We Are Many Page #2

to read the dossier.

This dossier is based on the work

of the British Joint Intelligence Committee.

It is extensive, detailed and authoritative.

It concludes that Iraq has chemical

and biological weapons.

That Saddam has continued to produce them.

That he has existing

and active military plans

for the use of chemical

and biological weapons,

which could be activated within 45 minutes,

including against his own Shia population.

They were 100 percent sure

that there were weapons of mass destruction.

They had zero percent of knowledge

where they were.

I felt I knew what had happened

in the creation of an interior group

of knowing people.

So what was going on

in the corridors of power was,

"I've been there."

"I've been to the Secret Service

headquarters."

"I've seen the papers."

"If you'd seen what I've seen,

you'd know how to go

through those corridors."

So there was the creation

of a bunch of insiders

who were also, in a sense,

distributing the same lie.

The intelligence was never there.

I remember the dodgy dossier.

I remember the front page

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.

You can see pieces of it here and there.

Units are being mobilized.

Tanks are loading on ships.

The Marines are loading up.

You can see pieces of it.

The bombing increased over Iraq

about 500 percent

during the fall of 2002...

with the purpose of trying

to goad Saddam Hussein

into retaliating,

to give us a reason to go to war.

And then I saw that. I was witness to that.

But the President's still saying,

you know, "It may not..."

"I hope it doesn't come to war."

President Bush knows the real battle

is to win support of the United Nations.

When I saw Bush on TV saying,

"We're gonna try diplomacy first,"

but then I saw the reality on the ground,

something didn't sit right with me,

and I knew there was more to the story.

On some level, globally,

people knew that this was not true,

and I think that's what led to February 15th

and the massive show on the streets

was because people felt

like something's not right.

Before our kids start coming home

from Iraq in body bags

and women and children

start dying in Baghdad,

I need to know, what did Iraq do to us?

We had never raised money for an ad before,

and we proposed this

"Let the Inspections Work" ad,

sent it out to our members hoping to raise,

you know, $20,000, $40,000.

And we raised $400,000.

And we made the ads,

and we figured out everything

we could possibly do

to build opposition to going to war.

We organized demonstrations,

and it got bigger and bigger and bigger.

Packing the streets to stop the war,

the organizers of today's rally

claim 300,000 people turned out

to show their anger over Iraq.

I am in total opposition to the war.

I think it's an obscenity,

and I think Blair is a scoundrel.

The troop movements began to get underway,

and that's when we really moved quickly

to form the coalitions

in the US and internationally.

It took a lot of courage for people

to raise their voices early on,

prior to February 15th 2003.

People were afraid to speak.

They were afraid of being called unpatriotic.

The Bush Administration and Saddam Hussein

are not the only ones

cranking up the talk about war.

So are American opponents of war with Iraq.

We have a President

that is sending the ships,

sending the war machines,

sending the bombs, sending the troops.

And look what we have growing here at home.

A mass, beautiful movement

that's gonna stop them

from dropping those bombs.

I'm becoming consumed with the thought

that our country may soon be at war,

waged partially in my brother's name

and the names of thousands

killed last year in the terror attacks.

We had to do something.

To sit back and not do anything

was unbearable.

We, as a civilized people,

must know better and do better.

We must be a greater nation than that.

You build confidence, and all

of a sudden you start daring

to do stuff that you never ever thought

possible in the past.

And the next step was to call

for a global day of demonstrations.

I mean, I don't know

what we were thinking, actually,

that there could be even

a global demonstration.

I mean, nobody had ever done that.

It was a, you know,

completely left-field idea

even for us, and we'd had a few.

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