11 days that led Britain to war

27 March 2005


Jack Straw has emerged remarkably unscathed from all the inquests into the Iraq war, despite having served as a senior Labour cabinet minister since 1997. He was not called to give evidence to the Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly and, although he did appear before the Butler inquiry into intelligence failures before the war, that was behind closed doors.

So the Foreign Secretary must have been rather bemused to find himself at the dispatch box in the House of Commons on Thursday, more than two years after the start of hostilities in Iraq, still trying to damp down the fires of speculation over how we were led into war. Not only has the Government failed to dispel suspicions that it misused intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction to make the case for attacking Iraq, but a new conflagration has sprung up over the legality of the war. The more information that emerges about both issues, the clearer it becomes that they are intertwined.

Earlier this month a book by Philippe Sands QC, an international lawyer in Cherie Booth's Matrix chambers, charged that the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, changed his legal advice on the eve of war. Last week's disclosure of the resignation letter of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who quit as deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office the day before the conflict began, forced Mr Straw to admit that Professor Sands was right.

The resulting controversy has focused attention on an 11-day period in March 2003, when Lord Goldsmith twice put his legal advice in writing. The first document, dated 7 March and seen by only a handful of ministers and officials, was 13 pages long. It is reported to have argued that the case for war might not stand up in court. The second, circulated to the Cabinet on 17 March and published as a parliamentary answer the same day, consisted of only 337 words in nine paragraphs. It declared unequivocally that the war was legal. What happened in that period to bring about such a transformation? The search for the answer has led to persistent demands that the first document should be made public: resisting those pressures was what brought Mr Straw to the Commons on Maundy Thursday.

Since her resignation Ms Wilmshurst has kept her counsel, apart from a statement making it clear that she considered the war illegal. The parts of her letter released under the Freedom of Information Act put it more strongly - she called the war a "crime of aggression" - but the most crucial paragraph was blacked out. Not for long: within hours Channel 4 News revealed that it said Lord Goldsmith "gave us to understand" that he agreed war would be illegal without a new resolution by the UN Security Council.

more...

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=624053

Poland has attacked us and we must launch a defensive war - Adolf Hitler.

I cannot believe people are still trying to defend this illegal and fraudulent invasion/massacre.

The people of this planet must hold them accountable, no matter how many times they distract and slither free.