WMD

I was just browsing BBC News website, as I tend to do (quite a lot in fact) and came across a blog post about the launch of Al Jazeera English, (AJE), a new international news channel. This in itself is interesting (if we ever reconnect our Sky box I might tune in to see it, if it's free-to-air), but it was a comment that a reader posted that grabbed my attention.

Peter in comment #35 suggests that the BBC stood up to the UK govt over the WMD issue and turned out to be right. Since when? The Iraq Survey Group found the remains of dozens of chemical weapons, as predicted by the pre-war intelligence, and said so in their report (Vol 3, Annex F). The BBC, and pretty much everyone else as well, still refuses to report this, due to a misunderstanding over terminology. The net result is that many people are convinced that NOTHING at all was found in Iraq and that the pre-war intelligence was totally false. This naturally leads some people, including the 7/7 bombers, into various conspiracies - that the intelligence was cooked and that there was another motive for the war - which need to be resisted.
One wonders whether the 7/7 bombings would have gone ahead if the BBC and other media had reported accurately on the findings of the ISG (and on the 9/11 commission - which only ruled out one particular link between Saddam and OBL not all links).

Now this is just someone's opinion, they could post anything (and believe me, on the BBC site many people do...) but is this true? I don't have time just now to go looking for web versions of the ISG report or the 9/11 commission... so I am at the mercy of media reporting, accurate or otherwise, but does this sound familiar to anyone else? Is this accurate, did anyone hear it? (Even if true, I still tend to think that the sooner Blair and Bush are out of office, the better, but that's partly down to my conviction that no one person or party should be in power too long. Maybe because I grew up during the Thatcher era!)

Stock clichés like newspapers being the 'first draft' of history, and history being written by the winners (or those with the loudest voices?) spring to mind...