Helen Reyes Wrote:The only slightly not simple question I saw posed to Blair today was when Chilicot said "You went to war based on Iraq's non-compliance with weapons insepctions while at the same time Hans Blix was not saying they were uncompliant."

The audio died at the beginning of the feed via BBC World for about 30 seconds. It seemed intentional. The coverage had the message "One-minute delay" rather than "Live." The general impression was that the whole dialogue was rehearsed beforehand.

Quote:
Tony Blair told the inquiry he believed Saddam Hussein was a "monster" before 9/11 but accepted that he would have to make the best of the situation.

At his first meeting with George Bush, in February 2001, Blair discussed Iraq. But it was in the context of trying to get a better sanctions regime. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, this view changed dramatically.

"I would fairly describe our policy up to September 11 as doing our best ... but with a different calculus of risk assessment ... The crucial thing after September 11 was that the calculus of risk changed."

Blair said that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, he firmly believed that he could not run the risk that Saddam would reconstitute his banned weapons programmes. "The decision I took – and frankly would take again – was if there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction [WMD] we should stop him. That was my view then and that is my view now."

Quote:
He accepted that the September 2002 dossier should have made clear that the now-notorious claim that Iraq had WMD that could be launched in 45 minutes referred to battlefield weapons and not long-range missiles. "It would have been better to have corrected it in the light of the significance it later took on," he said.

David Guyatt Wrote:Fingers crossed....

Quote:Putting Tony Blair on trial would be much too cruel. The man is ill, delusional, quite possibly to the point of madness. What he needs most of all is psychiatric help. Any doubts I might have had about that diagnosis were removed by his six-hour presentation to the Chilcot Inquiry of his reasons for joining the neo-conned “Dubya” Bush in the war on Iraq.

Without understanding why, I never thought Blair was Bush’s puppet. Now, thanks to the access Blair gave us to the workings of his mind for six hours, I do understand. He was ahead of Bush in the war on terrorism game because he is a neo-con, the real thing, whereas Bush had to be won over, conned, by America’s mad men. Blair didn’t. He was always with them in spirit. After 9/11, immediately after it, probably while the towers were still collapsing, their agenda was his agenda.
Though the Chilcot Inquiry is concerned only with Iraq – how Blair’s government made the decision to go to war and what lessons should be learned – Blair could not resist beating the drum for war on Iran. He did that four times. One might have been listening to John Bolton or any of America’s or Israel’s lunatics.
When he was going on about terrorism being a threat to all, he threw in: “It’s a constant problem for Israel. They get attacked.” That there is a cause-and-effect relationship between Israeli occupation and Israel’s frequent demonstrations of state terrorism and a degree of violence directed at the Zionist state from time to time is not something Blair the neo-con can, or ever will, get his deluded minded around.
At one point during his display of insufferable, Zionist-like self-righteousness, Blair denied he had said in an interview with the BBC’s Fern Britton that he favoured regime change in Iraq. “I didn’t use the words regime change in that interview,” he said to the Chilcot Inquiry. He was telling the truth in that he did not use those actual words. What then did he say on camera to Fern Britton on 13 December 2009? She asked him if knowing what we all know today (that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction) would he still have gone to war. Blair replied, “I would still have thought it right to remove him. If that is not regime change, what is?!
Blair still insists that the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein has “made the world a safer place”. The reality is that Blair and Bush together were the best recruiting sergeants for violent Islamic fundamentalism in many manifestations, not only the Al-Qaeda franchise.
Most amazing of all was that Blair declined an invitation to express any regret. He couldn’t even bring himself to say he regretted the loss of the lives of British soldiers and a great number of Iraqis (somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000), mainly civilians. To my way of thinking that makes him less than fully human.
Blair described Saddam Hussein as “a monster who threatened the world.” There’s an old English saying, “It takes one to know one.”

Quote:Plan to oust Saddam drawn up two years before the invasion
Secret document signalled support for Iraqi dissidents and promised aid, oil and trade deals in return for regime change

By Michael Savage, Political Correspondent
Monday, 1 February

Regime change ? by force: a US tank passes a portrait of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, 2003

A secret plan to foster an internal coup against Saddam Hussein was drawn up by the Government two years before the invasion of Iraq, The Independent can reveal.

Whitehall officials drafted the "contract with the Iraqi people" as a way of signalling to dissenters in Iraq that an overthrow of Saddam would be supported by Britain. It promised aid, oil contracts, debt cancellations and trade deals once the dictator had been removed. Tony Blair's team saw it as a way of creating regime change in Iraq even before the 9/11 attack on New York.

The document, headed "confidential UK/US eyes", was finalised on 11 June 2001 and approved by ministers. It has not been published by the Iraq inquiry but a copy has been obtained by The Independent and can be revealed for the first time today. It states: "We want to work with an Iraq which respects the rights of its people, lives at peace with its neighbours and which observes international law.

"The Iraqi people have the right to live in a society based on the rule of law, free from repression, torture and arbitrary arrest; to enjoy respect for human rights, economic freedom and prosperity," the contract reads. "The record of the current regime in Iraq suggests that its priorities remain elsewhere.

"Those who wish to promote change in Iraq deserve our support," it concludes. "We look forward to the day when Iraq rejoins the international community." A new regime was to be offered "debt rescheduling" through the Paris Club, an informal group of the richest 19 economies, given help from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and handed an EU aid and trade deal. Companies were to be invited to invest in its oil fields. A "comprehensive retraining programme" was to be offered to Iraqi professionals.

During his evidence to the inquiry last week, Mr Blair said it was only after 9/11 that serious attention was given to removing Saddam as the attack changed the "calculus of risk". However, another classified document released by the Iraq inquiry on Friday night showed that No 10 explicitly saw the Contract with the Iraqi People as an early tool to remove the former Iraqi dictator. A memo issued in March 2001 by Sir John Sawers, then Mr Blair's foreign policy adviser, cited the document under the heading "regime change".

"Regime change. The US and UK would re-make the case against Saddam Hussein. We would issue a Contract with the Iraqi People, setting out our goal of a peaceful, law-abiding Iraq," the memo states. "The Contract would make clear that the Iraqi regime's record and behaviour made it impossible for Iraq to meet the criteria for rejoining the international community without fundamental change."

Officials planned to release the contract alongside tougher sanctions against Saddam's regime being negotiated in 2001. When no agreement was reached and the US began to seek more active measures to remove the Baghdad administration after 9/11, the contract was dropped.

The document was not released by the Iraq inquiry, despite being cited as significant by Foreign Office officials. Sir William Patey, the Government's head of Middle East policy at the time it was drafted, said it was "our way in the Foreign Office of trying to signal that we didn't think Saddam was a good thing and it would be great if he went". He said it was used in place of an "explicit policy of trying to get rid of him".

"It was a way of signalling to the Iraqi people that because we don't have a policy of regime change, it doesn't mean to say we're happy with Saddam Hussein, and there is life after Saddam with Iraq being reintegrated into the international community," he said.

Ed Davey, the Foreign Affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said the document called into question Mr Blair's evidence and should have been made public before his hearing on Friday. "A plan to back Iraqis seeking to oust Saddam may have been far less damaging and certainly more legal than what happened. Yet it shows that Blair's intent was always for regime change from an early stage and before 9/11," he said. "Yet again, it seems that critical documents have not been declassified, hampering the questioning of Blair and others."

* Tony Blair is to be recalled by the Chilcot Inquiry to give further evidence, according to The Guardian. It claims that Mr Blair will be questioned in both public and in private after the panel raised concerns that his evidence relating to the legality of the invasion conflicted with that given by the former Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith.