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a very British dictatorship
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"Britain created Iraq as a national state after World War I by consolidating several provinces of the collapsed Ottoman empire, and established a monarchy, the short-lived Iraqi Hashemite dynasty, by installing a World War I ally from Arabia to rule as a king amenable to British interests.
Britain appointed Sunni Muslims rather than members of Iraq's Shi'a majority to staff its administrative infrastructure.
Over the following decades, the British-established order was contested by a wide range of opposing factions, including Shiites, Kurds, Communists, and nationalists, the latter including, by the 1950s, followers of Ba'thism, an ideology calling for unity among all Arabs, development, technology, and resistance to foreign and neocolonial interference.
In 1958, nationalistic military officers overthrew the Western-supported monarchical government, and established a republic. Among the initiatives undertaken by the new government were measures to end foreign monopoly control of Iraq's oil resources.
Ten years later another coup led to the establishment of the Ba'thist regime currently ruled by Saddam Hussein."
U.S. Propaganda in the Middle East - The Early Cold War Version
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The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) released a 1,000-page report [Oct 2004] that found Saddam had destroyed most of his chemical and biological weapons after losing the 1991 Gulf War and that his nuclear program had "progressively decayed."
"I cannot bring myself to say that I misrepresented the evidence, since I don't accept that I did."
"I indeed apologize for any information given in good faith but which subsequently turned out to be wrong,"
"I've already done so."
"What I don't in any way accept is that there was any deception in any way," - Blair
source
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| Operation Mass Appeal
The British MI6 establishes Operation Mass Appeal, a British intelligence mission "designed to exaggerate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" in order to shape public opinion. The operation plants stories in the US, British, and foreign media from the 1990s through 2003. Intelligence used by Mass Appeal is said to be "single source data of dubious quality."
After the First Gulf War, the operation seeks to justify the UN sanctions policy. But after the September 11 attacks, its objective is to secure public support for an invasion of Iraq. The mission is similar to Operation Rockingham, another British intelligence disinformation program. Former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter says in late in 2003 that he supplied Mass Appeal with intelligence while serving as UN chief weapons inspector from the summer of 1997 until August 1998 and that he met with British agents involved in the operation several times in both New York and London. - BBC story
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War Plans 'Made Five Months Before Air Attacks'
Contingency plans for going to war in Iraq were made five months before the first bombs began to fall on Baghdad, a court martial heard today.
Top secret plans with codenames such as P-Day, A-Day and G-Day were passed to British Army chiefs by US defence planners in October 2002.
Hostilities against Saddam Hussain were launched on March 20, 2003, in a series of night-time raids.
The plans was revealed during the court martial of reservist Lance Corporal Ian Blaymire, who is charged with the manslaughter of a colleague while serving in Iraq.
Sergeant John Nightingale, 32, a reservist from Guiseley, West Yorkshire, died after being hit at point-blank range in the chest by a bullet from an A2 rifle at Shaibah military camp in Iraq on September 23 last year.
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Blaymire, 23, of Leeds, is charged with his manslaughter and is appearing at a court martial at Catterick Garrison, North Yorkshire.
The classified documents were drawn up by Lt Colonel Christopher Warren, staff officer at Land Command, Salisbury, Wiltshire, who was responsible for operational training for regular soldiers and reservists at the time of the conflict.
He revealed that P-Day stood for the date on which the US President would make a decision for going to war. That date was scheduled for February 15, 2003.
A-Day stood for the air strikes, which were pencilled in for the first week of March, 2003, while G-Day, which stood for the ground offensive, was due to begin a couple of days later.
The dates and codenames were revealed after the court martial was adjourned and held in private while the information was discussed by the legal teams. - Scotsman
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"Ms.[Katharine] Gun, 29, was working at Britain's top-secret Government Communications Headquarters last year when she learned of an American plan to spy on at least a half-dozen U.N. delegations as part of the U.S. effort to win Security Council support for an invasion of Iraq.
The plans, which included e-mail surveillance and taps on home and office telephones, was outlined in a highly classified National Security Agency memo. The agency, which was seeking British assistance in the project, was interested in "the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals."
Countries specifically targeted were Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan. The primary goal was a Security Council resolution that would give the U.S. and Britain the go-ahead for the war."
