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Posted Thursday, August 26, 2004

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The Daily Telegraph

London, Thursday, August 26, 2004

 

[OFF WITH HIS HEAD]

MP tries to impeach Blair on WMD

By Andrew Sparrow

TONY Blair (below) faces an attempt to impeach him for allegedly misleading MPs in the approach to the war in Iraq.

A Welsh nationalist MP has drawn up a report detailing the Prime Minister's alleged "high crimes and misdemeanours" which will form the basis of the indictment.

Blair in Parliament

Adam Price, the MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, wants to resurrect Parliament's ancient impeachment procedure, which has not been used successfully for almost 200 years, because he believes Mr Blair acted dishonestly in taking the country to war. The parliamentary authorities consider impeachment obsolete and Mr Price's charges are unlikely to be debated in the Commons. But the attack on Mr Blair, who returned home yesterday after his summer holiday, will reopen the debate about weapons of mass destruction.

A report in this week's Spectator magazine says that Mr Price's impeachment document will accuse Mr Blair of seriously misleading MPs and the public about WMD.

For example, the Prime Minister told NBC News on April 3, 2002:

"We know that [Saddam Hussein] has stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons."

But, as the Butler inquiry showed, the joint intelligence committee told him in March 2002 that intelligence about Iraq's WMD was "sporadic and patchy" and that Saddam possessed "small stocks of chemical warfare agent precursors".

Mr Price will argue that Mr Blair did not tell the truth because he had already made a secret agreement with President George W Bush to invade Iraq and that that also justified his impeachment.

MPs used to employ impeachment to take action against a public figure accused of "high crimes and misdemeanours". After the Commons voted in favour of impeachment, the accused would be tried by the House of Lords.

The most notable case involved Warren Hastings, who was impeached in 1787 for offences in his capacity as governor general of India. He was acquitted after a trial that lasted until 1795. Although impeachment survives as a process in America, where Republicans tried to use it to force President Bill Clinton out of office, there has not been an impeachment in Britain since 1806.

A parliamentary committee that considered the matter recently concluded that "the circumstances in which impeachment has taken place are now so remote from the present that the procedure may be considered obsolete".

 

Tony Blair snubs George Bush's pleas to fly to the US and pick up Congressional Medal of Honor

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