Some news:

BBC News: Bush 'brainwashed' Blair on Iraq

BBC News: Baghdad diary

And some commentary:

Jack Murtha: U.S. has lost 'militarily' in Iraq

Tariq Ali: The war is already lost
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments

Britain tried to stop the US disbanding the army in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, Europe minister Geoff Hoon has said.

Mr Hoon, who was defence secretary at the time, said he and other members of the government tried to persuade the United States not to purge members of Saddam's Ba'ath party from senior positions in the army.

He told the Daily Telegraph: "We would not have disbanded the Iraqi army.

"We were very concerned in the final stages of the conflict that the Iraqi army was a force for stability in Iraq and I think we would have preferred for that army to remain intact."

He added: "I don't think we would have pursued the de-Ba'athification policy in quite the same way.

"I think we understood from perhaps experience in Europe that quite a lot of people were Ba'athists because they had to be if they wanted to be teachers or administrators and they weren't necessarily committed to Saddam Hussein.

"Those were arguments that I certainly put forward and I know other members of the government put forward. So we lost the argument."

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Three Danish journalists who published secret intelligence reports on Iraq have been acquitted of endangering national security.

The court ruled that Niels Lunde, Michael Bjerre and Jesper Larsen had acted in the public interest.

Their articles said Danish intelligence services knew there was no evidence Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US-led invasion in 2003.

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