A Single Conscience v. the State
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"Anything that I was doing with respect to the war was making me uncomfortable," Ms Errey said.
"Then to have to brief the minister and fundamentally give him -- even though I didn't write it -- lines of propaganda that I didn't believe with respect to the war was beyond what I was prepared to do. I wouldn't lie or mislead the public."
The next day, as the war began, she submitted a leave application. Ms Errey said that Dr Chessell suggested that, considering her views on the war, maybe she should not be working at Defence. "
Sacked weapons adviser tells: I won't lie
"I believe I was being asked, as was the rest of the department at that time, to perpetuate the lie that the government was putting forward in so far as the weapons of mass destruction existed and that they were a grave threat to the rest of the world," Errey said in a radio interview."
Australian government denies sacking bureaucrat over her views on
Govt accused of lying over Saddam threat
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Grinning idiot
"Look...um...y'know...um"
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WMD may never be found - Blair
Tony Blair has said Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "may never be found".
Mr Blair said he had "to accept we haven't found them and we may never find them" - but that did not mean Saddam Hussein had not been a threat.
He said the former Iraqi leader had been in breach of UN resolutions and his weapons may have been "removed, hidden or destroyed".
more: BBC
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P2 - Neocon - Neo-liberal
"Look...um...y'know...um" |
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"I have to accept we haven't found them and we may never find them, We don't know what has happened to them.
They could have been removed. They could have been hidden. They could have been destroyed." Tony B -[a]- LIAR
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The UK National Intelligence Machinery - the UK Intelligence and Security Agencies, 2000
This is a picture of an e-mail written in the run up to the Iraq war
in preparation of the September Dossier
"Why don't we issue it in the name of the JIC?
Makes it more interesting to the media"
The Joint intelligence commitee had nothing to do with the September Dossier
John Scarlett's deal: claim ownership & any flack attracted and get promotion
to head of the Secret Intelligence Service
Spin Genocide
The September Dossier E- mails,
The death of Dr Kelly & associates
The Hutton Report
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How Arabic text of WMD dossier was massaged by Downing St
Sunday, 24th April 2005, by Robert Fisk
When Tony Blair published his notorious 2002 "dossier" which falsely claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, Downing Street also produced an Arabic version - which contained significant deletions and changes in text that substantially altered its meaning.
A translation carried out for The Independent on Sunday reveals for the first time that several references to UN sanctions were cut from the Arabic text. On one page, the words "biological agents" were changed to read "nuclear agents". Arab journalists who reported on the dossier culled their information from the Arabic version - unaware that it was not the same as the English one.
While there is evidence of sloppiness in the translation - a 2001 Joint Intelligence Committee assessment of Iraqi nuclear ambitions is rendered as 2002 - many of the changes were clearly deliberate, apparently in an attempt to make the dossier more acceptable as well as more convincing to an Arab audience. At the time, the US and Britain were trying to convince Arab Gulf states that Saddam Hussein still represented a major threat to them - in the hope of seeking their support for the 2003 invasion - while the Arab world was enraged at the disastrous effects UN sanctions had on child mortality in Iraq.
In the "Executive Summary" at the start of the English edition, readers in Arabic were reminded that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people before the 1991 Gulf War. But the fact that he had admitted this after the Gulf War was deleted, along with the fact that he agreed to give up his WMD. The apparent intention was to convince Arabs that Saddam remained an imminent threat.
In some cases, too, the Arabic text was hardened to remove any doubts that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The alteration of "biological agents" - biologia in Arabic - to nuclear (la-nawawiya in Arabic) is obviously deliberate, and may reflect the belief that an Arab audience would be more fearful of nuclear weapons than biological agents. References to "damaged" Iraqi factories have been changed to "destroyed" (tadmir in Arabic), giving the impression that US and British air strikes in 1991 were more accurate than in fact they were.
On Iraq’s nuclear programme, the English version of the dossier says that two research reactors were "bombed" in 1991. In the Arabic, the two reactors are described as "destroyed". - The Independent via Indymedia UK
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Tony Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein posed a 'current and serious' threat to Britain is challenged by dramatic new allegations [..] that Britain's spy chiefs have retracted the intelligence on which it was based.
