Oops:
Tony Blair was at the centre of an embarrassing row last night after the most senior US official in Baghdad bluntly rejected the Prime Minister’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 laboratories’. The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) had unearthed compelling evidence that showed 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 realising 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 programme. ‘It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me.’
Meanwhile, in Italy Prime Minister Berlusconi disputes the claim that he gave an interview warning of a terrorist strike on the Vatican.
And here in North America, Canada isn’t jumping on board with the U.S. claim that the mad cow came from Canada.
It does seem a little odd how quickly the government came out with that explanation, given how little it seemed to know about other details surrounding the incident.