Ailing British Nobel literature laureate Harold Pinter fiercely attacked the Anglo-American decision to go to war in Iraq in a pre-recorded speech aired at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Wednesday.

The British playwright said the Iraq war was one of a number of "US crimes" and mocked Tony Blair's Britain as "pathetic and supine", according to The Independent on Thursday.

The invasion of Iraq was "a bandit act", "an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law ... an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public." he said.

Pinter, who has been treated for cancer in recent years, was supposed to have delivered the traditional Nobel lecture in person, but was forced to cancel his trip to Sweden because of poor health.

Pinter began his speech by explaining that most of his plays had been born from a single line, word or image that came into his head. But the Nobel Prize winner interrupted his literary meanderings with an impassioned tirade against the Iraq war.

He continued: "We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'... the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true."

Other assertions - that Iraq had a relationship with al-Qa'ida, thus sharing responsibility for 9/11, and that Iraq threatened the security of the world - proved to be equally baseless, he said.

Pinter also took on US foreign policy more widely, contending that "crimes" committed by the US since the Second World War have been largely overlooked, unlike the atrocities committed by other nations.

Source: Xinhua