politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,1113227,00.html
In a Christmas message to British troops, Blair claimed there was 'massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories'. The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) had unearthed compelling evidence that showed Saddam Hussein had attempted to 'conceal weapons', the Prime Minister said. But in an interview yesterday, Paul Bremer, the Bush administration's top official in Baghdad, flatly dismissed the claim as untrue - without realising its source was Blair. It was, he suggested, a 'red herring', probably put about by someone opposed to military action in Iraq who wanted to undermine the coalition. Four Bulgarian and two Thai soldiers were killed and 37 coalition troops were injured after Iraq's increasingly well-organised resistance attacked, using mortars, machine guns and a car bomb. At least seven Iraqi civilians were killed and up to 135 were injured in the attacks. Last week guerrillas fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad; A massive anti-insurgent offensive by US forces in Baghdad appears to have made little difference. With confusion apparently growing between London and Washington over WMD, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said he would be pressing Ministers when Parliament returned in the New Year on what precisely the Government knew. Blair made his remarks in a pre-Christmas interview with BFBS, the British Forces Broadcasting Service, heard by the 10,000 British troops stationed in southern Iraq. In recent days, senior Whitehall officials have raised the extraordinary possibility that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction after all - but believed he did after being misled by his own advisors.
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