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Blix: US Held 'Witch Hunt'



Updated: 07:12, Monday March 12, 2007

Hans Blix, the former UN weapons inspector, has accused America of conducting a "witch-hunt" in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
He was speaking exclusively to Sky News as part of our in-depth survey of Iraq.

All this week Sky's Inside Iraq series is focusing on how the country and its people are coping with the aftermath of the invasion - and looking at what the future holds.
Our teams on the ground will be bringing the latest developments, interviews with key players and ordinary Iraqis and expert analysis on the bigger picture.
Mr Blix became a powerful critic of the US-led invasion after his teams failed to find the significant stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that Tony Blair and President George Bush insisted Saddam Hussein was hoarding.

He told Sky News' Anna Botting the invasion was "clearly illegal" and said Mr Blair had not been completely straight with the evidence used to justify military force.
Mr Blix said: "They put exclamation marks instead of question marks. There were question marks but they changed them to exclamation marks.
"And I think they got the political punishment for that. They lost a lot of confidence. Both Bush and Blair ..."
He said that allowing the UN inspectors to continue their work could have avoided the war. More than 130 UK troops, over 3,100 US forces and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since the invasion as the country threatens to tumble into full-scale civil war.
Mr Blix said: "I think if they'd allowed us to carry on the inspections a couple of months more then we would have been able to go to all the sites suspected of by intelligence.
"And since there weren't any weapons we'd have come with that answer: there are no weapons at all the sites you've given us."
The former Swedish foreign minister added that he hoped Iraqi people could be empowered and turn around their country's fortunes, saying: "I don't see that the US can succeed."

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