Bombshell: British Iraq inquiry in flames

Bombshell: British Iraq inquiry in flames
05.03.2015



If ever there was a geo-political bombshell, this is it. Twelve years after the illegal and inhumane invasion of Iraq based on lies, fabrication and downright arrogance, 6 years after the launch of the Chilcot inquiry, comes today the following allegation. 

For those who have followed the Iraq story, a must read.


HUMAN RIGHTS LAW RULES CHILCOT INQUIRY INVALID

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN IS NOT IMPARTIAL


To Sir Richard Ottaway,

Chair of Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee

House of Commons

SW1A OAA



28 FEB 2015



Dear Sir,



Following the meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee on 4th Feb 2015 concerning the Chilcott Inquiry, which was unsatisfactory in not establishing a completion date, I shall be grateful if you will investigate a much graver matter concerning the validity of the Inquiry as a whole. That is its failure to be impartial within European Human Rights Law.



Sir Lawrence Freedman was appointed Privy Councilor as Adviser to PM Tony Blair on Foreign Affairs, in the period from 1997-2007. He has also formed a company with the MOD to train the military and businesses in military strategy. I contend that these positions are incompatible with his membership of the Chilcot Inquiry.



At 9 am on the 18th of January 2010, one hour before Jonathan Powell was due to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, Sir John Chilcot received the following letter from Sir Laurence Freedman,



"Jonathan Powell will be giving evidence today. I thought it would be helpful to set out, for the record, my involvement in Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech, delivered to the Economic Club of Chicago on 24 April 1999 on 'The doctrine of the International Community.

I was asked by Jonathan Powell to submit ideas for this speech on about 12 April 1999 and I submitted the attached memo on April 16th. I believe I discussed it with Jonathan Powell early the following week, but I made no more submissions."



Now of these submissions there were, in fact, twelve paragraphs included in Blair's speech verbatim.



One paragraph of the memo of the suggestions from Professor Freedman was as follows:-



"Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men - Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevich. Both have been prepared to wage vicious campaigns against sections of their own community, and Saddam Hussein even occupied a neighboring country. As a result of these destructive policies both have brought calamity on their own peoples. Instead of enjoying its oil wealth Iraq has been reduced to poverty, with political life stultified through fear."



The following are extracts from 'THE BLAIR DOCTRINE' delivered by Blair to the Chicago Economic Club on April 22 1999,



" Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men - Saddam Hussein and Slobodan. Both have been prepared to wage vicious campaigns against sections of their own community, and Saddam Hussein even occupied a neighboring country. As a result of these destructive policies both have brought calamity on their own peoples. Instead of enjoying its oil wealth Iraq has been reduced to poverty, with political life stultified through fear."



The wording, in turn, is reminiscent of statements two years earlier to be found in The Project for a New American Century, PNAC, written by Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Bolton, and Cheney. (All committed zionists, as is Freedman.) Freedman must have been aware of the PNAC, and may, as a war strategist, have met its authors and even contributed to its ideas, if not the actual words. Recently, in 2010, he did indeed share a conference platform with Richard Perle, again compromising his role as an impartial member of the Chilcot Inquiry during its progress from 20069 and 2015.



The Blair Doctrine was delivered by Blair in Chicago two years before Bush was elected as President, and eleven months before 9/11. Blair had of course been groomed in America as a young, charismatic, potential leader in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Fulbright International Travel Scholarships, along with Karzai and Gordon Brown.( Tony Benn was convinced Blair was a CIA instrument in smashing the Labour party.) The PNAC push to deal with Saddam Hussein had come long before Bush was elected President. As Sir Christopher Meyer said to the Chilcot Inquiry , Blair was " a firm believer" in removing Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. In Blair's own words ..."I had a vision ... greater than Iraq , greater than the American Alliance, greater than the greatness of our history." There was no stopping him . ( cf " A Journey "p 500 - 501).



Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who gave evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on its second day, closed his remarks as he was leaving, " in our conversations ( a clever word) I was surprised you did not mention Israel." Certainly the PNAC authors were very concerned to stop Saddam paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, as was Freedman.



The second part of my letter deals with the possible deception by Chilcot himself, and, according to European Human Rights Law, the lack of validity of the Inquiry because it can not be considered impartial. This lack of validity will cause extreme distress for Military Families Against War, as it is contrary to the protection given by European Human Rights Law to enable those affected to be confident that they can obtain an unbiased hearing. Rose Gentle will be staggered that she will never obtain justice for her dead son because the Chilcot Inquiry is rubbish. Nor will all the Iraqis ever be compensated whose relatives and children have been killed, maimed and psychologically damaged in the wreckage of a country in civil war. The fact that the barbarian acts of Lindsey England with her cigarette pointing at the penises of naked Iraqis at Abu Ghraib or the sexual torture ( "work them hard") in Camp Bread Basket will never be exposed in the International Criminal Court along with The Leaders of the war ( whose actions lead to all others), will be a stimulus to continuous violence in the future, as the Joint Intelligence Committee prophesied in the year 2000.



When in a letter of of 3 March 2011 I challenged Sir John about the Freedman Letter, his secretary replied that he had known about this "a long time before". "and had full confidence in the balance of his team".



But how long before ? (Cicero in a speech in praise of Pompey used this same legal ambiguity) Was it 24 hours before? Was it written in panic ?

Was it 2 months before? or at the commencement of his Inquiry in Nov 2009?



Now if it was at the commencement of the Inquiry how was Chilcot able to say, with a straight face, that :- "We come to this task with open minds and a commitment to review the evidence objectively. Each member of the committee is independent and non-partisan. We are determined to be thorough, rigorous, fair and frank to enable us to form impartial and evidence-based judgements on all aspects of the issues, including the arguments about the legality of the conflict."



Sir John also made clear that the Inquiry team would be critical if they felt it necessary.

"The Inquiry is not a court of law and nobody is on trial," he said. "But I want to make something absolutely clear. This Committee will not shy away from making criticism. If we find that mistakes were made, that there were issues which could have been dealt with better, we will say so frankly."

"We are all committed to ensuring that our proceedings are as open as possible because we recognise that is one of the ways in which the public can have confidence in the integrity and independence of the inquiry process.



How was he able to allow the official Inquiry Biography of Freedman, (which I quote below) still to omit in 2009, and still go on omitting in 2015, without alteration, the fact that Sir Lawrence Freedman was Foreign Affairs Policy Adviser to Blair between 1997 and 2007.



Official Chilcot Inquiry Biography Freedman



Sir Lawrence Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at King's College London since 1982. He became head of the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King's in 2000 and was appointed Vice-Principal in 2003.

He was educated at Whitley Bay Grammar School and the Universities of Manchester, York and Oxford. Before joining King's he held research appointments at Nuffield College Oxford, IISS and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997.

Professor Freedman has written extensively on nuclear strategy and the cold war, as well as commentating regularly on contemporary security issues. Among his books are Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (2000), The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (3rd edition 2004), Deterrence (2005), the two volume Official History of the Falklands Campaign (second edition 2007) and an Adelphi Paper on The Transformation in Strategic Affairs (2004). A Choice of Enemies: America confronts the Middle East, won the 2009 Lionel Gelber Prize and Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature. His most recent book is Strategy: A History (2013).



