{"id":7534,"date":"2009-12-09T11:16:08","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T15:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=7534"},"modified":"2009-12-09T11:16:08","modified_gmt":"2009-12-09T15:16:08","slug":"taxi-confidential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=7534","title":{"rendered":"Taxi Confidential"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.newsweek.com\/blogs\/declassified\/archive\/2009\/12\/08\/was-taxi-driver-source-for-key-saddam-wmd-claim.aspx\">Newsweek<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Among the most eye-grabbing of those claims came in an official British government \u201c white paper\u201d released in late September 2002 after Blair had returned from a meeting at Camp David with George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney claiming Saddam had chemical or biological weapons that could be deployed \u201cwithin 45 minutes of an order to use them.\u201d Blair said this, and other claims in the white paper based on secret intelligence, demonstrated that Saddam was a \u201ccurrent and serious threat to the U.K. national interest.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBrits 45 Mins from Doom\u201d screamed the headline in The Sun, Britain\u2019s largest-selling daily newspaper, after the white paper was released.<\/p>\n<p>But according to Holloway, the 45 minute claim should have been regarded as questionable from the outset. <strong>According to Holloway\u2019s paper, the claim \u201chad originated from an \u00e9migr\u00e9 taxi driver on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, who had remembered an overheard \u2026 conversation in the back of his cab a full two years earlier.\u201d<\/strong> According to the MP, in a footnote to the original intelligence report, a U.K. intelligence analyst had \u201cflagged up\u201d that specific portion of the report, which supposedly related to the readiness of Iraqi missiles, as \u201cdemonstrably untrue.\u201d It was provably false, Holloway says, because the missiles in question, according to the MP\u2019s information, \u201cdid not exist \u2026The footnote said it in black and white ink.\u201d According to Holloway, while \u201cthe truth of the matter was that the intelligence services simply did not know whether Saddam Hussein had WMD, it was equally probable that he was bluffing to maintain a credible threat against Iran.\u201d But Holloway says a senior U.K.intelligence official told him: \u201cThere was no appetite in government to hear that.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Bombs away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Newsweek: Among the most eye-grabbing of those claims came in an official British government \u201c white paper\u201d released in late September 2002 after Blair had returned from a meeting at Camp David with George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney claiming Saddam had chemical or biological weapons that could be deployed \u201cwithin 45 minutes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}