Chilcott Enquiry....

[Colston]

...got very interesting today. Straw talks a lot about the Middle East and US and Israeli policies...

[luke]

craig murray has this on jack straw at the chilcot enquiry;

Jack Straw's Biggest Lie

I was a British Ambassador at the time of the events covered by the Iraq Inquiry. I know many of the witnesses and a great deal of the background. I can therefore see right through the smooth presentation. Jack Straw was the smoothest of all - but he told lie after lie.

Straw's biggest and most important lie goes right to the heart of the question of whether the war was legal. Did UN Security Council Resolution 1441 provide a legal basis for the invasion, or would a second resolution specifically authorising military action have been required? The UK certainly put a massive amount of diplomatic effort into obtaining a second resolution.

Here is Straw's argument that the invasion was legal without a second resolution:

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Then you make a point very strongly in your statement and this has been confirmed by Sir Jeremy Greenstock that you did not believe that military action thereafter, in the event of noncompliance, would depend on a second resolution. It would be desirable but it wasn't dependent on that. We are not, today, going into the legal arguments on that. Sir Jeremy's basic contention was that he had got the Americans and British into a comparable position as before Desert Fox in December 1998. So I think that's quite important, that your understanding, at least of the position, was that it wasn't absolutely essential to have a second resolution.

RT HON JACK STRAW: I was not in any doubt about that and neither was Jeremy Greenstock, and for very good reasons, which is that there had been talk by the French and Germans of a draft which would have required a second resolution, but they never tabled it. We tabled a draft, which, as I set out in this memorandum, and which Sir Jeremy Greenstock confirms in his memorandum, was aimed to be selfcontained, in the sense that, if very important conditions were met through failures by the Saddam regime, that of itself would provide sufficient authority for military action, and no doubt the next time we will get into the wording of the resolution, which, as I say in this memorandum, I can virtually recite in my sleep, but there are reasons why in OP12 we use the language that we do, and serious consequences are mentioned in OP13 and so on. For sure, we wanted a second resolution after that and well, again, I set out

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: We will come on to that in a moment.

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/43198/100121pm-straw.pdf

As Ambassador in an Islamic country, I was copied all or nearly all of the telegrams of instruction on the diplomatic efforts to secure a second resolution. I can tell you these facts as an eye-witness.

Straw argues that the proof that no second resolution was needed is that

I was not in any doubt about that and neither was Jeremy Greenstock, and for very good reasons, which is that there had been talk by the French and Germans of a draft which would have required a second resolution, but they never tabled it.

But they did not table it because we gave assurances to the French and Germans (and Russians and Chinese) that our draft of UNSCR 1441 did not authorise military action. The instructions were to inform those governments that UNSCR 1441 contained "no automatic trigger" which would lead to military action. I remember the phrase precisely "no automatic trigger". Rod Lyne on the committee must remember it too, because he was one of the people, as Ambassador in Moscow, instructed to give that message.

It is the most perverse of lies by Straw to argue that the fact that the Germans and French did not table their draft proved that 1441 authorised war, when we had told them not to table their draft because 1441 did not authorise war.

I read with enormous care and in real time every single word of the scores of telegrams on the effort to secure the second resolution. Not one word gave any hint at all that a second resolution might not be necessary to authorise war. There was absolutely no mention in telegrams to Embassies of the notion that UNSCR 1441 was a sufficient basis for war, and no second resolution needed, until many weeks after 1441 was passed, just before the invasion.

STOP PRESS ADDITION

In response to New Labour hacks questioning my word, I can offer you irrefutable evidence to back up my own evidence that all the FCO material at the time of the adoption of UNSCR 1441 and for weeks afterwards right up until March, took the view that UNSCR 1441 did not provide legal grounds for the invasion.

It is the resignation letter of Deputy FCO Legal Adviser Elizabeth Wilmshurst in which she stated:

"I cannot agree that it is lawful to use force against Iraq without a second Security Council resolution to revive the authorisation given in SCR 678. I do not need to set out my reasoning; you are aware of it.