If it was at the commencement in Nov 2009 that Chilcot knew of Freedman's role in composing Blair's 1999 speech, why was the Official website Biography not updated to read more accurately as follows :-



Sir Lawrence Freedman was appointed a Privy Councilor in 2009 on account of his services

as Foreign Affairs advisor to PM Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007. Freedman contributed twelve crucial paragraphs, including removing Saddam Hussein, to "The Blair Doctrine" delivered to The Chicago Economic Club in April 1999, a year and a half before 9/11.

Freedman is closely associated with the authors of the Project for the New American Century of 1998. He has also established a Company with the MOD to train military and businesses in military strategy



I understand that while the Chilcot Inquiry has been in progress Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at Kings College London and has recently supervised a Phd study at Exeter on Israeli counter terrorist strategy and IDF War strategy. He has written a number of Papers on Israeli IDF anti terrorist strategy. He has written papers on the value of nuclear deterrence. He has set up a private company Simulstat with close association with the MOD teaching strategy to military and business at Cranfield and Shrivenham.. Such a close association with the MOD would make it hard for him to be critical of the MOD .



As Professor of War Studies he must know the Nuremberg Protocols of 1946 and the 40 Blue Books produced from Courtroom 600 Nuremberg and that planning and executing an aggressive war was considered "the supreme international crime of all "punishable by death.



In a public hearing it would only be human that Sir Lawrence would wish to distance himself from his master Tony Blair and the strategy of regime change, which as Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said "he had advised the Prime Minister on numerous occasions was palpably illegal".



One begins to wonder if, in Sir Lawrence Freedman, one is not dealing with Mephistopheles himself . He has managed to inveigle himself into the position of being both Judge and Jury of his own actions, and to manipulate as a puppet a man less clever than himself. We will never know the truth of the first week of Shock and Awe, how little Ali's burnt body came to be scarred with with charcoal flash marks like Hiroshima plutonium. We will never know of the mother in Fallujah staring at her beautiful child with a huge cancer on her face and of mothers, giving birth to babies with one eye, and their innards carried outside their bodies, whether the MOD knew all along that the munitions used with depleted uranium and plutonium would cause these tragedies, because Freedman himself was advocating the use of nuclear weapons and was himself negotiating with the MOD to form a company from which he would benefit. We do not know if Freedman himself copied terms such as Shock and Awe ( Sturm und Drang ) and |Storm Shadow Missiles" (Sturmtruppen ) |from Nazi Germany because the whole Inquiry is rotten to the core . We will not know if Freedman is in touch with Blair's lawyers extending the maxwellisation Programe by deceit ad infinitum..







I therefore request that you investigate the impartiality of Sir Lawrence Freedman and whether the Chilcot Inquiry should quickly be brought to a close as not complying with European Human Rights Law. Maxwellisation could clearly go on for a very long time indeed without a conclusion. I suggest that on the morning of Jonathan Powell's appearance Freedman must have been very worried indeed that the cat might have come out of the bag. Perhaps the Committee was instructed by Chilcot to steer clear of these speeches when questioning Powell.





I shall be pleased to forward to you copies of the many letters I have received from Sir John's staff.



While writing this letter to you , Bassim an Iraqi Sheik, to whom I tried to teach English , lost his nephew and youngest brother who were killed in Baghdad. He has now lost all the male members of his family, since his brother was killed, while hooded, by the Americans , and his brother in law by the Shia Militia. You could never meet a kinder or more intelligent man than Bassim. I dedicate this letter to him.



Yours sincerely.

Nicholas Wood . Secretary to the Submission of 19 Nov 2009

Secretary to the Letter from Privy Councillor Tony Benn to Kofi Anan 2003

\Secretary to The Blair War Crimes Foundation.

cc Mrs Rose Gentle, Military Families Against War .

ccThe Editor Private Eye.

Iraq invasion 2003: The bloody warnings six wise men gave to Tony Blair as he prepared to launch poorly planned campaign

Iraq invasion 2003: The bloody warnings six wise men gave to Tony Blair as he prepared to launch poorly planned campaign




Exclusive: In November 2002, a group of academics were summoned to advise the then PM. Here, four of them recall that day
COLE MORETON
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/iraq-invasion-2003-the-bloody-warnings-six-wise-men-gave-to-tony-blair-as-he-prepared-to-launch-poorly-planned-campaign-10000839.html
Sunday 25 January 2015


Tony Blair had a cough. He looked sick, pale and exhausted. “Don’t tell me it is going to be bad,” he said to the six men he had summoned to see him in Downing Street as war loomed. “Tell me how bad it will be.”

Those “six wise men” were all academics, expert in Iraq, the Middle East and international affairs. They had been called to the Cabinet Room to outline the worst that could happen if Britain and the United States launched an invasion.

This was a meeting that could have changed the course of history and, with better planning for the aftermath, saved countless lives – if only the Prime Minister and his advisers had listened and acted on the bloody warnings on that day in November 2002.

As we continue to wait for Lord Chilcot’s long-delayed report into Britain’s part in the war, four of those six men have agreed to talk to The Independent on Sunday about how and why things turned out even worse than they predicted. If anybody knows, they do.


The six wise men1 of 6







Next










“They were expecting a short, sharp, easy campaign and that the Iraqis would be grateful,” says Dr Toby Dodge, then of Queen Mary University of London, and the first to speak that morning.

He warned of a possible disaster: that Iraqis would fight for their country against the invaders rather than just celebrate the fall of their leader. A long and nasty civil war could follow. “My aim that day was to tell them as much as I could, so that there would be no excuses and nobody saying, ‘I didn’t know.’”

Blair has been defending himself in advance against the kicking he is expected to get from Lord Chilcot and the panel helping his investigation. There has been outrage at the news that the report will not be published until after the election, but Dr Dodge believes this is partly because members of the panel want to get their draft of history absolutely right – and that they will not pull punches.

“They fought like cats and dogs to get the transcripts of the conversations between Blair and George W Bush,” says the political scientist, who gave evidence to the inquiry’s first gathering back in 2009.

“This is not going to be written in high mandarin. It will be clear and direct. It is going to be damning.”

Professor George Joffe of Cambridge University, who also spoke that morning, and to the panel in 2009, agrees. “I think it is bound to be damning. The errors of judgement were so blatant, there is no way they can whitewash this.”

The six men were assembled around the Cabinet table in 2002 by Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College London and an adviser to Blair. “I simply felt it was important that such decisions should be taken with eyes open about the possible longer-term implications,” he told The Independent on Sunday in 2004. He is now on the Chilcot panel.

Dr Dodge believes the report will criticise Blair’s so-called sofa government, which was “highly informal and backed up with no institutional depth whatsoever. There was no extensive research in terms of risk assessment.”

