The tactic should be obvious to all
To save difficulties Chilcot it being drip-leaked to the Daily Mail. Shocking stuff nevertheless!
Ministers with copy of Attorney General's report claiming Iraq war illegal told 'Burn it'http://www.dailym.ai/1M8a9DN _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Fresh revelations have emerged describing the frenetic efforts of the Blair government prior to the launching of the Iraq war to find a legal pretext for its participation in the US-led attack. Just two weeks before the invasion began, the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned Prime Minister Tony Blair that a war could violate international law.
On Wednesday, February 23, the Guardian published extracts from a soon to be published book, Lawless World: America and the making and breaking of global rules. The author is Phillipe Sands, a professor of international law at University College London.
Sands has used his connections in senior legal circles to provide a detailed account of the Labour government’s manoeuvres to secure legal advice giving official imprimatur to the war.
The war’s legality was an issue for the Blair government not due to any respect for international law, but because it feared future prosecution. The published extracts reveal that the prime minister was conscious that the invasion, as an act of preemptive aggression, had little or no basis in international law but was determined to proceed regardless.
Having decided on this course of action, Sands discloses that to protect itself against any potential consequences, the government “took steps to put together a legal team to prepare for possible international litigation.”
The government’s concerns were shared by Britain’s senior military leaders. “I spent a good deal of time recently in the Balkans making sure Milosevic was behind bars,” the Guardian reported General Sir Mike Jackson, head of the army, as saying. “I have no intention of ending up next to him in the Hague.”
The chief of defence staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, sought a clear assurance from the attorney general on March 10, 2003, as to the war’s legality. According to Sands, Boyce wanted to be sure that British soldiers would not be “put through the mill” at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Britain, unlike the US, is a signatory to the ICC.
Under the government’s ministerial code of conduct, the attorney general is to be consulted “in good time before the government is committed to critical decisions involving legal considerations.” Attorney General Goldsmith was first asked about the legality of an invasion of Iraq at a meeting with several government ministers in July 2002.
“They were reminded,” Sands’s book states, “that the prime minister had told President Bush that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, so long as a coalition had been created and UN weapons inspectors had been given a further opportunity to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”
Goldsmith informed the ministers that a war could not be justified on self-defence or humanitarian grounds, and that the goal of regime change would be unlawful. This opinion was again confirmed after the attorney general considered legal advice with the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence.
The Blair government subsequently decided to base its case for war on the issues of weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi government’s alleged noncompliance with UN resolutions.
In November 2002, the UN Security Council approved resolution 1441, which threatened Iraq with “serious consequences” if it did not fulfil various obligations. This measure did not, however, include a provision for invasion. The Foreign Office provided the government with what Sands describes as “crystal clear” advice that without an additional UN resolution, Britain could not legally use force against Iraq.
Blair deliberately avoided asking the attorney general for his formal opinion until March 7, 2003, 12 days before the war began. In a 13-page memo, Goldsmith warned the prime minister that the government’s case for invasion could be declared illegal if it ever came before a court of law. He nevertheless advised that while a second UN resolution would be safer, in his opinion it was legal to go to war on the basis of resolutions 1441, 678, and 687.
The Blair government has stonewalled repeated attempts by media outlets, members of parliament, and others to have this document released under Freedom of Information laws.
On March 13, Goldsmith met with Baroness Morgan, Blair’s director of political and government relations, and Lord Falconer, a Home Office minister. At this meeting, he dropped all of his previous warnings and approved the legality of the government’s line. This capitulation has been interpreted as a result of massive pressure placed on the attorney general by the government, as well as by the Bush administration’s legal team.
Four days later, Goldsmith’s opinion was presented to parliament, with no reference to any of his previous warnings and equivocations. According to the Guardian, transcripts of evidence from last year’s Butler inquiry suggest that the attorney general did not even write the public statement that was issued in his name. The newspaper alleged that it was penned by Morgan and Falconer, two of Blair’s closest associates. Goldsmith has denied this, saying that the transcripts were incorrect.
No opposition from within the government
Cabinet ministers received a summary of the attorney general’s advice the same day as it was publicly presented. The opinion was submitted on just two pages. As Sands describes it: “The ministerial code of conduct requires the full text of any advice to be made available in papers to the cabinet. None was provided. There was no discussion, and no minister raised any question as to the basis upon which the prime minister had decided that Iraq was in material breach of resolution 1441.”
