Guardian: Jack Straw was warned the Iraq War was Illegal [View All]

Warned by the government's lawyers. The Iraq Inquiry has nailed him. And just ahead of the Poodle's appearance. I have never felt closer to and international tribunal, and may never feel that way again. So, here is the article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/26/chilcot-iraq-inquiry-jack-straw

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.

(snip)

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.

(snip)

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.

(end snips)

The Iraq War was illegal. We did it anyway. The coalition of the criminals.