He expects the panel to attack the chiefs of staff, civil servants and other advisers at the time. “They will damn the diplomats and the top military brass for not doing their job, which was to say, ‘No, minister.’ If Blair was the poodle of Bush then people like Jeremy Heywood [his principal private secretary] served a very poor policy very poorly.”

Others have criticised the Chilcot panel for not pushing witnesses hard enough, but Dr Dodge disagrees. “My reading of the questions was that they were giving them enough rope to hang themselves.”

Families escape from Basra in March 2003 (EPA)

So what did happen? And could lives had been saved if the Prime Minister’s response to that meeting on the morning of Tuesday 19 November 2002 had been different?

“We were heavily briefed,” says Dr Dodge, who is now at the London School of Economics. “They said, ‘Don’t tell him not to do it. He has already made up his mind.’”

So there was no chance of stopping the invasion, or the UK joining it, but what was at stake that morning was the aftermath. What would happen on the day after victory was declared?

“They had no plan for what would happen after the invasion,” says George Joffe. “The approach was, ‘The Americans are heading this up. They will have a detailed plan. We need to follow them.’”

Unfortunately, he says, that was not true. “The State Department had spent a year preparing a detailed briefing about how the after-invasion scenario should be handled. All that was junked. They were making up policy on the hoof.”

The six wise men brought their expertise to Downing Street the day after UN inspectors had arrived in Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was also at No 10, explaining details to the Prime Minister and pointing out places on a number of maps. In other news, the tanker Prestige was spilling 76,000 tons of crude oil into the Atlantic off the Spanish coast.

The meeting began with five-minute presentations by Dr Dodge, Professor Joffe and Professor Charles Tripp of the School for Oriental and Asian Studies, an expert in the Middle East. Professor Joffe emphasised the rigid power structures in Iraq that defined Saddam Hussein as much as he defined them, but became frustrated when the Prime Minister responded by personalising the problem again, saying: “But the man is evil, isn’t he?”

Another expert present was Steven Simon, then deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He was also a US diplomat who had been seconded from the State Department; it is unclear whether Blair was aware of this.

Mr Simon now believes that even with greater forward planning the invasion would have had the same catastrophic results, as it was absurd for the White House to think it could bring democracy to Iraq with a war. “If everything had been done differently, there might have been some small shot at avoiding disaster. But only a small shot.”

Professor Joffe disagrees, and believes there could have been a more positive and peaceful outcome if Blair had taken on board what was said that day and used his influence with George W Bush to push for a detailed post-invasion plan that kept stability in the country. “The people who were put in charge in Iraq had very little knowledge or experience of the Middle East,” he says. “There was nobody in leadership with any practical experience of how to handle a transition to democracy like that. They were quite childish in somehow believing that democracy would bloom. This showed ignorance, not only of the region but also of the way politics works.”

The Pentagon and the White House took the decision to remove those at the top of the Iraqi army and the ruling Ba’ath Party, he says, but Paul Bremer took it much further in his role as Governor of Iraq and demolished both entirely. This opened Pandora’s box, says Professor Joffe, by removing the lid that had been in place under Saddam. “Islamic State is a direct consequence of the decision to invade.”

The civil war and violent chaos that followed the war created the right conditions for Islamic State to grow, says Professor Joffe. The movement picked up strength on the ground by forming alliances with the former Ba’ath party leaders who served under Saddam and who still had extensive networks, he says. “Given their sense of alienation from the Shia-led government, their organisation and the reputation of the Ba’ath Party for bringing order in the past, whatever their methods, you can see why Sunni tribes have said, ‘These are the guys we have got to support.’”

The sixth wise man was Professor Michael Clarke, then at King’s College London and now the director general of the Royal United Services Institute. He was neither a hawk nor a dove that day, but “agnostic” about what might happen after an invasion. “Blair knew this was going to be serious,” he says. “He was not blasé about it at all.”

Sir John Chilcot, centre, and his panel (Getty)

The Prime Minister arrived that day looking ill, he says. “He looked like a man who should not have been working full time, a man who was just getting over a virus that had left him worn out.”

Did he look like a man who should not have been making big decisions? “There is no let-up in leadership. The poor guy had to carry on.”

Professor Clarke does believe that the way Tony Blair was already attempting to justify the invasion to the public was a mistake. “We knew there was no nuclear stuff in Iraq,” he says. “We genuinely believed there were battlefield chemical weapons in the country.” Could they be described as weapons of mass destruction? “Yes, because of the indiscriminate effect they could have on the civilian population.”

The irony was that Saddam himself thought he had chemical WMDs, says Professor Clarke, because his own generals had not dared admit to him that they had not built as many as he thought. “Everyone believed the weapons existed but they didn’t because they had deteriorated and Iraq had not built as many as we thought.” Those that were in existence had deteriorated. Each general thought the others had the weapons, but they too were bluffing: “Nobody would tell Saddam the truth.”

What about the public claim that Iraq could launch a chemical strike against British troops in Cyprus within 45 minutes? “That was always absurd,” says Professor Clarke. “Tony Blair fell into the trap of bringing intelligence material into the public debate, which is a very foolish thing to do. Even the best intelligence is always messy.”

He believes Blair did not actually decide to go to war on the basis of intelligence, but made it look as if he had with his two “dodgy” dossiers. “He presented the case to the public as if they had incontrovertible evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. That was rubbish. They were ridiculous documents, both those documents.”

He does not believe Chilcot’s findings will come as a shock. “We all know the basic picture. The Americans committed a strategic blunder. Tony Blair never gave any real thought to not supporting them.”

Like Steven Simon, Professor Clarke believes that it barely occurred to the Prime Minister not to support the invasion, as his first concern had to be about the long-standing relationship between Britain andthe US. “He has been knocked about, but I think history will judge him more kindly than his contemporaries.”

Back in that meeting in 2002, it was Michael Clarke who showed sympathy for the ailing Tony Blair. He was the last to leave the room, and as he did so he placed a hand on the leader’s shoulder, saying, “Good luck, Prime Minister.” What was the reaction? “He gave me a knowing smile and said, ‘Yeah. Thank you.’”

He could probably do with such sympathy now.

Iraq invasion 2003: The bloody warnings six wise men gave to Tony Blair as he prepared to launch poorly planned campaign

Iraq invasion 2003: The bloody warnings six wise men gave to Tony Blair as he prepared to launch poorly planned campaign




Exclusive: In November 2002, a group of academics were summoned to advise the then PM. Here, four of them recall that day
COLE MORETON
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/iraq-invasion-2003-the-bloody-warnings-six-wise-men-gave-to-tony-blair-as-he-prepared-to-launch-poorly-planned-campaign-10000839.html
Sunday 25 January 2015


Tony Blair had a cough. He looked sick, pale and exhausted. “Don’t tell me it is going to be bad,” he said to the six men he had summoned to see him in Downing Street as war loomed. “Tell me how bad it will be.”

Those “six wise men” were all academics, expert in Iraq, the Middle East and international affairs. They had been called to the Cabinet Room to outline the worst that could happen if Britain and the United States launched an invasion.

