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

[Jan Klimkowski]

"This is Sir Richard's time-bomb. He wants to set the record straight and defend the integrity of MI6," a security source told Daily Mail.
The source stressed that Dearlove is ready to do what no other MI6 chief has ever done because "the events in question were unprecedented" and he's tired of being blamed for having "too-cozy"relationship with Blair.
"If Chilcot doesn't put the record straight, Sir Richard will strike back," he added.

:rofl::rofl::rofl:

Petulant self-centred asscovering nonsense worthy of an afternoon matinee...

We don't need Chilcot to "reveal the truth" to us plebs.

We know the truth.

Blair promised Bush he would ensure British soldiers spilt blood in the neocon War on Iraq, and everything after that was a psyop: spinning half-baked intelligence into an overblown justification for war and ensuring there was no credible opposition.

What happened to Dr David Kelly again?

[Magda Hassan]

6 November 2013 Last updated at 21:54 GMT

Iraq Inquiry: Hold-up over access to key documents

[URL="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24844656#story_continues_1"]
The Iraq Inquiry says it cannot proceed with the next phase of its work because key information, including correspondence between Tony Blair and George W Bush, has yet to be released.[/URL]


The inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcot had hoped to begin contacting those likely to be criticised in its report this autumn, to allow them to respond.
But it said it had not yet agreed with the government over the publication of the most "difficult documents".
The inquiry began its work in 2009.
In a statement on the inquiry's website, Sir John said the next phase of its work was "dependent on the satisfactory completion of discussions between the inquiry and the government on disclosure of material that the inquiry wishes to include in its report or publish alongside it".
He added: "Since June this year the inquiry has submitted 10 requests covering some 200 cabinet-level discussions, 25 notes from Mr Blair to President Bush and more than 130 records of conversations between either Mr Blair or Mr [Gordon] Brown and President Bush.
"The inquiry secretariat has responded to a number of Cabinet Office questions on those requests, but the government and the inquiry have not reached a final position on the disclosure of these more difficult categories of document."
'Scale of task'Sir John has written to Prime Minister David Cameron to express his regret that no agreement has yet been reached.
In his reply, the prime minister acknowledged the progress that had been made and said he was "aware of the scale of the task declassification has presented to a number of government departments".
He added: "I appreciate consideration of the disclosure requests for the remaining sensitive categories of information must be handled sensitively and carefully but I hope that consideration of the final sets of papers can be concluded as soon as possible."
A spokeswoman for No 10 said she had nothing to add to the prime minister's letter. The Cabinet Office has released a statement saying "discussions are continuing between the government and the inquiry about the disclosure of records".
BBC political correspondent Carole Walker said this was the latest in a series of delays to the long-running inquiry.
The inquiry, which is examining the background to the UK's involvement in the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, has never set a firm deadline for publishing its final report - set to be about a million words long.
However, it was initially expected to be published in 2012.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24844656

[David Guyatt]

"Difficult categories of documents".

A masterly civil servant phrase.

A more honest description would be "revealing categories of documents".

We can't have that can we.

As Jan said in 131 above, we don't need an inquiry to tell us what happened - we know.

Blair is covering his ass, saving it for the expensive leather seats of that jet on permanent loan to him by his business buddy.

[Magda Hassan]

Exclusive: US blocks publication of Chilcot's report on how Britain went to war with Iraq

Department of State's objection to release of key evidence may prevent inquiry's conclusions from ever being published, except in heavily redacted form

