We Are Many Page #3

on the Evening Standard.

I've got it somewhere in this room.

I remember keeping it, you know,

that Iraq could attack within

45 minutes or something.

Those 45 minutes, I think,

was what really became famous

because they wanted to create a fear.

I remember hearing it on the news

and thinking, "45 minutes to attack?"

"That... that's quite a peril."

You just read that,

and that seemed pretty far-reaching,

but you didn't know

what information they had.

You don't want to disbelieve a Prime Minister

when a Prime Minister puts out

a document like that

from 10 Downing Street.

I really wanted to find out

what the evidence was.

So I wrote to the government

and I got a copy of the dossier.

And I thought, "OK,

this is all very technical."

"Can I check any of this?"

So I found two weapons inspectors,

and I asked them,

"How valid are these documents?"

And they said,

"Well, we know this isn't true,

we know that's not true,

we know this isn't true."

Order!

Now, it's amazing to me that I could do that,

and yet none of the MPs

seemed to be able to do it.

I think it also destroyed

Mr. Blair's credibility.

He lost his credibility

in those 45 minutes, actually.

It sort of completely caused me

to become a different person politically...

because I had to come to terms

with the fact, as a Conservative,

that the institutions of the

British state had set out to tell lies.

That is finally the bottom line.

Lied to in order to go to war.

There was a grand deception

in which we all share

various amounts of, uh, responsibility

and, uh, in which we, everybody,

didn't do their job.

In the United States

the lies were told endlessly,

and in Britain, the Murdoch Press,

the Murdoch television networks,

some parts of the BBC, all played the game.

So, the military industrial complex is also,

you know, has its analogue in the press,

the media industrial complex.

America and our allies

are called once again...

to defend the peace

against an aggressive tyrant.

And we accept this responsibility.

I remember saying...

I don't know whether you can

say this on tape.

But, "This bastard

is actually gonna take us to war."

"This is not just rhetoric."

I remember having these debates

a year before the invasion,

and we'd say, "Oh, my God,

it looks like

they're really going to invade Iraq,"

and everyone would say,

"Well, they're not that crazy.

It couldn't happen."

US Central Command has been

moving aircraft carriers

and war planes closer to Iraq.

Now 600 of its specialists

are to move themselves

to within a few hundred miles of Iraq.

And so the global military enterprise

snaps into action.

The public doesn't know about it.

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