This was a meeting that could have changed the course of history and, with better planning for the aftermath, saved countless lives – if only the Prime Minister and his advisers had listened and acted on the bloody warnings on that day in November 2002.

As we continue to wait for Lord Chilcot’s long-delayed report into Britain’s part in the war, four of those six men have agreed to talk to The Independent on Sunday about how and why things turned out even worse than they predicted. If anybody knows, they do.


The six wise men1 of 6







Next










“They were expecting a short, sharp, easy campaign and that the Iraqis would be grateful,” says Dr Toby Dodge, then of Queen Mary University of London, and the first to speak that morning.

He warned of a possible disaster: that Iraqis would fight for their country against the invaders rather than just celebrate the fall of their leader. A long and nasty civil war could follow. “My aim that day was to tell them as much as I could, so that there would be no excuses and nobody saying, ‘I didn’t know.’”

Blair has been defending himself in advance against the kicking he is expected to get from Lord Chilcot and the panel helping his investigation. There has been outrage at the news that the report will not be published until after the election, but Dr Dodge believes this is partly because members of the panel want to get their draft of history absolutely right – and that they will not pull punches.

“They fought like cats and dogs to get the transcripts of the conversations between Blair and George W Bush,” says the political scientist, who gave evidence to the inquiry’s first gathering back in 2009.

“This is not going to be written in high mandarin. It will be clear and direct. It is going to be damning.”

Professor George Joffe of Cambridge University, who also spoke that morning, and to the panel in 2009, agrees. “I think it is bound to be damning. The errors of judgement were so blatant, there is no way they can whitewash this.”

The six men were assembled around the Cabinet table in 2002 by Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King’s College London and an adviser to Blair. “I simply felt it was important that such decisions should be taken with eyes open about the possible longer-term implications,” he told The Independent on Sunday in 2004. He is now on the Chilcot panel.

Dr Dodge believes the report will criticise Blair’s so-called sofa government, which was “highly informal and backed up with no institutional depth whatsoever. There was no extensive research in terms of risk assessment.”

He expects the panel to attack the chiefs of staff, civil servants and other advisers at the time. “They will damn the diplomats and the top military brass for not doing their job, which was to say, ‘No, minister.’ If Blair was the poodle of Bush then people like Jeremy Heywood [his principal private secretary] served a very poor policy very poorly.”

Others have criticised the Chilcot panel for not pushing witnesses hard enough, but Dr Dodge disagrees. “My reading of the questions was that they were giving them enough rope to hang themselves.”

Families escape from Basra in March 2003 (EPA)

So what did happen? And could lives had been saved if the Prime Minister’s response to that meeting on the morning of Tuesday 19 November 2002 had been different?

“We were heavily briefed,” says Dr Dodge, who is now at the London School of Economics. “They said, ‘Don’t tell him not to do it. He has already made up his mind.’”

So there was no chance of stopping the invasion, or the UK joining it, but what was at stake that morning was the aftermath. What would happen on the day after victory was declared?

“They had no plan for what would happen after the invasion,” says George Joffe. “The approach was, ‘The Americans are heading this up. They will have a detailed plan. We need to follow them.’”

Unfortunately, he says, that was not true. “The State Department had spent a year preparing a detailed briefing about how the after-invasion scenario should be handled. All that was junked. They were making up policy on the hoof.”

The six wise men brought their expertise to Downing Street the day after UN inspectors had arrived in Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, was also at No 10, explaining details to the Prime Minister and pointing out places on a number of maps. In other news, the tanker Prestige was spilling 76,000 tons of crude oil into the Atlantic off the Spanish coast.

The meeting began with five-minute presentations by Dr Dodge, Professor Joffe and Professor Charles Tripp of the School for Oriental and Asian Studies, an expert in the Middle East. Professor Joffe emphasised the rigid power structures in Iraq that defined Saddam Hussein as much as he defined them, but became frustrated when the Prime Minister responded by personalising the problem again, saying: “But the man is evil, isn’t he?”

Another expert present was Steven Simon, then deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He was also a US diplomat who had been seconded from the State Department; it is unclear whether Blair was aware of this.

Mr Simon now believes that even with greater forward planning the invasion would have had the same catastrophic results, as it was absurd for the White House to think it could bring democracy to Iraq with a war. “If everything had been done differently, there might have been some small shot at avoiding disaster. But only a small shot.”

Professor Joffe disagrees, and believes there could have been a more positive and peaceful outcome if Blair had taken on board what was said that day and used his influence with George W Bush to push for a detailed post-invasion plan that kept stability in the country. “The people who were put in charge in Iraq had very little knowledge or experience of the Middle East,” he says. “There was nobody in leadership with any practical experience of how to handle a transition to democracy like that. They were quite childish in somehow believing that democracy would bloom. This showed ignorance, not only of the region but also of the way politics works.”

The Pentagon and the White House took the decision to remove those at the top of the Iraqi army and the ruling Ba’ath Party, he says, but Paul Bremer took it much further in his role as Governor of Iraq and demolished both entirely. This opened Pandora’s box, says Professor Joffe, by removing the lid that had been in place under Saddam. “Islamic State is a direct consequence of the decision to invade.”

The civil war and violent chaos that followed the war created the right conditions for Islamic State to grow, says Professor Joffe. The movement picked up strength on the ground by forming alliances with the former Ba’ath party leaders who served under Saddam and who still had extensive networks, he says. “Given their sense of alienation from the Shia-led government, their organisation and the reputation of the Ba’ath Party for bringing order in the past, whatever their methods, you can see why Sunni tribes have said, ‘These are the guys we have got to support.’”

The sixth wise man was Professor Michael Clarke, then at King’s College London and now the director general of the Royal United Services Institute. He was neither a hawk nor a dove that day, but “agnostic” about what might happen after an invasion. “Blair knew this was going to be serious,” he says. “He was not blasé about it at all.”

Sir John Chilcot, centre, and his panel (Getty)

The Prime Minister arrived that day looking ill, he says. “He looked like a man who should not have been working full time, a man who was just getting over a virus that had left him worn out.”

Did he look like a man who should not have been making big decisions? “There is no let-up in leadership. The poor guy had to carry on.”

Professor Clarke does believe that the way Tony Blair was already attempting to justify the invasion to the public was a mistake. “We knew there was no nuclear stuff in Iraq,” he says. “We genuinely believed there were battlefield chemical weapons in the country.” Could they be described as weapons of mass destruction? “Yes, because of the indiscriminate effect they could have on the civilian population.”

The irony was that Saddam himself thought he had chemical WMDs, says Professor Clarke, because his own generals had not dared admit to him that they had not built as many as he thought. “Everyone believed the weapons existed but they didn’t because they had deteriorated and Iraq had not built as many as we thought.” Those that were in existence had deteriorated. Each general thought the others had the weapons, but they too were bluffing: “Nobody would tell Saddam the truth.”

What about the public claim that Iraq could launch a chemical strike against British troops in Cyprus within 45 minutes? “That was always absurd,” says Professor Clarke. “Tony Blair fell into the trap of bringing intelligence material into the public debate, which is a very foolish thing to do. Even the best intelligence is always messy.”