My views accord with the advice that has been given consistently in this office before and after the adoption of UN security council resolution 1441 and with what the attorney general gave us to understand was his view prior to his letter of 7 March. (The view expressed in that letter has of course changed again into what is now the official line.) "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4377605.stm

All FCO instructions in the period to which I refer would have had to be in line with the view expressed by FCO legal advisers at that time. That view was precisely as I have stated it above.

This part of Straw's evidence is therefore a huge lie.

There were numerous other minor lies from Straw. It is completely untrue that we had persuaded the three African security council members to support a second resolution authorising war. Baroness' Amos mission to Francophone states we had ignored for years was a miserable failure. That was clear from reporting telegrams from posts.

It's a small point, but Straw's lie that upset me most personally was:

I don't in the least mind people disagreeing with me, indeed I encourage it, but I do ask them to be loyal, because, otherwise, you can't operate any kind of governmental system.

I disagreed with Straw, over the issue of the use of torture to gain intelligence in the "War on Terror". I was very loyal. I kep my disagreement entirely internal and argued it in top secret telegrams and internal policy meetings. As a result of my disagreeing, Straw attempted to have me framed on false charges, destroying my health in the process and leaking false accusations to the tabloids to ruin my reputation too. When my name was finally cleared, they had to give me six year's salary to settle.

I defy anyone to read Murder in Samarkand and say Straw is not a liar.

from http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/01/jack_straws_big.html

this was posted on medialens which raise some interesting points;

One other point on Straw's evidence is that they knew they wouldn't get a second UN resolution authorizing force, in advance, and they knew why.

Straw claimed that he was 'mystified' by the prospect of a French veto at the UN Security Council 'under any circumstances'. He simply couldn't think why, although he agreed that sanctions were a failing policy and he knew that they were shortly due to be lifted from Iraq.

He only needed to cast his mind back to the case Richard Perle was making to 'opinion formers' in the US; that Saddam had indicated when sanctions were finally lifted the reconstruction contracts for Iraq's oil infrastructure were to go to French, German and Russian businesses. Iraq would no longer trade in oil with American and British companies. It was for this reason that Bush and Blair favoured "regime change" - it was good for business - ours and America's oil business.

It was commercial oil interests that split the UN Security Council, and Bush, Blair, Straw they all knew this. The second resolution was a public relations exercise that they knew was doomed to failure from the start.

Of course, none of the flunkies on the Chilcot inquiry panel mentioned the oil, to help jog Straw's memory about the 'mystical', 'under any circumstances' French veto. As Alan Clark would say Straw was again being economical with the actualité.

and;

this is also the reason that Blair has stated on the record that he was "happy" to pay the "blood-price" in this conflict. Obviously with other people's blood. This is a quid pro quo arrangement of sacrificing people in order to participate in the spoils of war for commercial interests.

For he was representing the 'national interest' in his view, which is the same as saying the business interests who bankrolled him into political power. Some of these same business interests have made a killing in Iraq over the spoils of war through reconstruction, oil futures, and other commerical contracts. And some of them, like J P Morgan bank, are now paying Blair millions of pounds a year for doing nothing - as a reward for his abuse of power by sacrificing people for private commercial gain, greed and profits.

and this a good site for following it http://www.iraqinquirydigest.org/

[faceless]

Apparently the attacks on 11th Sep 2001 weren't just an attack on the USA, but an attack on Britain too.

Tony Blair says so, so it must be true.

[Colston]

[mickyv]

GG did warn us !

[Brown Sauce]

I listened to it for most of the day. Bliar was as always, a charmer.

A clever charmer.

I still don't "get it".

I really don't.

can anyone enlighten a poor sinner ?

