*Ø* Bliar, Bliar, pants on fire!

Tony Blair's Incredible Shrinking Mass Graves

How many people have been found in Hussein's mass graves? Blair said 400,000, but finally admits it is one-eightieth that number, ie, 5,000. Just a tad less.

The transnational oil corporations really, really, really wanted that black stuff, didn't they? If you go to places like this article in the red-white-n-blue American Daily you'll read puke-making stuff like this:

We went to war because Saddam himself is a Weapon of Mass Destruction. The mass graves we have discovered in Iraq prove that. Three hundred thousand bodies have been discovered in these graves – so far.

This inflates 5,000 bodies to 300,000. OK, so the guy's a redneck nutter, so we can wear it. The American right has been lying about the Middle East for three years – in fact, all our lives.

But when a Labor Prime Minister of Britain says 400,000 bodies have been found in mass graves since the end of the war in Iraq, why isn't there an uproar in the media, in Parliament and in Congress? Check this out:

"In an account that might be more aptly titled The Incredible Shrinking Mass Graves, the Observer revealed that a claim by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' was false and that o­nly 5,000 bodies have been discovered so far. Tony Blair's claim was prominently featured in a report entitled Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves that was published by USAID and remains unchanged o­n its website.

"According to an article by the Guardian:
On December 14 Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted o­n the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'

"The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq ...

"It comes amid inflation from an estimate by Human Rights Watch in May 2003 of 290,000 'missing' to the latest claims by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, that o­ne million are missing.

"At the heart of the questions are the numbers so far identified in Iraq's graves. Of 270 suspected grave sites identified in the last year, 55 have now been examined, revealing – according to the best estimates that The Observer has been able to obtain – about 5 000 bodies.

"The numbers of mass graves in Iraq continues to inflate (from 400,000 to 500,000) ..." [emphasis mine]
Source: US Foreign Aid Watch

See also Phillip Adams, Where are the bodies of evidence? ... quite a good article. Then there's Iraq War Lies, a good compendium worth saving as a whole webpage, and the Almanac's own Myths of the War on Terror and Iraq, with more info and resources than you can pole-vault over.