He believes Blair did not actually decide to go to war on the basis of intelligence, but made it look as if he had with his two “dodgy” dossiers. “He presented the case to the public as if they had incontrovertible evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. That was rubbish. They were ridiculous documents, both those documents.”

He does not believe Chilcot’s findings will come as a shock. “We all know the basic picture. The Americans committed a strategic blunder. Tony Blair never gave any real thought to not supporting them.”

Like Steven Simon, Professor Clarke believes that it barely occurred to the Prime Minister not to support the invasion, as his first concern had to be about the long-standing relationship between Britain andthe US. “He has been knocked about, but I think history will judge him more kindly than his contemporaries.”

Back in that meeting in 2002, it was Michael Clarke who showed sympathy for the ailing Tony Blair. He was the last to leave the room, and as he did so he placed a hand on the leader’s shoulder, saying, “Good luck, Prime Minister.” What was the reaction? “He gave me a knowing smile and said, ‘Yeah. Thank you.’”

He could probably do with such sympathy now.

The Chilcot inquiry: September 11 and the road to the Iraq War

The Chilcot inquiry: September 11 and the road to the Iraq War

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-chilcot-inquiry-september-11-and-the-road-to-the-iraq-war-9999788.html

The Iraq Report – Part 1: The beginning
ANDY MCSMITH

Friday 23 January 2015

After six years and nearly £9m, the report of Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war remains unpublished – and, we were told this week, will not be published this side of the general election.


Will the British public ever be told the truth about a conflict that millions of them opposed, whose lethal fallout can still be felt across the world today?

In the absence of an official account, this series of articles – based on evidence given to the inquiry and other accounts that are already in the public domain – is an attempt to set down in writing, as objectively as possible, the known facts and unresolved questions of one of the most bitterly controversial episodes in recent British history

***

Tony Blair was in a hotel room reading through the speech he was due to deliver to the TUC annual conference when Alastair Campbell came bursting in and insisted that he switch on the television. At 1.46pm British time, a Boeing 767 passenger airliner had hit the north tower of the World Trade Centre in New York. The south tower was hit 17 minutes later.
READ MORE:THE IRAQ REPORT – PART 2: INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF IRAQ
THE IRAQ REPORT – PART 3: THE AFTERMATH
THE IRAQ REPORT – PART 4: TIMELINE OF EVENTS
THE IRAQ REPORT – PART 5: THE KEY PROTAGONISTS
THE IRAQ REPORT – PART 6: A SUMMARY OF THE IRAQ WAR BY NUMBERS

The Prime Minister grasped at once that what he was seeing, from the Grand Hotel, Brighton, on 11 September 2001, was seminal, a pivotal moment in world affairs. There would obviously be a reaction from the US government that would be felt across the world: and whatever the US did, Blair decided, the UK must back them up.

“TB said that we had to help the US, that they could not go it on their own, that they felt beleaguered and this would be tantamount to a military attack in their minds,” Campbell recorded in his diary.

Tony Blair was not, of course, the only head of government to promise to be at America’s side as it embarked on what became known as the “war on terror”. One of the first world leaders on the phone to Washington was the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder. The day after the attack, he reported to the Bundestag that he had promised Bush “Germany’s full – I repeat, full – solidarity.” The first foreign head of government to visit the smouldering remains of New York’s Twin Towers was France’s President Jacques Chirac one week after the attack. Standing on US soil, he announced: “France, I can tell you, will not stand aside in a fight against a scourge that defies all democracies.”

Though neither Chirac nor Schroder said so at the time, their promise of support was not unconditional: it depended on what the US decided to do. Within 14 months, Schroder and Chirac were meeting to co-ordinate their opposition to the planned invasion of Iraq.

But when Tony Blair broadcast from Downing Street on the evening of 11 September, promising that “we here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends”, there was no unspoken codicil. He fully intended to go wherever the Americans went.


The Iraq War: A timeline1 of 17

David Cameron blocks report that exposes Tony Blair's Iraq war crimes

Lindsey German 11 November 2013. Posted in News

David Cameron is blocking publication of the Iraq Inquiry report because it confirms a secret conspiracy by Bush and Blair to take the US and Britain into an illegal war

Demonstration at Iraq Inquiry on 29January 2010 when Tony Blair gave evidence

While David Cameron was laying wreaths of poppies at the Cenotaph this weekend, to remember the past war dead, he has been blocking an inquiry set up to tell the truth about the war in Iraq.

That is the meaning of the refusal of the Cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to release records of conversations between then prime minister and US president George Bush, in the run up to the war on Iraq.

These records have been demanded repeatedly by the Chilcot inquiry, set up when Gordon Brown was prime minister, back in 2009. Chilcot said then that his inquiry would take a year and a half, or maybe a bit longer. That would have seen it report over two years ago. But now its publication date has been pushed back into 2014 at least.

Exclusive: US blocks publication of Chilcot’s report on how Britain went to war with Iraq

Department of State’s objection to release of key evidence may prevent inquiry’s conclusions from ever being published, except in heavily redacted form
JAMES CUSICK


POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT


Thursday 14 November 2013


Washington is playing the lead role in delaying the publication of the long-awaited report into how Britain went to war with Iraq, The Independent has learnt.


Although the Cabinet Office has been under fire for stalling the progress of the four-year Iraq Inquiry by Sir John Chilcot, senior diplomatic sources in the US and Whitehall indicated that it is officials in the White House and the US Department of State who have refused to sanction any declassification of critical pre- and post-war communications between George W Bush and Tony Blair.

Without permission from the US government, David Cameron faces the politically embarrassing situation of having to block evidence, on Washington’s orders, from being included in the report of an expensive and lengthy British inquiry.

Earlier this year, The Independent revealed that early drafts of the reportchallenged the official version of events leading up to the Iraq war, which saw Mr Blair send in 45,000 troops to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The protected documents relating to the Bush-Blair exchanges are said to provide crucial evidence for already-written passages that are highly critical of the covert way in which Mr Blair committed British troops to the US-led invasion.

One high-placed diplomatic source said: “The US are highly possessive when documents relate to the presence of the President or anyone close to him. Tony Blair is involved in a dialogue in many of these documents, and naturally someone else is at the other end – the President. Therefore this is not Tony Blair’s or the UK Government’s property to disclose.”

The source was adamant that “Chilcot, or anyone in London, does not decide what documents relating to a US President are published”.

Last week, Chilcot sent Downing Street an update on his inquiry’s progress which explained his continuing inability to set a publication date. He described difficult discussions with the Government on the disclosure of material he wanted to include in his report, or publish alongside it.

He said that over the past six months, he had submitted requests that covered 200 cabinet-level discussions, a cache of notes from Mr Blair to Mr Bush, and more than 130 records of conversations between any two of Mr Blair, Gordon Brown and the White House. Mr Cameron was informed that the inquiry and the Cabinet Office had “not yet reached a final position” on the documents.