[faceless]

[Brown Sauce]

Murder in Samarkand
David Hare's witty portrait of an unlikely hero, based on the memoir by Craig Murray. Craig is proud to be sent as Ambassador to Uzbekistan, eager to work hard and also eager for fun. The combination takes him on a dangerous course both professionally and personally, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

Craig Murray ...... David Tennant
Bax/Safayev ...... Jonathan Coy
Dill/French Ambassador ...... Richard Cordery
Foreign Secretary/Uzbek Judge ...... Simon Chandler
Prosecutor/Fazilov ...... Ian Gelder
Roy/Avazov ...... John Hollingworth
US Ambassador/Karimov ...... Paul Jesson
Dr Ableman/Uzbek Uncle ...... Bruce Myers
Angela ...... Flora Montgomery
Dilobar ...... Nadira Murray
Emily ...... Clara Neather
Nadira ...... Jemima Rooper
Serena/Kristina ...... Lucy Robinson
Ivo Sanderson/Quest ...... Malcolm Sinclair
Procurator ...... Sirojiddin Tolibov
Fiona ...... Lia Williams

Piano by Michael Webborn

Produced by Ann Scott

Directed by Clive Brill

A Greenpoint production for BBC Radio 4.

------------------

I managed to grab it ...

http://www.couchtripper.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?t=11223

[Brown Sauce]

here's a previously unpublished interview with the straw man ... from 2006 ..

[luke]

Defence chiefs gag damning Iraq invasion findings
Exclusive Study by Lt Gen Chris Brown is deemed too harsh and kept secret – but Chilcot inquiry makes clear it expects access

Highly critical comments by a senior army officer asked to conduct a study of the circumstances surrounding the invasion of Iraq have been suppressed on the orders of the country's top defence officials, the Guardian has learned.

The study, by Lt Gen Chris Brown, was commissioned in the light of mounting evidence of the failure to prepare properly for the invasion and its consequences.

Former senior military officers and defence officials have already described their anger and frustration about the failures in damning testimony to the Chilcot inquiry into the 2003 Iraq invasion. One of the inquiry's key objectives is to spell out the lessons that should be learned from what is widely regarded in Whitehall as an ill-conceived operation of dubious legality and, in foreign policy terms, a disaster comparable to the 1956 Suez crisis.

Against this background, the Ministry of Defence agreed to conduct its own study. However, Brown's criticisms were so harsh that they have been suppressed following the intervention of Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, chief of the defence staff, and other officials, who considered them too embarrassing even for internal consumption at the MoD.

Defence chiefs also appear to be worried that once Brown's study was passed to Sir John Chilcot to help him with his inquiry, they would lose control of the contents.

An MoD spokesman told the Guardian: "Lt Gen Chris Brown has led a small team in the production of an internal, classified MoD paper examining the Iraq campaign for the purpose of learning lessons for the future. As part of the routine staffing of such an important piece of work, a variety of military officials and civil servants have provided input during the paper's development."

In a comment making it clear it expects to be given the study, the Chilcot inquiry said: "The inquiry is aware of the MoD's internal study of lessons learned in Iraq. We do not comment on specific documents we hold but, as we said before, the inquiry is confident that it will be given access to all relevant government documents."

Whitehall officials made plain tonight that these statements disguise deep sensitivity about the revelation that there is an internal MoD dispute over the study.

Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and commentator on military matters, said: "Defence is far too important, a matter of life and death, to get too sensitive about potential embarrassment."

Brown was the last senior British military representative in Baghdad in 2009. He was subsequently appointed to the post of "Iraq study team leader". He was previously involved in planning Nato operations in Kosovo and was commander of British troops in Northern Ireland.

Lt Gen Frederick Viggers, his predecessor in Baghdad at the time of the 2003 invasion, told the Chilcot inquiry in December: "We've got huge experience in this country – we're not using it and we're putting amateurs into really, really important positions and people are getting killed as a result of some of these decisions."