The supposed proof that the Iraqi dictator was still trying, even in the run-up to war, to produce chemical and biological weapons became crucial to the Prime Minister's case for urgent military action rather than waiting for inspectors to finish their task.
Yet, according to a senior intelligence source interviewed by BBC1's Panorama, MI6 has since taken the rare step of withdrawing the intelligence assessment that underpinned the claim that Saddam had continued to produce WMD - an admission that it was fundamentally unreliable.
Observer
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While the Joint Intelligence Committee advised Mr Blair that Saddam may have retained some old WMD from the original Gulf War, he was claiming publicly that Saddam had "stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and biological weapons."
When the JIC reported that intelligence was "limited" and based mainly on "assessment", Mr Blair said the matter was "beyond doubt."
Last Autumn Mr Blair also told the Hutton inquiry that he'd published the dossier "because there was a tremendous amount of information and evidence coming across my desk as to the weapons of mass destruction and the programmes associated with it that Saddam had."
Yet, the Ministry of Defence's chief WMD intelligence analyst at the time tells Panorama that the Prime Minister's comments "confused me.....Certainly no-one on my staff had any visibility of large quantities of intelligence of that sort."
In his first television interview Dr Brian Jones, explains that misjudgements were made on the basis of sparse intelligence by senior people, rather than the intelligence community as a whole, and that the Joint Intelligence Committee should accept responsibility.
A failure of intelligence
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PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
Sunday July 18, 2004
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'
On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'
The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.
Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror, and the location of the bodies of the dead.
The Baathist regime was responsible for massive human rights abuses and murder on a large scale - not least in well-documented campaigns including the gassing of Halabja, the al-Anfal campaign against Kurdish villages and the brutal repression of the Shia uprising - but serious questions are now emerging about the scale of Saddam Hussein's murders.
It comes amid inflation from an estimate by Human Rights Watch in May 2003 of 290,000 'missing' to the latest claims by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, that one million are missing.
At the heart of the questions are the numbers so far identified in Iraq's graves. Of 270 suspected grave sites identified in the last year, 55 have now been examined, revealing, according to the best estimates that The Observer has been able to obtain, around 5,000 bodies. Forensic examination of grave sites has been hampered by lack of security in Iraq, amid widespread complaints by human rights organisations that until recently the graves have not been secured and protected.
While some sites have contained hundreds of bodies - including a series around the town of Hilla and another near the Saudi border - others have contained no more than a dozen.
And while few have any doubts that Saddam's regime was responsible for serious crimes against humanity, the exact scale of those crimes has become increasingly politicised in both Washington and London as it has become clearer that the case against Iraq for retention of weapons of mass destruction has faded.
The USAID website, which quotes Blair's 400,000 assertion, states: 'If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.'
It is an issue that Human Rights Watch was acutely aware of when it compiled its own pre-invasion research - admitting that it had to reduce estimates for the al-Anfal campaign produced by Kurds by over a third, as they believed the numbers they had been given were inflated.
Hania Mufti, one of the researchers that produced that estimate, said: 'Our estimates were based on estimates. The eventual figure was based in part on circumstantial information gathered over the years.'
A further difficulty, according to Inforce, a group of British forensic experts in mass grave sites based at Bournemouth University who visited Iraq last year, was in the constant over-estimation of site sizes by Iraqis they met. 'Witnesses were often likely to have unrealistic ideas of the numbers of people in grave areas that they knew about,' said Jonathan Forrest.
'Local people would tell us of 10,000s of people buried at single grave sites and when we would get there they would be in multiple hundreds.'
A Downing Street spokesman said: 'While experts may disagree on the exact figures, human rights groups, governments and politicians across the world have no doubt that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and their remains are buried in sites throughout Iraq.'
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
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| Revealed: documents show Blair's secret plans for war
PM decided on conflict from the start. Blair told war illegal in March 2002. Latest leak confirms Goldsmith doubts
Tony Blair had resolved to send British troops into action alongside US forces eight months before the Iraq War began, despite a clear warning from the Foreign Office that the conflict could be illegal.
A damning minute leaked to a Sunday newspaper reveals that in July 2002, a few weeks after meeting George Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr Blair summoned his closest aides for what amounted to a council of war. The minute reveals the head of British intelligence reported that President Bush had firmly made up his mind to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, adding that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".