Although the Prime Minister told Chilcot in a letter last week that some documents needed to be “handled sensitively”, the Cabinet Office decoded the Prime Minister’s phrases yesterday, telling The Independent: “It is in the public’s interests that exchanges between the UK Prime Minister and the US President are privileged. The whole premise about withholding them [from publication] is to ensure that we do not prejudice our relations with the United States.”

The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, has been widely criticised as the senior civil servant responsible for blocking the delivery of material to the inquiry. Sir Menzies Campbell, who as the Liberal Democrats’ foreign-affairs spokesman was a high-profile opponent of the war, has described the delays as “intolerable”, adding: “The full story need[s] to be told.”

The former Foreign Secretary Lord Owen has called for Sir Jeremy to be stripped of his role in deciding which documents are released to the inquiry. However, the Cabinet Office said yesterday that Sir Jeremy was merely upholding a previous decision taken by his predecessor, Lord O’Donnell, which emphasised the importance of privacy in communications between Downing Street and the White House.

Chilcot, a former diplomat who previously investigated intelligence on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction as part of the Butler Review, heads an inquiry team that comprises Sir Roderic Lyne, the former UK ambassador to Russia; Sir Lawrence Freedman, the professor of war studies at King’s College London; and Baroness Prashar, a former member of Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights.

Another member of the inquiry team, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, has been ill and has had limited input into its recent deliberations.

The authors are facing difficult choices forced on them by Washington and the Cabinet Office’s desire not to upset the so-called “special relationship” between Britain and the US. They may deliver a neutered report in spring next year which would effectively absolve Mr Blair of any serious policy failures – because there would be no clear evidence contained in the report to back up such direct criticism. Another possibility is that the report will be so heavily redacted as to be rendered meaningless and hence a waste of almost £8m of British taxpayers’ money.

Since the Iraq Inquiry was launched in 2009 by the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, covert back-channel communications between the Cabinet Office and its counterparts in Washington have focused on the diplomatic convention that the disclosure of “privileged channels of communication” should remain at all times protected.

The final report is supposed to examine how the Blair government took decisions and what lessons can be learnt to “help ensure that if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond”.

Dr James Strong, a foreign-policy analyst at the London School of Economics, said: “All governments like to keep their secrets secret. The US is no exception. As its response to WikiLeaks suggested, the US defines a secret in terms of the type of document rather than the contents. So regardless of what these particular documents say, the US probably wouldn’t want them published, because governments normally keep private exchanges between leaders private.”

The US State Department declined to comment. Tonight, the Cabinet Office denied that the US had a veto on the issue, adding: “These issues are being worked through in good faith and with a view to reaching a position as rapidly as possible.”

In numbers: The Iraq war

179 British service personnel killed in Iraq

500,000 War related Iraqi deaths caused by the war to June 2011, according to 2013 PLOS Medicine study

1,569 Days since the Iraq Inquiry opened on 29 July 2009

35 Witnesses heard in private by Sir John Chilcot’s team

1,000,000+ Total length in words of the Iraq Inquiry report

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-us-blocks-publication-of-chilcots-report-on-how-britain-went-to-war-with-iraq-8937772.html

Anti-War Activists Press For Release Of Iraq Documents

Anti-War Activists Press For Release Of Iraq Documents
NOV 2013
Saturday 9TH
posted by Morning Star in Britain


Peace campaigners scold David Cameron

Peace campaigners scolded David Cameron yesterday after the Tory Prime Minister excused the cover-up documents that would reveal the full story behind Britain's invasion of Iraq.

Sir John Chilcot has made 10 requests for access to the classified information in order to conclude his inquiry into 2003 attack and publish a report.

They include 130 transcripts of conversations between former Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown with former US president George Bush.

Details of around 200 cabinet discussions and 25 notes from Mr Blair to Mr Bush are also included in the documents.

But Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood has stalled the process over what Mr Cameron called concerns over "sensitivity" in a letter to Mr Chilcot.

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament leader Kate Hudson accused the government of driving the inquiry from the long grass and "into the woods."

She said: "How much longer can they keep up this charade? It is now over a decade since Tony Blair took the UK into a bloody war in Iraq based on a lie.

"To say these conversations are 'central' to the inquiry is an understatement - they are crucial to understanding the path to war, including if Blair guaranteed unconditional UK support for an illegal invasion."

Menzies Campbell, who was Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman at the time of the invasion, also labelled the hold-up as "intolerable."

He added: "The Iraq adventure is one of the most serious failures of government policy in the last 50 years."

Tony Blair and Iraq: The damning evidence

Secret testimony to Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence shows former PM 'accepted Libya was a bigger threat'
JONATHAN OWEN


SUNDAY 07 APRIL 2013





Hitherto unseen evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence has revealed that former prime minister Tony Blair was told that Iraq had, at most, only a trivial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Libya was in this respect a far greater threat.


Intelligence officers have disclosed that just the day before Mr Blair went to visit president George Bush in April 2002, he appeared to accept this but returned a "changed man" and subsequently ordered the production of dossiers to "find the intelligence" that he wanted to use to justify going to war.

This and other secret evidence (given in camera) to the inquiry will, The Independent on Sundayunderstands, be used as the basis for severe criticism of the former prime minister when the Chilcot report is published.

Mr Blair is said to have "realised" and "understood" that Libya was the real threat and that he knew "it would not be sensible to lead the argument on Saddam and the WMD issue" according to evidence of a conversation on 4 April 2002, the day before he flew to the US to spend a weekend with Mr Bush.

This was disclosed in a closed evidence session with one of MI6's most senior officers, named as SIS4. Although details have been redacted, the transcript, later released online with little fanfare, states that Mr Blair "realised that the WMD threat from Libya was more serious than from Iraq".

During a closed session with former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, redacted evidence claims Mr Blair "had understood that Libya posed a bigger threat than Iraq, and understood the risk, therefore, of focusing on WMD in relation to Iraq". It refers to a meeting held by Mr Blair at Chequers days before the visit to Mr Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, but is unclear whether the claims were made by Sir Richard or another individual. What is clear is that in 2002, British intelligence "discovered that Libya has an active nuclear weapons programme", according to Sir Richard.

By contrast, Iraq had no nuclear weapons and any actual WMD would be "very, very small" and would fit on to the "back of a petrol lorry", according to one senior MI6 officer. They admitted the danger from WMD was "all in the cranium of just a few scientists, who we never did meet and we have been unable to meet ever since".

Yet the weekend at Crawford in April 2002 marked Mr Blair's conversion to Mr Bush's way of thinking. The former US president was determined to deal with Saddam Hussein. On Friday 5 April, Mr Blair and Mr Bush spent the evening alone, without their advisers. By the end of the weekend Mr Blair appeared to be a changed man, where previously he had said "we don't do regime change", according to Admiral Lord Boyce, former Chief of the Defence Staff.

The findings will inform a highly critical attack on Mr Blair when the Chilcot Inquiry publishes its report later this year. "Chilcot has the full story and it's a very complex one," a former senior MI6 officer, who would not be named, told The IoS.