He said the invasion of Iraq suffered from a lack of direction from the outset. Individuals at the highest levels of the government did not seem to have a clear idea of the operation's direction. He added: "I am not talking about the soldiers and commanders and civilians … who did a great job … it's the intellectual horsepower that drives these things [that] needs better co-ordination."

Major General Tim Cross, the only UK military official appointed to help plan the invasion aftermath, delivered a severe indictment of Whitehall's failures. "There were serious concerns about legality and over money," he told the Chilcot inquiry. He described the preparations for the invasion as "woefully thin".

The Chilcot inquiry has yet to say which documents Whitehall submitted to it. Departments insist decisions to disclose which documents are up to them. The inquiry is expected to resume public hearings at the end of June or early July.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/27/defence-chiefs-gag-iraq-report

[luke]

Ex-head of MI5 among new witnesses at Iraq inquiry
Lady Manningham-Buller, who expressed concern about plans to invade Iraq, is to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, it was announced today


Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller warned ministers that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat.

The head of MI5 at the time of the Iraq invasion, Lady Manningham-Buller, who expressed concern about plans to invade Iraq, is to give evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, it was announced today.

She is among new witnesses, including Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, and General Sir Mike Jackson, then head of the army, and John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, who will give evidence when the inquiry resumes public hearings this summer.

Manningham-Buller told the Guardian last year that she had warned ministers and officials that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat. Amid Anglo-US preparations to invade Iraq, she asked: "Why now?"

She added: "I said it as explicitly as I could. I said something like: 'The threat to us would increase because of Iraq.'"

Blix is expected to tell the inquiry that he should have been given more time to see whether Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction.

Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, meanwhile, has said the terms of the Chilcot inquiry into the invasion of Iraq should be changed to ensure the disclosure of as many official documents as possible.

In the most forthright comment from the government on the inquiry, Clegg said at the Hay festival last month: "The battle that needs to be fought is to make sure that in the final Chilcot report the presumption is towards real meaningful thorough disclosure."

The inquiry has often referred to documents obliquely in oral hearings but has not released them. It says the decisions to disclose or release official papers is a matter for the individual departments from where they originated.

Clegg was asked by Philippe Sands QC, an international lawyer and academic, if he agreed that there needed to be a change in the inquiry's protocols so there would be a presumption of disclosure in relation to documents. Clegg replied: "There needs to be a presumption of disclosure, absolutely."

He added: "This is not a game between politicians. What is really important is that Chilcot in its final report does what it was proposed to do all along, which is to make sure that all of us understand how that decision was reached so that we can learn lessons and make sure that we never, ever again have a government hell bent on war and able to bamboozle the British people."

The inquiry, in a separate development, has invited international lawyers to give their views on what was the legal basis, if any, of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/11/iraq-inquiry-chilcot-head-mi5

good to hear hans blix will be there

[luke]

Tony Blair 'very much exaggerated' Iran's role in Iraq
Former British ambassador to Tehran tells Chilcot inquiry that Blair made 'very bad decisions' about 2003 invasion

Tony Blair "very much exaggerated" Iran's role in supporting al-Qaida insurgents in their attacks on British and US forces in Iraq, Britain's ambassador in Tehran at the time of the invasion said today.

Sir Richard Dalton told the Chilcot inquiry that London and Washington misread the intentions of the Iranian regime, believing it would inevitably be hostile to their mission in Iraq when in fact Tehran wanted them to succeed in installing a stable government in Baghdad.

Dalton – Britain's ambassador to Iran from 2003 to 2006 – said Blair made "a series of very bad decisions" about the legality of the 2003 invasion. He described the description by President George Bush's of Iran as part of an "axis of evil" as a "monstrous error".

As international pressure continues to increase over Tehran's alleged efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, Dalton also warned that military action against Iran would be illegal unless there was evidence it posed an "imminent and real" threat to another country.

