evidence that the UK and the US have been interfering with the elections in iraq.
“Israel has nukes, how can we say Iran ought not to ?”
I think you’ve got it the wrong way round Mr/Mrs/Miss anonymous.
Iran does not have nukes, how can we say Israel ought to?
That, for very many years, was the case and yet is is intellectually about as vacuous a position as you could hope to find, no?