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

[David Guyatt]

Circus performers always rehearse their act in front of mirrors Helen. :

How else would they know if their light-reflecting costumes bunched into their lower orifice? dontknow:

[Jan Klimkowski]

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.

I have not seen a full transcript yet. With that caveat, the bits I heard on the radio as I was driving today appeared to be a complete farce, a travesty.

Much of the "questioning" seemed to consist of "Inquiry" members summarizing a chronology and then asking Blair whether he agreed with their summary. What a joke.

Here are some initial observations:

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."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/...key-points

Did the so-called Iraq Inquiry ask Blair what Saddam had to do with 9/11?

Did they ask him whether there was any link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11?

Did they ask him whether WMD were used during 9/11?

I don't believe so. (NB again I haven't seen a full transcript yet.)

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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/...key-points

Did the so-called Iraq Inquiry push him on why he didn't correct the false 45-minute claim at the time?

Did they ask him whether this WMD claim referred to chemical weapons rather than nuclear and biological weapons?

Did they ask him who provided Saddam with the precursors needed for chemical weapons?

Did they ask him whether chemical weapons constituted WMD as commonly understood?

I don't believe so. (NB again I haven't seen a full transcript yet.)

Politicians, especially government ministers, will routinely insist on corrections of what they consider to be factual misinterpretations by the media. Blair and Campbell's refusal to ask for a correction of the 45-minute claim reveals their true, insidious, corrupt, intention.

[David Guyatt]

...

[David Guyatt]

Fingers crossed....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...Blair.html

[quote]Chilcot War Inquiry: Professor to launch 'Nuremberg' war crimes prosecution against Blair

By Glen Owen
Last updated at 11:14 PM on 30th January 2010



Plans to bring a war crimes prosecution against Tony Blair based on last week’s bombshell evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry have been launched by a leading law professor.

The move could see Mr Blair follow former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic into a dock in The Hague.

Professor Bill Bowring says the revelation that the Government rejected Foreign Office warnings not to invade Iraq means there is a good chance Mr Blair can be ‘investigated, at the very least’ for war crimes.

‘We now know that the Government was explicitly warned beforehand that the UK risked being prosecuted for going to war,’ said Prof Bowring.

Professor Bowring has launched plans to bring a war crimes prosecution against Tony Blair
He says that he will deploy the same law used to convict the killers of Garry Newlove, the Cheshire father of three kicked to death in front of his family in 2007, and Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46.

He is drafting a submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC) arguing that Mr Blair is guilty under the law of ‘joint enterprise’, which holds people responsible for the actions of a wider group if they know they are involved in criminal enterprises.

It means the former Prime Minister would be liable for any crimes committed by US forces, such as disproportionate bombing.

On Tuesday, Sir Michael Wood, the chief legal adviser to the Foreign Office from 2001 to 2006, said he warned the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that invading Iraq without UN backing would ‘amount to the crime of aggression’ and could lead

to the prosecution of British soldiers and politicians. Mr Straw rejected the warning.

Prof Bowring said the April 2002 meeting between Mr Blair and George Bush at the President’s Texas ranch, described as the moment the agreement to invade was ‘signed in blood’, would be critical in the case.

‘Joint enterprise’ was used to convict the killers of Mr Newlove in 2008. Though one kick killed Mr Newlove, three men were convicted of his murder because they were aware they were engaged in joint criminality.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor has said that he could ‘envisage’ a situation in which Mr Blair found himself in the dock.

An ICC spokeswoman said that the mandate of the chief prosecutor’s office covered the conduct of Allied forces in the war, but would not comment on Prof Bowring’s specific legal argument.

[Peter Presland]

Fingers crossed....

Yep - I'll go along with that.

OTOH - this from Alan Hart:

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.”

Also a couple more pics which lightened the gloom a little:

[Magda Hassan]

This is excellent news. I do have my fingers crodssed. There is another professor of law in the US who has taken out international arrest warrants for Bush, Chaney, Rice et al. It will be a great day to see their no longer smirking faces in the dock. More of a chance with Blair because I don't think the US signed up for the ICC though they forced every one else to sign up. I wonder if he will meet the same end as Milosevic in his cell?

