Bollitics The Chilcot inquiry

[snowychap]

The Britton Inquiry - the lying war criminal Blair used a 'convenient justification' for war

Tony Blair is facing strong criticism after he said he would have gone to war in Iraq even if he had known there were not any weapons of mass destruction.

The former prime minister said it was the "notion" of Saddam as a threat to the region which tilted him in favour of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

He added that he would have used different arguments to justify the war.

Critics have said Mr Blair misled Parliament and "tailored his arguments to fit the circumstances".

Hans Blix, who was in charge of the UN team searching Iraq for WMD, said he thought Mr Blair used WMD as a "convenient justification" for war.

"Saddam's removal was a gain but it's the only gain that I can see from the war," said Mr Blix.

Speaking on BBC One's Fern Britton Meets programme, Tony Blair was asked whether he would still have gone on with plans to join the US-led invasion had he known at the time that there were no WMD.

He said: "I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat."

...more on link

[PauloBarnesi]

Why can’t Tony Blair just disappear?

[Gringo]

Why can’t Tony Blair just disappear?

Because he only thinks he's god.

[Gringo]

Oooh, your slip is showing

Tony Blair's 'sycophancy' led us into war with Iraq, says former DPP

Britain went to war with Iraq because of Tony Blair’s “sycophancy” towards the US, according Sir Ken Macdonald, QC, the former Director of Public Prosecutions.

The former Prime Minister engaged in an “alarming subterfuge” with George Bush, and then misled the British people into a war they did not want, Sir Ken said.

In an article for The Times he argues that the Chilcot Inquiry should be held in "deserved and withering contempt" if it ends in a “whitewash” by failing to disclose details of a “foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions”.

He also called Mr Blair’s belief that he did what he thought was right a “narcissist’s defence”, adding: “Washington turned his head and he couldn’t resist the stage or the glamour that it gave him.”

Sir Ken, who was appointed in 2003 under the Blair government, added that the war was the result of a “Prime Minister lost in self-aggrandisement and a governing class too closed to speak truth to power.”

His comments come as a senior minister has accepted that Tony Blair could have lost the crucial House of Commons vote on the Iraq war if he had told MPs he wanted to depose Saddam Hussein regardless of whether he had weapons of mass destruction.

Get your outrage in now for by the time the inquiry reports, the blair pr machine will have a different version of the story for us all to hear.

[snowychap]

Alastair Campbell had Iraq dossier changed to fit US claims

Fresh evidence has emerged that Tony Blair's discredited Iraqi arms dossier was "sexed up" on the instructions of Alastair Campbell, his communications chief, to fit with claims from the US administration that were known to be false.

The pre-invasion dossier's worst-case estimate of how long it would take Iraq to acquire a nuclear weapon was shortened in response to a George Bush speech.

As Campbell prepares to appear before the Iraq inquiry on Tuesday, new evidence reveals the extent to which – on his instructions – those drafting the notorious dossier colluded with the US administration to make exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

...more on link

I would suggest that might be interesting but he'll probably spend most of his time lying through his back teeth. It is, after all, difficult to change one's habits.

[Gringo]

Utter nonsense snowy. We've already had an enquiry that proved the dossier was not sexed up and the conspiracy was all the bbc's making and david kelly was the sort of magician who could clean the handle of a knife whilst being dead.

[rjw63]

[Awol]

You think it was Mandelson's doing, Rob?

[rjw63]

No comment ;-)

[wiganvillain]

At least he would've been able to twist a few arms

[snowychap]

Now that would have been fun with Coochie running the show.

[snowychap]

I've only just switched on so I'm not quite up to speed but is Campbell trying to pin it on the JIC (and particularly the man for whom he claimed Blair had the utmost respect and for whom he he has 'the utmost regard', i.e. John Scarlett)?

[snowychap]

Gordo to face inquiry before election:

Gordon Brown will be called to give evidence to the Iraq Inquiry before the general election, the BBC understands.

The prime minister had been due to appear before Sir John Chilcot's inquiry after the election - due by June at the latest.

But he has been under pressure from opposition parties to explain his role before voters go to the polls.

Mr Brown was chancellor at the time of the 2003 invasion and has said he will be "happy" to appear whenever called.

...more on link

[Awol]

Straw was interesting today.

Felt regime change as a policy was unlawful and unacceptable - case rested on WMD.

