Sunday Herald -- America tore out 8000 pages of Iraq dossier

THE United States edited out more than 8000 crucial pages of Iraq's 11,800-page dossier on weapons, before passing on a sanitised version to the 10 non-permanent members of the United Nations security council.

The full extent of Washington's complete control over who sees what in the crucial Iraqi dossier calls into question the allegations made by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that 'omissions' in the document constituted a 'material breach' of the latest UN resolution on Iraq.

Current and former UN diplomats are said to be livid at what some have called the 'theft' of the Iraqi document by the US. Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant general secretary of the UN and the UN's humanitarian co- ordinator in Iraq until 2000, said: 'This is an outrageous attempt by the US to mislead.'

Yesterday, US President George W Bush announced that a planned trip to several African countries, scheduled for January, had been cancelled. As he gave the go-ahead to double the current 50,000 US troops deployed in the Gulf by early January, he used his weekly radio address to say that 'the men and women in the [US] military, many of whom will spend Christmas at posts and bases far from home' were the only thing that stood between 'Americans and grave danger'.

Is this censorship and the reaction going to be in the American press?