In evidence he gave to the Chilcot inquiry in January, Blair dwelt on the role of Iran and al-Qaida in destabilising Iraq and making the task of rebuilding the country more difficult after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

"What nobody foresaw was that Iran would actually end up supporting al-Qaida," Blair said. "What happened in the end was that they did because they both had a common interest in destabilising the country, and for Iran I think the reason they were interested in destabilising Iraq was because they worried about having a functioning majority Shia country with a democracy on their doorstep."

Dalton, however, told the inquiry today: "From what I saw of his evidence, I thought he very much exaggerated this factor." Iranian help to al-Qaida was limited to permitting fighters to pass across its territory from Pakistan and Afghanistan, he said. Tehran had no interest in promoting "anarchy" in Iraq, but wanted an inclusive Iraqi-run government capable of acting as a source of stability in the region.

He added: "I did believe at the time – particularly in 2003 – there was a misreading of Iran as inevitably hostile to the success of the coalition mission.

Iran wanted to foment enough disorder in Iraq to "make sure the coalition felt some pain and therefore didn't dig in for a long stay", but its interference, including support for Shia militia in Iraq, was not as critical to the US-led mission as the insurgency led by former Ba'athists.

"Their objective was never to destabilise Iraq to the point at which the whole enterprise would fail," Dalton said. "They feared anarchy and they feared that if the handover to Iraqi politicians was to fail completely, that would be the worst possible situation for Iran, because that would allow the Americans an excuse to stay very much longer."

Washington's refusal to listen to legitimate Iranian concerns that the west was "messing in their neighbourhood" led to a damaging downward spiral in relations with Tehran, Dalton told the inquiry.

"I also felt at the time of Mr Blair's testimony to you that he was seeking to cast a retrospectively benign light on a series of very bad decisions taken about the legality of an attack on Iraq by saying it was not only right to do it, but we might have to do it again," he added.

"I felt strongly then and I do now that a military adventure against Iran ... would be illegal in the absence of an imminent and real threat to any country from Iran. No such nuclear threat exists at present."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/07/dalton-chilcot-tony-blair

[Brown Sauce]

"Tony Blair "very much exaggerated" Iran's role in supporting al-Qaida insurgents in their attacks on British and US forces in Iraq, Britain's ambassador in Tehran at the time of the invasion said today. "

Well, there's news.

[luke]

[faceless]

WMD claims were lies says former envoy
By Nigel Morris,
12 July 2010
The Independent

Britain was taken to war in Iraq on the basis of “lies”, scaremongering and deliberate exaggeration, a former UK diplomat told the Iraq inquiry. Carne Ross claimed that Britain and the United States privately did not believe that Iraq's weapons programmes posed a “substantial threat” before launching the 2003 invasion.

Mr Ross, the former first secretary at the UK’s mission to the United Nations, told the Chilcot inquiry there was no “significant intelligence” to support claims that Saddam Hussein had amassed an arsenal of deadly weapons. He argued that Saddam could have been contained through sanctions – and condemned the failure by the US or UK to close the Iraqi dictator’s bank accounts in Jordan.

Mr Ross, who resigned before the war, pointed to a document circulated to Labour MPs in 2002 as evidence of a “process of deliberate public exaggeration”, including the claim that Saddam could develop nuclear weapons within five years. He added: “This paper also contains such scare-mongering claims as ‘less than a teaspoon of anthrax can kill over a million people’ without explaining the extremely difficult process for anthrax to be weaponised and delivered in an effective method.”

The former diplomat said the September 2002 dossier that made the case for war – including the notorious claim that Iraq could launch a missile strike within 45 minutes “misrepresented” the raw intelligence.

He said a “very uncertain and patchy picture” was converted into “positive claims of knowledge of threat”. Mr Ross concluded: “This process of exaggeration was gradual, and proceeded by accretion and editing from document to document, in a way that allowed those participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in blatant dishonesty. But this process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies.”

Mr Ross challenged the inquiry to publish all Government documents concerning the war. He alleged that the evidence given by some officials was contradicted by papers he had seen and added he had seen “very little” in classified documents that could not be made public.