JAMES CUSICK

POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT

Wednesday 13 November 2013

Washington is playing the lead role in delaying the publication of the long-awaited report into how Britain went to war with Iraq, The Independent has learnt.
Although the Cabinet Office has been under fire for stalling the progress of the four-year Iraq Inquiry by Sir John Chilcot, senior diplomatic sources in the US and Whitehall indicated that it is officials in the White House and the US Department of State who have refused to sanction any declassification of critical pre- and post-war communications between George W Bush and Tony Blair.
Without permission from the US government, David Cameron faces the politically embarrassing situation of having to block evidence, on Washington's orders, from being included in the report of an expensive and lengthy British inquiry.
Earlier this year, The Independent revealed that early drafts of the reportchallenged the official version of events leading up to the Iraq war, which saw Mr Blair send in 45,000 troops to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime.
The protected documents relating to the Bush-Blair exchanges are said to provide crucial evidence for already-written passages that are highly critical of the covert way in which Mr Blair committed British troops to the US-led invasion.
One high-placed diplomatic source said: "The US are highly possessive when documents relate to the presence of the President or anyone close to him. Tony Blair is involved in a dialogue in many of these documents, and naturally someone else is at the other end the President. Therefore this is not Tony Blair's or the UK Government's property to disclose."
The source was adamant that "Chilcot, or anyone in London, does not decide what documents relating to a US President are published".
Last week, Chilcot sent Downing Street an update on his inquiry's progress which explained his continuing inability to set a publication date. He described difficult discussions with the Government on the disclosure of material he wanted to include in his report, or publish alongside it.
He said that over the past six months, he had submitted requests that covered 200 cabinet-level discussions, a cache of notes from Mr Blair to Mr Bush, and more than 130 records of conversations between any two of Mr Blair, Gordon Brown and the White House. Mr Cameron was informed that the inquiry and the Cabinet Office had "not yet reached a final position" on the documents.
Although the Prime Minister told Chilcot in a letter last week that some documents needed to be "handled sensitively", the Cabinet Office decoded the Prime Minister's phrases yesterday, telling The Independent: "It is in the public's interests that exchanges between the UK Prime Minister and the US President are privileged. The whole premise about withholding them [from publication] is to ensure that we do not prejudice our relations with the United States."
The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, has been widely criticised as the senior civil servant responsible for blocking the delivery of material to the inquiry. Sir Menzies Campbell, who as the Liberal Democrats' foreign-affairs spokesman was a high-profile opponent of the war, has described the delays as "intolerable", adding: "The full story need[s] to be told."
The former Foreign Secretary Lord Owen has called for Sir Jeremy to be stripped of his role in deciding which documents are released to the inquiry. However, the Cabinet Office said yesterday that Sir Jeremy was merely upholding a previous decision taken by his predecessor, Lord O'Donnell, which emphasised the importance of privacy in communications between Downing Street and the White House.
Chilcot, a former diplomat who previously investigated intelligence on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction as part of the Butler Review, heads an inquiry team that comprises Sir Roderic Lyne, the former UK ambassador to Russia; Sir Lawrence Freedman, the professor of war studies at King's College London; and Baroness Prashar, a former member of Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights.
Another member of the inquiry team, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, has been ill and has had limited input into its recent deliberations.
The authors are facing difficult choices forced on them by Washington and the Cabinet Office's desire not to upset the so-called "special relationship" between Britain and the US. They may deliver a neutered report in spring next year which would effectively absolve Mr Blair of any serious policy failures because there would be no clear evidence contained in the report to back up such direct criticism. Another possibility is that the report will be so heavily redacted as to be rendered meaningless and hence a waste of almost £8m of British taxpayers' money.
Since the Iraq Inquiry was launched in 2009 by the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, covert back-channel communications between the Cabinet Office and its counterparts in Washington have focused on the diplomatic convention that the disclosure of "privileged channels of communication" should remain at all times protected.
The final report is supposed to examine how the Blair government took decisions and what lessons can be learnt to "help ensure that if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond".
Dr James Strong, a foreign-policy analyst at the London School of Economics, said: "All governments like to keep their secrets secret. The US is no exception. As its response to WikiLeaks suggested, the US defines a secret in terms of the type of document rather than the contents. So regardless of what these particular documents say, the US probably wouldn't want them published, because governments normally keep private exchanges between leaders private."
The US State Department declined to comment. Tonight, the Cabinet Office denied that the US had a veto on the issue, adding: "These issues are being worked through in good faith and with a view to reaching a position as rapidly as possible."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/pol...37772.html

[Malcolm Pryce]

Hmmm it looks like the Government is in trouble on this one. The language coming out of the US is uncompromising and it's difficult to imagine any government of Airstrip 1 defying the US. But that leaves them in a potentially disastrous situation. What can they do? How come they never foresaw this?


We really need someone to leak this.


And, of course, there's a wonderful post-PRISMatic irony that the US objects to the President's confidentiality being breached.

[Peter Presland]

Hmmm it looks like the Government is in trouble on this one. The language coming out of the US is uncompromising and it's difficult to imagine any government of Airstrip 1 defying the US. But that leaves them in a potentially disastrous situation. What can they do? How come they never foresaw this?


We really need someone to leak this.


And, of course, there's a wonderful post-PRISMatic irony that the US objects to the President's confidentiality being breached.

I agree with all that Malcolm and the 'post-PRISmatic irony' is delicious.

I found myself chuckling a bit over it too; but rueful chuckling - very rueful.

It will interesting to watch the ducking and diving of the UK Establishment as this develops. But I have little doubt that a course acceptable to both will be found and, as always, they'll get clean(ish) away with it.

[David Guyatt]

Ever get the sick sense that the book and film "The Ghost Writer" may have a basis in fact?

[Magda Hassan]

But I have little doubt that a course acceptable to both will be found and, as always, they'll get clean(ish) away with it.

