The corruption case against Ariel Sharon is building and if the Telegraph is reporting about it he must be in trouble.
The scale of the evidence has been revealed by the aide, David Spector, in an exclusive interview with the Telegraph. Mr Sharon is fighting for his political life over a long-running scandal about murky political payments and alleged illicit campaign financing.
Mr Spector, 50, who is credited with planning Mr Sharon’s successful attempt to become the leader of the Likud party in 1999, believes that his tapes could be important evidence in the police investigation into the Israeli leader and could possibly bring about his downfall.
For many years Mr Spector recorded four-way conversations involving himself, the prime minister and Mr Sharon’s sons, Gilad and Omri, on audio and video tapes.
UK intel agencies have pre-emptively warned Tony Blair not to blame them for his war.
BRITISH intelligence chiefs launched a pre-emptive strike against Tony Blair last night, ahead of the publication of the Hutton report, and blamed the government for pressurising them into cherry-picking intelligence to justify the war on Iraq.
The UK’s leading spies believe the political fallout from the publication on Wednesday of the Hutton Inquiry’s report will result in an attempt by the Prime Minister and his senior Cabinet colleagues to blame the intelligence services for the shoddy information which was used by the government to convince the British people and parliament that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were a threat to the UK.
While here in the US Kay puts all of the blame on the CIA and other agencies.
Dr. Kay said he was convinced that the analysts were not pressed by the Bush administration to make certain their prewar intelligence reports conformed to a White House agenda on Iraq.
Last year, some C.I.A. analysts said they had felt pressed to find links between Iraq and Al Qaeda to suit the administration. While Dr. Kay said he has no knowledge about that issue, he did believe that pressure was placed on analysts regarding the weapons programs.
“All the analysts I have talked to said they never felt pressured on W.M.D.,” he said. “Everyone believed that they had W.M.D.”
Assuming ‘he did believe’ in the sentence preceding the direct quote is a typo on the NYT’s part, and it appears that Dr. Kay hasn’t bothered talking to these other people, could it be said he’s cherry-picking intelligence?