And top-secret British government papers suggesting that the two leaders had made a pact to act against Iraq have been given to the inquiry by barrister and Plaid Cymru MP Elfyn Llwyd. The document was leaked to him after the invasion.

"It was quite clear that the deal had been struck firmly that weekend and the wording was quite unambiguous," he told The IoS. "There's no doubt in my mind that that weekend saw Blair decide to go to war." The former prime minister "had his head turned" and was "star-struck" by Mr Bush, he said.

Before the middle of 2002, "Iraq had been relatively low down the scale of preoccupations" in terms of WMD, according to one MI6 officer in evidence to the inquiry. In the months after Mr Blair's return from Texas, the secret services came under pressure to come up with intelligence to support a move to war.

MI6 was "on the flypaper of WMD", and had no appetite for war, admitted another officer, SIS4. "Those of us who had been around [redacted] knew perfectly well what a disaster for countless people a war was going to be." Another MI6 officer, SIS1, described the "handling" of Curveball, the Iraqi source whose claims of mobile chemical weapons laboratories were subsequently exposed as lies, and the "marketing" of the intelligence as "awful".

The committee is expected to examine why secret warnings from senior Iraqi figures that there were no WMD were dismissed by British intelligence. Iraq "will not be able to indigenously produce a nuclear weapon while sanctions remain in place", stated a report by the Joint Intelligence Committee in March 2002, which admitted there was little or no intelligence on chemical or biological weapons.

After the invasion in March 2003, SIS4 suggested, there was "a sort of recognition that the WMD thing had served its purpose; we had got in, we had done the war".

"This report will be absolutely damning on Blair's style of government, the decision-making process and the planning and execution for its aftermath," said a source close to the inquiry, speaking before the 10th anniversary on Tuesday of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue.

One authority on Iraq, Toby Dodge of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, agrees. "I think they will rip into him for his style of government, and that there wasn't due process," he said. "It's clear the way the intelligence was handled, filtered out and shaped was an issue. This is a perversion of the use of intelligence."

A spokesperson for Mr Blair said: "There have been five inquiries into this now. If people do want to see the intelligence reports they are published online. The view that Saddam Hussein had a WMD programme was held not just by the intelligence services in the UK and US but in countries which opposed military action."

Blair’s war crimes blocks Iraq inquiry

Blair’s war crimes blocks Iraq inquiry

Anti-war campaigners are to hold a protest against ex-UK Prime Minister 

Tony Blair in London on November 13, 2012.

The Iraq inquiry is not to report before autumn 2013

due to the UK government’s reluctance to release

papers showing former British Prime Minister Tony

Blair’s conspiracy with ex-US President George

Bush in waging an illegal war against the Arab

country.

The inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot said earlier that

he will not be ready to publish the reports on the truth of

ritain’s involvement in the Iraq war before the middle

of 2013, two years behind schedule.

Iraq war unlawful’: all 27 UK Foreign Affairs lawyers, 2003. ‘Official report delayed again’: UK govt today

Posted on December 30, 2012 by Carl Herman

The UK Cameron government is blocking publication of their “official” report on Iraq war until perhaps 2014 or later, according to the UK’s most popular newspaper website.

Perhaps this delay is in part because the Blair government was advised before the war by all 27 attorneys in their Foreign Affairs Office that war on Iraq was unlawful. That would mean armed attack on Iraq would be an unlawful War of Aggression, with identical criminal implication on US armed attack on Iraq.

Unlawful war requires US military to refuse all war orders and arrest those who issue them (more documentation here).

Public understanding that current wars “on terror” are not even close to lawful would end these wars.War law forbids all armed attack unless under attack by another nation’s government.

As I wrote in 2010:

All the lawyers in the UK’s Foreign Affairs Department concluded the US/UK invasion of Iraq was an unlawful War of Aggression. Their expert advice is the most qualified to make that legal determination;all 27 of them were in agreement. This powerful judgment of unlawful war follows the Dutch government’s recent unanimous report and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s clear statements.

This stunning information was disclosed at the UK Chilcot inquiry by the testimony of Foreign Affairs leading legal advisor, Sir Michael Wood, who added that the reply from Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office to his legal department’s professional work was chastisement for putting their unanimous legal opinion in writing.

Tony Blair and the death of David Kelly: The Chilcot Inquiry equals "don't mention Dr David Kelly"

Shameful episode in British history

by Stephen Frost



Global Research, January 23, 2011

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22921



Chilcot Inquiry equals "don't mention Dr David Kelly" ... an inquest into Dr Kelly's death is required by the laws of this land, and indeed those of Europe ... the evidence would have to be heard under oath at an inquest ... so far, there have been no fewer than five inquiries into the Iraq War (Foreign Affairs Committee, Intelligence and Security Committee, Hutton Inquiry, Butler inquiry, Chilcot Inquiry) but not a single word of evidence at any of these inquiries has been heard under oath ... if evidence were heard under oath there WOULD be a breaking of ranks (perjury is a very serious crime) ... the only chance of hearing evidence under oath would be at an inquest into Dr David Kelly's death ... that is why the call for that inquest is so important ... please read this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/07_01_11davidkelly1.pdf

and, for background, please read this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12085257

Everyone who cares about this shameful episode in British history, and who wants to arrive at the truth of the matter, should support the increasingly loud calls for this required (in law) inquest into a death which was inextricably linked to the United Kingdom's waging of illegal (according to both the Geneva Conventions ... "the supreme international war crime" ... and the United Nations Charter) aggressive war on the sovereign state of Iraq.

Stephen Frost is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Stephen Frost

Tony Blair summoned back to Chilcot inquiry into Iraq war

Members of panel are believed to be concerned about damaging and conflicting evidence revealed since former PM's last appearance

Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 October 2010 12.30 BST

Tony Blair is to be summoned back to the official inquiry into the Iraq invasion in light of damaging and conflicting evidence revealed since he appeared as a witness in January.

Members of the Chilcot inquiry are believed to be concerned about evidence in documents released in July showing that the former prime minister was warned by his government's chief law officer that an invasion of Iraq would be illegal the day before he privately assured George Bush he would support US-led military action.

The Guardian first reported in February shortly after Blair testified that the inquiry team planned to question him again in light of evidence which it was already clear contradicted that given by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general at the time.

Documents released in July provided an unprecedented insight into how Goldsmith repeatedly warned the prime minister of the potential consequences of invading Iraq without fresh UN authority – much to Blair's irritation.
They included a note from Goldsmith to Blair, marked secret and dated 30 January 2003, saying: "In view of your meeting with President Bush on Friday, I thought you might wish to know where I stand on the question of whether a further decision of the [UN] security council is legally required in order to authorise the use of force against Iraq."

Goldsmith warned Blair that he "remained of the view that the correct legal interpretation of resolution 1441 [the last security council decision on Iraq] is that it does not authorise the use of force without a further determination by the security council".

Goldsmith concluded: "My view remains that a further [UN] decision is required."

A handwritten note, believed to be from David Manning, Blair's chief foreign policy adviser, warned: "Clear advice from attorney on need for further resolution."

