Yorkie wrote:
What a shoddy attack on Lord Hutton, you are no better than the countrys gutter press.
as for the evidence about attack in 45 minutes what very short memories most people have.
cannot anyone remember the churchill-matrix, and Astra saga?
let me remind you it was known as the supergun affair. the government then tory, put directors of arms companies on charge for illegaly supplying weapons to iraq, then it was discovered that under the official secrets act vital evidence was witheld to the defense side.
in smart words that government were to send directors to prison, for suppling arms which the government had ordered and given credit lines for.
so there is a cleft stick, do you declare weapons of mass destruction found
and then find that they were actualy built in Britain, or not declare any?
of course iraq had weapons of mass destruction we built the bloody things thats how we know!
Gosh, Yorkie.
We were one of the transport companies that carried it, and yours truly was one of the drivers. However, Supergun was not a weapon of mass destruction, and it was passed out through Dover Customs with the minimum of formalities.
The truth about Supergun, is that it was Oil Pipeline equipment. It said so on our T.I.R. carnets.
Methinks the idea was simple. Iraq was gonna fire oil at Israel from the Sueprgun, to avoid having to ship it through the Suez Canal.
Note: No-one from our Company was ever called to give evidence to the Commons Select Committee enquiry. Paul Ashwell (the guy who got arrested in Greece) was not, as far as I am aware, ever questioned by committee either. Clearly, thats because we were too thick to know anything about it.
All I remember, is that one Sunday night, all the remaining trailers had to shipped to Calais on the double, so that Matrix Churchill and Sheffield Forgemasters could draw down on their Letters of Credit.
As I recollect, and my memory is (necessarily) vague on such things, a few months before Supergun, we had another job carrying weapons systems and the like down to Portsmoth to be loaded on an Exhibition shp due to sail for the mddle east (Iraq). It was one of the Townsend Thoresen ships. Viking Voyager or something like that. The name did amuse me as I remember.
Oh for the good old days....