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Tony Blair, who narrowly defeated a recent parliamentary attempt to call an inquiry into the Iraq war, is facing a new threat from Washington, where victorious Democrats are expected to call British witnesses as they launch congressional investigations into the war.
"Now we are the majority party and we can hold hearings," said a senior member of the staff of John Conyers, who in January will become chair of the House Judiciary Committee. "We can hold any number of hearings."
Democratic Senators are also expected to seek hearings aimed at throwing light on how Downing Street and the White House co-ordinated efforts to claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. All the claims that led to war, from allegations that Saddam was reconstituting a nuclear weapons programme to his alleged links with al-Qa'ida, could come under examination. Unlike their counterparts in Britain, congressional committees have the crucial power to subpoena witnesses and documents.
Mr Conyers's staff have long been investigating how false information was presented by the Bush administration to persuade the public of the "significant and growing" threat posed by Saddam. Their inquiries were partly triggered by the leaking of the Downing Street memos, which revealed the belief of the British government that Mr Bush had decided on war as early as the spring of 2002.
When Mr Conyers published his findings last year, he said: "We have found that there is substantial evidence the President, the Vice-President and other high-ranking members of the Bush administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq, misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for such war, countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Iraq, and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of their administration."
| Read the rest of The Independent's article (a British online newspaper): Independent Online Edition > UK Politics
It should be an interesting new year. |