Demonstrating his frustration with Goldsmith, Blair scrawled in the margin: "I just don't understand this." An aide wrote: "Specifically said we did not need further advice [on] this matter."

The following day, 31 January 2003, Blair flew to Washington for a meeting with Bush. Manning records the president – in a minute previously disclosed – telling Blair that military action would be taken with or without a second security council resolution and the bombing would begin in mid-March 2003.
The note records Blair's reaction: "The prime minister said he was solidly with the president."

On 14 January 2003, in a note handed to Blair, Goldsmith warned that UN security council 1441 "contains no express authorisation by the security council for the use of force".

By 7 March, after a trip to Washington, Goldsmith told Blair that a new UN resolution might after all not be needed, although going to war without one would risk Britain being indicted before an international court.

Ten days later, on 17 March 2003, Goldsmith published a short note saying an invasion would be lawful.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/26/tony-blair-summoned-back-to-chilcot-inquiry

Blood is His Argument: Tony Blair's Gentle Cuddling at Iraq "Inquiry"

Chris Floyd
www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1915-blood-is-his-ar gument-tony-blairs-gentle-cuddling-at-iraq-qinquiryq.html


January 29, 2010

On Friday, Tony Blair appeared before the "Chilcot Inquiry," the panel of hoary, lugubrious Establishment worthies set up to "examine" -- with extreme circumspection, exquisite politeness, and all due reverence to authority -- the "origins" of Britain's involvement in the mass-murder spree known as the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The event could be summed up entirely in a single headline:

Tony Blair to a million dead Iraqis, and the grieving survivors of British soldiers: Fuck you.

Blair's appearance before the panel has occasioned some entirely misplaced and uninformed kudos from some in the American progressiverse, who laud the Brits for holding such a bold inquiry. "It's the kind of thing you would never see in the United States," they say, forgetting, if they ever knew, such minor matters as the Watergate hearings -- which actually had the power to send people to jail for lying, unlike the completely powerless Chilcot panel -- or the Watergate grand jury, which named a sitting president as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a criminal case, or even the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton by the United States Senate, which I believe happened well within the adulthood of at least some of our leading progressives.

In any case, there was never any chance that the well-wadded Chilcot worthies were going to lay a glove on former PM turned corporate shill and Catholic saint-in-waiting. Blair was never going to do anything but repeat the bluster -- and outright lies -- he has regurgitated ad infinitum about his blood-soaked adventure with George W. Bush -- and the Chilcotniks were never going to call him on his bullshit. [Blair's knowing and deliberate lies are thoroughly detailed here.]And so it proved.

Blair strutted in -- through a back entrance, to avoid protestors -- and did the expected regurgitation. The war was legal, the war was righteous, the war was legal, and it was the right thing to do. After all, he claimed over and over, Iraq was clearly "in breach of UN sanctions ordering him to destroy all his weapons of mass destruction." Yet, as one observer noted in the Guardian, none of the Chilcot worthies deigned to point out to Blair that Iraq could not possibly been in breach of UN orders to disarm -- because it had no weapons of mass destruction. It was already disarmed -- a fact which the US and UK had known since 1995, and which could have been reconfirmed by the UN inspection teams in 2003 ... if Bush and Blair had not invaded before the inspections were over.

But Blair's illogical connections were never challenged by the panel, nor did he explain why he and Bush invaded before the inspections were completed. Instead, he simply evoke 9/11 over and over and over again -- and then blamed "the external elements of Iran and al Qaeda" for anything that went wrong after the invasion. Apparently, there was not a single Iraqi opposed to the destruction of their country; it was just a bunch of "outside agitators" causing trouble. Blair's absolute erasure of the Iraqi people in these passages is a perfect encapsulation of the whole mindset that drove the Anglo-American attack: the Iraqis are non-people, they are worthless chits in a geopolitical game, they are rags and automatons at the mercy of big-time players like the Western powers, Iran and al Qaeda.

Indeed, this was his main theme of the day: it was Iran's fault. In fact, Blair seemed to regard his appearance before Iraq War panel chiefly as an opportunity to foment war fever for a new "humanitarian intervention" against Iran.

As Jonathan Freedland notes:

Blair pushed further, apparently touting a new war in the Persian Gulf, this time against Iraq's neighbor, Iran. All day Blair used his platform to bring up Iran, even when it was only tangentially related to the topic in hand. The arguments that applied in 2002 – about WMD falling into terrorist hands – applied in spades to Iran in 2010, he said.

Blair took "responsibility" for the war -- but it was a responsibility he gladly shouldered, one he was proud of. As for all the people who have died because of this criminal folly, Blair had nothing nothing to say.

As Jonathan Freedland notes:
I thought Blair would have prepared a closing statement that would express, if not regret or apology, at least sorrow for the young British men and women in uniform who had lost their lives. There was, surely, a way for a communicator as gifted as Blair to do that without giving ground on the justness, as he still sees it, of the war. And yet, even when Sir John Chilcot asked him one last time if he had anything to add, Blair did not pay tribute to the dead – British or Iraqi. He simply said "no".


Just like the Hutton inquiry into the strange death of WMD whistleblower Daniel Kelly -- the results of which have recently been sealed up for the next 70 years in a "highly unusual move" by UK authorities -- the Chilcot panel was never going to bring any powerful miscreant to accountability. It was set up -- like the American 9/11 Commission -- to siphon off festering anger and suspicion with a show of official concern. By stirring up just enough murk to cover the small nuggets of truth that inevitably surface in such probes, the Chilcot inquiry, like Hutton, the 9/11 Commission, will be able to claim that while there may have been some regrettable "system" failures here and there on this and that, no actual powerful person should be held accountable for any inadvertent "mistakes" that were made.

And the scam is already working. One of the panel of Guardian commentators, writing alongside Freedland, the "moderate," Broder-like Martin Kettle, was already chewing up some conventional wisdom cud by the end of the day:
On the other side of the argument there were fewer interruptions than there might have been, fewer silly stunts, and actually fewer demonstrators than one might have expected. Though passions are still strong, it may be that a lot of the poison and pain is ebbing. In that sense, today was probably cathartic.

Yes, as good old Kevin Drum always used to say back in the old days, when splitting the difference between some atrocious Bush policy and the president's "far left" critics, "that sounds about right." That hits the comfortable middle spot: yes, it was all a bit unpleasant, but now the "pain is ebbing," and we can look forward to seeing fewer of those "silly stunts" that shrill extremists have used to draw attention to the mass murder of human beings in a war based on ostensible reasons which even the war's architects now happily admit were unfounded -- and, according to Blair, unimportant. So Saddam didn't have WMDs? So what? It was a good thing to kill all those people anyway.

Another of Kettle's fellow commentators has a different view, however, and we'll give the final word here to Seamus Milne:
The spectacle of official indulgence of a man many here and abroad regard as responsible for a devastating war crime has been sickening. John Chilcot said at one point that the lessons of occupation had been "expensive, but very necessary". Millions of Iraqis who have actually paid that price take a very different view.