[Magda Hassan]

Tony Blair Iraq inquiry evidence ludicrous, says Short


Clare Short said Gordon Brown was marginalised by Tony Blair

The argument put forward by Tony Blair in his evidence to the Iraq inquiry was "ludicrous", former cabinet minister Clare Short has said.
It was wrong to suggest, after the 11 September attacks, that al-Qaeda would team up with "rogue states".
Gordon Brown, then Chancellor, was "marginalised" when the decision to go to war was made, Ms Short said.
Ms Short resigned as International Development Secretary shortly after the invasion of Iraq in early 2003.
Former Prime Minister Mr Blair spent six hours giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry in Friday.
'No such threat'
He said Saddam had been a "monster and I believe he threatened not just the region but the world."
Mr Blair also stressed the British and American attitude towards the threat posed by Saddam Hussein "changed dramatically" after the terror attacks on 11 September 2001, saying: "I never regarded 11 September as an attack on America, I regarded it as an attack on us."
Speaking on BBC One's Andrew Marr Show, Ms Short described Mr Blair as "preachy", adding: "There was no link at the time between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. So there was no such threat."
Asked about Mr Brown's role in the decision to go to war, she said: "Gordon was marginalised and not in the inner group."
She added that "they [Mr Blair and his supporters] wanted him out of the Treasury... and they were going to offer him the Foreign Office and that he wouldn't accept it."
Ms Short is to give evidence to the Iraq inquiry on Tuesday. Mr Brown has said he will do the same before the general election, which is expected to take place on 6 May.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8489797.stm

[David Guyatt]

Bliar caught telling porkies again?

Regime change was always the plan - before 911.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/pol...85155.html

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.

[Magda Hassan]

From Wikipedia. From the memory hole. Have they ever released the cabinet discussion documents and the legal advice documents?


Katharine Teresa Gun (born Katharine Teresa Harwood in 1974) is a former translator for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence agency. In 2003, she became publicly known for leaking top-secret information to the press concerning illegal activities by the United States of America in their push for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Gun, who was raised in Taiwan, worked as a Mandarin Chinese-to-English translator for GCHQ. On 31 January 2003, she received an e-mail from a USA National Security Agency official named Frank Koza. This email requested aid in a secret and illegal operation to bug the United Nations offices of six nations: Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan. These were the six "swing nations" on the UN Security Council that could determine whether the UN approved the invasion of Iraq. The plan allegedly violated the Vienna Conventions, which regulate global diplomacy.
Gun admitted leaking the email to The Observer but said she did it "with a clear conscience", hoping to prevent the war. "I have no regrets and I would do it again", she said. In a BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, she admitted that she had not raised the matter with staff counsellors as she "honestly didn't think that would have had any practical effect."[1] After her revelation, GCHQ terminated her employment.

On 13 November 2003, Gun was charged with an offence under section 1 of the Official Secrets Act 1989. Her case became a cause célèbre among activists, and many people stepped forward to urge the government to drop the case. Among them were the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Daniel Ellsberg (the US government official who leaked the Pentagon Papers), and actor Sean Penn, who described her as "a hero of the human spirit". Gun planned to plead "not guilty", saying in her defence that she acted to prevent imminent loss of life in a war she considered illegal.
The case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. The reasons for the prosecution dropping the case are unclear. The day before the trial, Gun's defence team had asked the government for any records of advice about the legality of the war that it had received during the run-up to the war. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny as the defence were expected to argue that trying to stop an illegal act (that of an illegal war of aggression) trumped Gun's obligations under the Official Secrets Act. Speculation was rife in the media that the prosecution service had bowed to political pressure to drop the case so that any such documents would remain secret. However, a Government spokesman said that the decision to drop the case had been made before the defence's demands had been submitted.

[Peter Lemkin]

Wow! I do love the Circus!....especially the clowns! I do hope Professor Bowring doesn't have an 'accident' or suddenly commit 'suicide' or die of 'natural' causes. There are very powerful forces protecting Tony the Phony! Bring on the trapeze artists! And, can we please have a 'Professor Bowring' stand up in the USA!..but most are cowards there now...due to the unPatriot Act and our Gestapo.