But we all know. And especially the Iraqis. But all of us too. The Emperor has no clothes. And I wont be surprised at all if one day some bereaved Iraqi takes one or more of them out with them. What would they have to lose with no justice under the sun and nothing left to live for?

[David Guyatt]

"Career changing", my arse.

Did you hear the joke about the priest and a nun?

Q: what fun does a priest have?
A: Nun.

The punchline is the same as the below soon to be published report. Even the Guardian states it's gonna be a "compromise". What fun.

But my guess is that it won't be the truth, or the whole truth. I bet anyway.

Chilcot inquiry into Iraq war set to publish findings in new year

Tony Blair prepares for career-defining moment as Sir John Chilcot agrees compromise over George Bush letters

• Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent
  
• theguardian.com, Sunday 29 December 2013 22.30 GMT
  

George Bush and Tony Blair: the latter told the Chilcot inquiry it is important to protect the confidentiality of correspondence between a prime minister and president. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Tony Blair is preparing himself for the defining moment of his post-prime ministerial career as Whitehall sources confirmed that Sir John Chilcot will publish his report into the handling of the Iraq war in the new year.
A compromise agreement between Chilcot and the cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, who had been resisting calls for the publication of correspondence between Blair and George Bush, is understood to mean that the final stages of the inquiry can be started in the new year.
Chilcot, a former permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office who had demanded the publication of the correspondence, is expected to press ahead with the "Maxwellisation process" in which people criticised in the report are contacted for their comments.
The inquiry sent out what were described as "boilerplate" letters in the initial stages of the "Maxwellisation process" in the autumn. But this process, named after rules introduced after the late Sir Robert Maxwell was deemed in an official 1969 report to be unfit to run a public company, was put on hold by Chilcot in November after he reached an impasse with Heywood on publishing the highly sensitive correspondence. Extracts of the correspondence are now expected to be published in the report in redacted form.
A senior Whitehall source told the Guardian: "In the new year it seems the Chilcot inquiry is going to be published. Everyone will be assuming: bad hair day for Tony Blair and Jack Straw. The Conservatives can't say or do very much given that Iain Duncan Smith was further ahead than Blair. But the Conservatives are irrelevant to it."
Lord Mandelson, the former business secretary who remains close to Blair, indicated recently that the former prime minister's inner circle expect the report to be published within months. Mandelson told the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 just before Christmas: "Ed Miliband … has to navigate his way through what could be a very difficult minefield, and that is the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, which remains a very sensitive issue for many in the Labour party, but also many in the public."
Asked when he expected the report to be published, the former cabinet minister said: "I think we expect it somewhere in mid-year. It's certainly taken its time."
Blair's office and the Iraq inquiry declined last night to comment on the timing of the publication of the report. But it is understood that the former prime minister is relaxed about the publication of his correspondence with Bush. Some friends of Blair say that the report would lack credibility unless the correspondence is published.
In his evidence to the inquiry Blair said it was important to protect the confidentiality of correspondence between a prime minister and a president. But friends point out that Blair went out of his way to explain the correspondence without breaking confidences.
A crucial communication between Blair and Bush was a note in July 2002 which gave the impression than the then prime minister had indicated that Britain would back the US in a military campaign to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Sir David Manning, his chief foreign affairs adviser, had told Blair that his original draft was "too sweeping" and "went further than we should have gone".
Blair told the inquiry that he had offered strong support for Bush but insisted that he still wanted the US to try for further UN security resolutions something Bush announced two months later in a speech to the UN general assembly. He told Chilcot: "In a sense what I was saying to America was: 'Look' and by the way I am absolutely sure this is how George Bush took it 'whatever the political heat, if I think this is the right thing to do I am going to be with you. I am not going to back out because the going gets tough. On the other hand, here are the difficulties and this is why I think the UN route is the right way to go".
Whitehall is assuming that the report will criticise Blair, his foreign secretary Jack Straw, the former prime minister Gordon Brown and Sir Richard Dearlove who was head of MI6 at the time of the Iraq war. Chilcot was a member of the commission chaired by the former cabinet secretary Lord Butler of Brockwell which was highly critical of the use of intelligence in the runup to the war.
But one Whitehall source said that the report will also have implications for politics today. "The report will reinforce MPs who are demanding an even greater say of the legislature over the executive. They will want to have this set in concrete. They will be saying among other things and it will be more difficult for the government to defend confirmation hearings for chief of the defence staff, for senior ambassadors, the ability to summon the national security council here."

[Magda Hassan]

Disgusting. Bliar and Straw have a 'bad hair day' and hundreds of thousands of others are dead and millions of others lives destroyed for their lies.