War couldn't have gone ahead without his support of Blair and considered resignation. So Jack why didn't you stop it and failing that why didn't you resign?

Bear in mind Blair's Fern Britton interview where he said I would have invaded Iraq anyway - WMD were not vital for war. Funny that because without that justification it was simply an illegal enterprise making Blair a bona fide war criminal.

The only way he could try and justify it was the dodgy dossier and concealling the full legal advice from Cabinet.

Brown will get bounced for starving the Armed Forces of sufficient resources as already evidenced by Geoff Hoon and it will be made perfectly clear to the hard of thinking that Brown has gallons of blood on his hands.

Still, even though the enquiry seem incapable of asking really penetrating questions of the witnesses, the unmistakable picture surrounding Blair's deceit is still coming out.

Hopefully a war crimes prosecution will follow at some point in the future but he won't have to wait for his famous hand of history before he is judged by the public and his peers. Suck it up Tony, karma's a bitch.

[snowychap]

Questioner: Did it make any difference to you that Mr Straw was a qualified lawyer.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst: He is not an international lawyer.

Followed by much chortling in the audience and amongst members of the inquiry panel.

[Awol]

Wood this morning was unequivocal: Military action without a second resolution had no basis in international law, this was the settled position of the entire FCO legal department and Straw explicitly rejected it. He also intimated he had done things prior to this at the Home Office which he'd been advised were illegal but had always got away with it.

Basically Straw lied in his evidence and has been busted.

Somehow Lord Goldsmith the Attorney General went from accepting the FCO position that war without another resolution would be illegal, to suporting the legality of invasion. This conversion occured over a period of ten days in March 2003 - i.e. days before the troops went in. So (rhetorical question) who lent on him?

If he mans up, owns up and tells the truth then Blair is screwed on Friday.

[tonyh29]

Even before George Bush entered the White House, Blair had outlined what he called this “doctrine of international community” in a speech in Chicago in April 1999.It was then, apparently, that a politician who had hitherto seemed ambitious but lacking in ideas or focus, bored by the details of domestic policy, discovered a mission in life – to impose Western “values” by force.

The result has been what the journalist John Kampfner called “Blair’s Wars” – Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq.

Confronted by the lies used to justify the invasion, Blair has insisted he acted “in good faith” – as if meaning well in defiance of the facts and the warnings of many experts could be a justification for going to war.

The truth is he didn’t give a damn about the pros and cons of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. He was determined to go along with Bush in seizing Iraq.Contemptuous of his critics, Blair is content to await the judgement of history – and of his god.

What will damn him forever in every tribunal is not simply his complicity in real crimes against humanity – a war that is destroying Iraq and that has taken upwards of a million lives – but this complete lack of contrition.

Blair will spend a well-paid ­retirement in the world of the global rich but he will in the coming decades be regularly casting an anxious eye over his shoulder in case war crimes investigators are on his track.

[snowychap]

Who wrote that, Tony? Any links to the original?

[Awol]

An excellent summary of where the inquiry is up to regarding the illegality of the war, and quite how far up to his neck in this that clearing in the woods Jack Straw is.

Link

Chilcot inquiry: all the legal advice that was fit to print

No wonder Jack Straw suppressed the record: it was he who ensured the cabinet was misadvised on legality of the Iraq war

No wonder Jack Straw wants to forget all about the cabinet discussion of the legality of the Iraq war that took place three days before it started.

Documents disclosed by the Iraq inquiry today show that the attorney general thought he might tell the cabinet that "the legal issues were finely balanced". Straw talked him out of it. Straw then tried to cover up the lack of discussion at that cabinet meeting.

I'm not sure that Straw could have come out of today's evidence much worse. Despite his evidence last week, he seems to have been gung-ho on the war from the outset and the Foreign Office's chief legal adviser, Sir Michael Wood, kept having to pull him back. Straw eventually got fed up with this and rejected Wood's advice outright.

Both Wood and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, have today strongly disagreed with the view that the then attorney general Lord Goldsmith eventually came to, after being parked for months at a time for fear that he would come up with the wrong answer. On 7 March 2003, Goldsmith gave advice that was still too equivocal for the chief of the defence staff to commit British troops to war, but by 13 March had come up with a "better view" that the war would be legal. Four days later, the cabinet was given an unequivocal statement of Goldsmith's view that persuaded them to back the war. That statement was drawn up to be as strong as possible, for public consumption.

Last year, the information tribunal ordered the government to release the minutes of the cabinet meetings of 13 and 17 March but Straw – for the first time ever – used the veto that he had himself put in the freedom of act to block publication. It had emerged during the tribunal hearing that there was considered to be insufficient discussion of the legal issues at the second meeting. It has since been admitted during the inquiry that all that happened at that meeting was that Goldsmith's very short legal advice was tabled and that a request by Clare Short for a discussion was rejected by the majority of the cabinet.

This lack of discussion is one of the key political and constitutional issues around the war. Should the cabinet have discussed the legality of a decision for which they were constitutionally collectively responsible?

Former defence secretary Geoff Hoon doesn't think so, as he told the inquiry last week. For him, a view from the attorney general one way or another was all that the cabinet needed. Former cabinet secretary Lord Turnbull took a similar line. It is now clear that Goldsmith thought the cabinet should perhaps be fully informed but he was talked out of it.

We know this because the inquiry has for once published actual documents that back up what the witnesses are saying. There is a letter from Wood to Straw's private office in March 2002, a year before the invasion, warning Straw not to be so sure that a war would be legal. There is correspondence from before and after the passage of UN security council resolution 1441 and – as most papers are reporting – correspondence between Straw and Wood in which the former explicitly rejects his legal adviser's legal advice. There is also documentary evidence that supports the government's claim that Goldsmith changed his mind on 13 March before a meeting with Blair allies Sally Morgan and Charles Falconer, in spite of what the Cabinet Office told me.

Wilmshurst today described as "lamentable" the process by which Goldsmith had moved from an initial view that a second UN resolution would be needed, to a different but still equivocal view on 7 March, and then to a definite view ten days later. She made clear her view that Goldsmith should have been asked earlier to give a formal view and that by the time he was asked, he had little choice but to back the war because the alternative was to give Saddam Hussein a massive propaganda victory.

But what happened after Goldsmith finally made up his mind to back the war on 13 March is also crucial. The events of that day can be deduced from Goldsmith's diary, and a note by his legal secretary David Brummell, published by the inquiry. Goldsmith appears to have told Brummell in the morning that he would back the war long before a meeting that evening. Indeed, at 6pm that afternoon, Goldsmith held a meeting with Straw where he told Straw that he would back the war; and as Brummell told the inquiry today, Straw was "duly grateful".

According to the Foreign Office's note of that meeting, Goldsmith told Straw that "in public he needed to explain his case as strongly and unambiguously as possible", but that "he thought he might need to tell the cabinet when it met on 17 March that the legal issues were finely balanced."

Straw warned him of the danger of leaks and advised him that it would be better to present the cabinet with a draft letter to the Commons foreign affairs committee as the basic standard text of his position, and then make a few comments. "The attorney general agreed."

It is noticeable that Straw did not try to persuade Goldsmith of the line that the government has used since – that the Cabinet should only ever get an unequivocal view of the attorney general's view. He merely argued that they could not be trusted with the truth.

As it happened, the cabinet got an even shorter statement of Goldsmith's view – the written parliamentary answer that was clearly designed to be as strong and unambiguous as possible, and Goldsmith said virtually nothing at the meeting. Short has said that she wanted to ask him both why he had taken so long to come to a decision – which we now know – and whether he had any doubts.

When Straw blocked the release of the cabinet minutes, I wrote here of the problem of using arguments about cabinet confidentiality and collective cabinet responsibility to obscure an apparent failure of cabinet collective decision-making. It now appears that Straw himself engineered that failure. The cabinet backed the war unaware that the legal issues were finely balanced. That is a scandal that can be firmly laid at Straw's door.

Blair, Brown, Straw et al are lying war criminals, nothing more and nothing less.

[peterms]

An excellent summary of where the inquiry is up to regarding the illegality of the war, and quite how far up to his neck in this that clearing in the woods Jack Straw is.

Link to pinko woolly liberal journal of the yoghurt-knitters

Really, Jon, I wonder about your recent reading habits. :shock:

But seriously, it's a decent summary of what happened. What hasn't attracted much comment up to now, at least as far as I've noticed, is the contemptuous way the cabinet was treated.

This article mentions this. It was commented on at the time, as a further step in the trend to marginalise and disempower cabinet which has been under way for some time, especially under Blair's term of office.

But it's frightening to think that we were taken to war, and very large numbers of people killed, on the basis of less evidence than a local council would consider when siting a new pelican crossing.