At the same time, a document obtained by this newspaper reveals the Foreign Office legal advice given to Mr Blair in March 2002, before he travelled to meet Mr Bush at his Texas ranch. It contains many of the reservations listed nearly a year later by the Attorney General in his confidential advice to the Prime Minister, which the Government was forced to publish last week, including the warning that the US government took a different view of international law from Britain or virtually any other country.
The advice, also put before the July meeting, was drawn up in part by Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office's deputy legal adviser, who resigned on the eve of war in protest at what she called a "crime of aggression". - .independent.
see the Attorny Generals advice to Tony Blair
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"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
"The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force."
- Downing Street Memo factfile MSNBC
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Related Headlines
Memos say British advisers foresaw risks (June 28, 2005) -- Recently disclosed secret British memos indicate long before the Iraq war, British officials felt U.S. plans were ill-conceived and illegal.
In one ... > full story
Conyers has 'Downing Street memo' hearing
(June 17, 2005) --
Anti-Iraq war members of Congress convened a hearing on the Downing Street memo and gave the White House some 500,000 signatures asking about the ... > full story
Briefing paper: Blair agreed to war early (June 11, 2005) -- British officials were told in July 2002 that Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in April 2002 to back military action in Iraq, the Sunday Times of ... > full story
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Memo alleges plan to fight beyond Iraq
LONDON, Oct. 16 (UPI) -- A secret memo just released alleges President Bush planned the Iraq war as just a first step in a crusade against weapons of mass destruction.
The Independent reports the memo was written in January 2003 by Michael Rycroft, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's personal secretary, and sent to Simon McDonald, the secretary for British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
The memo alleges in a phone call between the U.S. and British leaders, Bush said he "wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation" and named Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and North Korea as objectives.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are U.S. allies, and there has been no suggestion the United States planned to invade those countries, just deal with arms proliferation.
The memo is published in the U.S. edition of the book, Lawless World, a critique of Bush and Blair's foreign policies written by Britain-based international lawyer Phillipe Sands. - sciencedaily
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The leaked Iraq war documents
Michael Smith
The level of interest in the now famous Downing Street Memo, published in the May 1 edition of The Sunday Times, and in the leaked documents published over subsequent weeks, has been extraordinary
These three documents include the now famous “Downing Street Memo”, which contains the minutes of a meeting of what was effectively Tony Blair’s war cabinet held in Downing Street on July 23, 2002.
The meeting was a crucial one. President George W Bush was due to make a decision on which military plan should be used for the invasion of Iraq. The British had a number of deep concerns over the US plans which Blair would have to raise with the US president.
The Foreign Office was particularly concerned over US lack of interest in planning for the aftermath of the war and the lack of a legal justification for ousting Saddam. Regime change for its own sake is illegal under international law. It was therefore seen as essential that the allies went first to the UN to obtain a Security Council resolution backing the use of force to oust Saddam.
It was in this context that the main players on the British side met. Blair chaired the meeting, which was also attended by the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw; the then Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon; the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith; Sir Richard Dearlove, the Chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6); the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee John Scarlett; and Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, who as Chief of Defence Staff was head of Britain’s armed forces.
The key quotes in this particular document came from:
Dearlove, who had just returned from Washington where he had talks with George Tenet, and was quoted as saying that there was “a perceptible shift in attitude” in the US capital. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, though military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”
Straw, who said: “It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.” Britain should “work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.”
And Geoff Hoon, who in what may yet turn out to be the most damaging quote of all, said that “the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime”. (See British Bombing Raids were Illegal, says Foreign Office, June 19, 2005)
An inside-page article set out the context for the publication of the leaked document (see Blair planned Iraq war from the start, May 1, 2005), and it was in fact the second of the documents, the Cabinet Office briefing paper, Iraq: Conditions for Military Action, on which we based our first front-page story (Blair hit by new leak of secret war plan, May 1, 2005).
