The Iraq Inquiry - Chilcott's Circus Clowns Come to Town

[Jan Klimkowski]

These politicians have acted in a clearly unconstitutional and improper fashion.

All of those involved in this disgraceful subversion of process, including Attorney General Goldsmith, are revealed as unfit to hold public office.

Britain is supposedly a representative democracy, where the people we elect are meant to represent our interests fairly, honestly, without fear or favour, bathed in the bright shining light of truth.

What a crock. :eviltongue:

Chilcot inquiry: all the legal advice that was fit to print

No wonder Jack Straw suppressed the record: it was he who ensured the cabinet was misadvised on legality of the Iraq war

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.

Both Wood and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, have today strongly disagreed with the view that the then attorney general Lord Goldsmith eventually came to, after being parked for months at a time for fear that he would come up with the wrong answer. On 7 March 2003, Goldsmith gave advice that was still too equivocal for the chief of the defence staff to commit British troops to war, but by 13 March had come up with a "better view" that the war would be legal. Four days later, the cabinet was given an unequivocal statement of Goldsmith's view that persuaded them to back the war. That statement was drawn up to be as strong as possible, for public consumption.

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.

This lack of discussion is one of the key political and constitutional issues around the war. Should the cabinet have discussed the legality of a decision for which they were constitutionally collectively responsible?

Former defence secretary Geoff Hoon doesn't think so, as he told the inquiry last week. For him, a view from the attorney general one way or another was all that the cabinet needed. Former cabinet secretary Lord Turnbull took a similar line. It is now clear that Goldsmith thought the cabinet should perhaps be fully informed but he was talked out of it.

We know this because the inquiry has for once published actual documents that back up what the witnesses are saying. There is a letter from Wood to Straw's private office in March 2002, a year before the invasion, warning Straw not to be so sure that a war would be legal.

There is correspondence from before and after the passage of UN security council resolution 1441 and – as most papers are reporting – correspondence between Straw and Wood in which the former explicitly rejects his legal adviser's legal advice. There is also documentary evidence that supports the government's claim that Goldsmith changed his mind on 13 March before a meeting with Blair allies Sally Morgan and Charles Falconer, in spite of what the Cabinet Office told me.

Wilmshurst today described as "lamentable" the process by which Goldsmith had moved from an initial view that a second UN resolution would be needed, to a different but still equivocal view on 7 March, and then to a definite view ten days later. She made clear her view that Goldsmith should have been asked earlier to give a formal view and that by the time he was asked, he had little choice but to back the war because the alternative was to give Saddam Hussein a massive propaganda victory.

But what happened after Goldsmith finally made up his mind to back the war on 13 March is also crucial. The events of that day can be deduced from Goldsmith's diary, and a note by his legal secretary David Brummell, published by the inquiry. Goldsmith appears to have told Brummell in the morning that he would back the war long before a meeting that evening. Indeed, at 6pm that afternoon, Goldsmith held a meeting with Straw where he told Straw that he would back the war; and as Brummell told the inquiry today, Straw was "duly grateful".

According to the Foreign Office's note of that meeting, Goldsmith told Straw that "in public he needed to explain his case as strongly and unambiguously as possible", but that "he thought he might need to tell the cabinet when it met on 17 March that the legal issues were finely balanced."

Straw warned him of the danger of leaks and advised him that it would be better to present the cabinet with a draft letter to the Commons foreign affairs committee as the basic standard text of his position, and then make a few comments. "The attorney general agreed."

It is noticeable that Straw did not try to persuade Goldsmith of the line that the government has used since – that the Cabinet should only ever get an unequivocal view of the attorney general's view. He merely argued that they could not be trusted with the truth.

As it happened, the cabinet got an even shorter statement of Goldsmith's view – the written parliamentary answer that was clearly designed to be as strong and unambiguous as possible, and Goldsmith said virtually nothing at the meeting. Short has said that she wanted to ask him both why he had taken so long to come to a decision – which we now know – and whether he had any doubts.

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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...jack-straw