This document distributed on July 21, 2002 two days before the Downing Street meeting was designed to brief the participants on the latest situation with regard to the US war planning. It gives an astonishing feel of the official concern felt within Whitehall over the way in which things were going, the lack of legal justification, the failure to prepare for the post-war situation in Iraq and most particularly the fact that there was no way that Britain could get out of going to war (See Ministers were told of need for Gulf War excuse, June 12, 2005).
For as the briefing paper made clear very early on “When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change.”
At the time, this was the most damaging part of any of the documents. Despite Blair’s repeated insistence throughout 2002 that no decision had been taken to go to war with Iraq, political analysts had long believed that the decision was in fact made at the Bush-Blair summit at the president’s range at Crawford, Texas, in early April 2002. Not only did this confirm it, but it did so in terms that were highly damaging to the prime minister.
Despite having been warned by his officials that “regime change per se is illegal” he had agreed to back military action to achieve it. There were three conditions attached to his agreement. But the most crucial of these, that “options for action to eliminate Iraq’s WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted” would never be achieved.
The third leaked document was Foreign Office legal advice, which was appended to the briefing paper. This is a useful background document on the British view of international law the text of which is now also published on this website.
The recent circulation on the internet of the text of five other similar memos, which were leaked to me last September, has raised some interesting issues, largely because I destroyed the original copies I was given to protect my source. A number of supporters of President Bush have even suggested that this somehow “proved” that the documents were not genuine.
Firstly, all of the documents have been authenticated not just by me, but by the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press. Secondly, the various documents included quotes from a dozen senior officials, including Blair, Straw and Hoon, none of whom have come forward to dismiss them as fakes. Thirdly it is a matter of record that a police Special Branch leak investigation took place into how I came to get hold of the documents, something that would not have occurred were they forgeries.
The leak investigation should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the Downing Street Memo, which carries the stern warning, “This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.” The irony is of course that the attention given to the document by the internet bloggers once it appeared on this website has almost certainly made it the most widely read secret British document in history.
Additional links: Hansard on bombs dropped March to October 2002
Hansard on bombs dropped October 2002 to January 2003
Online discussion with Washington Post
times online
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UK's Blair "seduced" by U.S. before Iraq war - ex-diplomat
LONDON, Nov 7 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair was "seduced by the glamour of U.S. power" in the build-up to the Iraq war and repeatedly failed to influence U.S. policy, a former top British diplomat said in comments published on Monday.
Christopher Meyer, a former British ambassador in Washington who was heavily involved in the pre-war planning, said Blair was reluctant to negotiate conditions with President George W. Bush over Britain's support for war.
Blair did not use his position as Washington's most important ally to delay the start of the war to give more time to plan for what to do after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Meyer said.
"Britain should have made its participation in any war dependent on a fully worked-out plan, agreed by both sides, for the rehabilitation of Iraq after Saddam's demise," Meyer wrote in memoirs serialised in two British newspapers on Monday.
"We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise, but the ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to go it alone."
Meyer, ambassador in Washington from 1997 to February 2003 but now retired from the diplomatic service, said Britain's failure to press for more planning was still being felt.
"Had Britain insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise," he wrote.
He said in the Guardian and the Daily Mail that delaying the invasion from spring 2003 to the autumn would have given more time for planning for the aftermath and might have made it possible to agree on a second United Nations resolution.
"History's verdict looks likely to be that it was terminally flawed both in conception and execution," he wrote.
Meyer rejected the view that Blair blindly followed Bush, but said the British prime minister and his team were swayed by the power of the White House.
"Blair chose to take his stand ... from the highest moral ground," Meyer wrote. "It is the definitive riposte to 'Blair the Poodle', seduced though he and his team always appeared to be by the proximity and glamour of American power."
Meyer's criticisms come after a damaging week for Blair during which he faced a rebellion in parliament over planned anti-terrorism laws and saw a key ally resign.
Blair, who won his third consecutive election in May, faced widespread opposition from within his ruling Labour Party and the wider public over his support for the 2003 invasion. - alertnet.org
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Blair Blames France for Iraq War in Reply to Diplomat's Claims
by Colin Brown - Tony Blair has angrily rejected the charge by Britain's former ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, that he could have used his "swing vote" to stop the US going to war in Iraq. Sir Christopher claimed in his outspoken memoirs that Britain's support for military action was "taken for granted" by the White House, after Mr Blair agreed to military action with reservations at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002.
At his monthly press conference yesterday, the Prime Minister responded with claims that the French President, Jacques Chirac, was to blame for the slide to war without a second UN resolution. He said the French had threatened to veto a second UN resolution on Iraq.
Mr Blair told journalists: "If you go back and look at what happened in March 2003, I think you will see that I made the most strenuous efforts to get a second UN resolution and to end up with a second resolution that would have given us more time. The fact is, we couldn't get one for a very simple reason: the French made it clear they would veto any such resolution."
Senior French sources accused Mr Blair of a faulty memory. "Only four out of the 15 members of the Security Council supported a new resolution and Britain needed nine to win approval. It is completely wrong to blame it on France," said one official.
Sir Christopher supported the French in concluding that the French opposition to the draft UN resolution was not final. He said: "I never interpreted the French refusal to accept the draft of a second resolution as a refusal for ever and a day. In diplomacy, you never say never.
"Talking to me in private, French officials accuse America and Britain of deliberately exaggerating France's position to justify going to war without further UN cover."
Sir Christopher, 61, a career diplomat, said that in early October 2002 he asked a White House contact whether the US mobilisation for war had advanced so far that it was unstoppable. "I was told that the President had not yet signed off on going to war. Nothing was irrevocable."
He said President Bush would still have faced an agonising decision if he had encountered opposition from his key ally, Britain, in the weeks before the war in 2003. "The advice the British Prime Minister then gave the US President would never have been more important in my time in Washington. It could even be the swing vote for war or peace. The pendulum never swung back again." - commondreams
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MPs unite for inquiry into Blair's conduct over Iraq
MICHAEL SMITH
TONY BLAIR is set to face an unprecedented parliamentary inquiry into his conduct in the run-up to the Iraq war.
A coalition of Tory and Labour MPs is to table a motion to set up a Commons committee to examine "the conduct of ministers" both before and after the war. They believe they need the support of about 30 Labour rebels to succeed.
The committee, comprising seven privy counsellors, would have the power to see all sensitive documents and call any British witnesses, including intelligence chiefs.
The failure to plan for the aftermath is likely to be at the heart of the committee's inquiries now that Iraq is in the grip of a violent insurgency, says the Tory MP Douglas Hogg, one of the inquiry's architects and who is canvassing support for the move. The coalition already has backing from the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists.
Sir Menzies Campbell, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman, said his party had not supported earlier attempts to impeach the prime minister but was in no doubt that parliament should hold its own inquiry.
"Information that has emerged, in particular the memos leaked to The Sunday Times, strengthen overwhelmingly the case for an inquiry into the judgments of ministers, and in particular the prime minister, in the run-up to war and thereafter," he said.
The prime minister is the main target of the inquiry but in addition it will examine the conduct of Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, Geoff Hoon, then the defence secretary, and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general.
The inquiry is also expected to look at the secret air war against Iraq that began in May 2002, just weeks after Blair had agreed that Britain would take military action with America to achieve regime change. - times online
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Bush & Blair discussed Operation Northwoods type provocation - Material breach sought
according to Channel 4 News [ITN] Philipe Sands reveals in his new book -[uh oh! another book deal] Blair & Bush discussed:
"flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach." "It was also possible that a defector could be brought out who would give a public presentation about Saddam's WMD, and there was also a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated."
Lib Dem stooge Sir Menzies Campbell gave a depressingly restrained reaction: "its suprising that the president of the USA was trying to decieve Saddam Hussein"
er...actually... Both Bush & Blair LIED TO THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD...NO TRYING ABOUT IT.
On the 31st Jan 2003 Bush put the date of 10th March as a provisional start day for WAR...According to memo note, Blair privately agreed to this, then in public, continued to spin UN diplomacy/resolution talks to the Public & Parliament.
Sands is spinning this as a "in the post 911 world Governments are under pressure" - so, like other prominent leakers and objectors such as Michael Meacher, David Shayler & Craig Murray he has ulterior motives...BOOKs which distort the truth & help limit damage of zee leader in the annals of history
hoping to paint these world tyrants as under pressure from terrorist threats - So will a war on Iran go ahead undera new mandate of FAKE INTEGRITY?
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