The cabinet’s silence was indicative of the general closing of the ranks that occurred within the Labour Party once it was clear that Blair was committed to the US-led invasion. No serious opposition emerged to oppose the path to war, and no genuine efforts were made to investigate the potential illegality of an invasion.
Tactical criticisms of the war from within the political establishment have since intensified, with the occupation widely recognised as a debacle for American and British imperialism. In the light of the new revelations, a number of politicians from the three major parties have distanced themselves from their support for the invasion by claiming that the government misled them on the question of the war’s legality. According to the Guardian, “Some Labour and Conservative MPs have made it clear that the [March 17] statement helped to sway their vote in favour of military action.”
These self-serving protests are ludicrous. The war’s illegality was widely recognised by international law experts before the invasion. The Blair government’s case rested on the assertion that authority for war derived from UN resolutions 678, 687, and 1441. This ignored the fact that the Security Council deliberately refused to include a provision for military action in 1441, while the former two resolutions, passed in 1990 and 1991, dealt with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
More fundamentally, by March 2003, it was readily apparent that the questions of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and noncompliance with UN demands were merely pretexts for a pre-prepared US-led attack. Blair committed his government to this criminal war of choice to further Britain’s own imperialist interests.
Some of these issues were even recognised within the Foreign Office. On March 18, the office’s deputy legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmhurst, resigned in protest against the government’s claim that invasion was legal. “I cannot in conscience go along with advice within the office or to the public or parliament—which asserts the legitimacy of military action without such a resolution, particularly since an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression; nor can I agree with such action in circumstances which are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law,” she wrote.
The Nuremberg trials, convened after World War II to prosecute surviving Nazi leaders, established that the knowing commission of an aggressive war was the principal war crime. The demand must now be intensified that Tony Blair and his conspirators within the Labour Party take their place in the dock for their crimes of intent against the Iraqi people. _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2016 12:18 pm Post subject:
Chilcot: International Criminal Court says it will not investigate Tony Blair – but might prosecute soldiers
Court says decision to invade is outside its remit but will use report to look at evidence of soldiers' human rights abuses
Tony Blair will not be put on trial for war crimes but British soldiers could be, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have said.
Ahead of the long-awaited publication of the Chilcot report on Wednesday, lawyers at the court have ruled out prosecuting the former prime minister for war crimes because it says the decision to go to war is outside its remit.
Instead the ICC says lawyers will comb through the 2.6 million word document for evidence of war crimes committed by British troops during the war.
The decision has outraged the families of the 179 British soldiers who were killed during the eight year conflict. They blame Mr Blair for dragging the UK into the war under false pretences.
READ MORE
The Chilcot Inquiry is unlikely to change anyone's mind about the Iraq War
The Chilcot report: on Wednesday the myth of wicked Blair meets the reality of a huge account of a complex war
Chilcot Inquiry: MPs seek to impeach Tony Blair using ancient law
In a statement to the Sunday Telegraph, the ICC said it had begun a “preliminary examination” of claims of abuse by British soldiers from human rights lawyers on behalf of Iraqi victims.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC in The Hague said: “We will take note of the Chilcot report when released in the context of its ongoing preliminary examination work concerning Iraq/UK.
“A preliminary examination is not an investigation but a process aimed at determining whether reasonable basis exist to open an investigation.
“As already indicated by the Office in 2006, the 'decision by the UK to go to war in Iraq falls outside the Court’s jurisdiction’.”
Iraq-war.jpg
The US-led invasion began in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein (PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images)
The statement said the court was considering introducing a “crime of aggression” to deal with illegal invasions but stressed they could not apply it retroactively.
Roger Bacon, whose son Matt was killed by a roadside bomb in 2005, condemned the court's stance.
He told the Telegraph: “It is outrageous. It is double standards.
“These soldiers have gone out to do their best for us and here they are being hounded and yet the guy who took them there is not being looked at.
The most iconic images from the war in Iraq
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“That is completely wrong and disgusting.”
Last year, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Mr Blair could be made to stand trial over the war – saying he believed the invasion was illegal.
He said: “We went into a war that was catastrophic, that was illegal, that cost us a lot of money, that lost a lot of lives.
“The consequences are still played out with migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, refugees all over the region.”
tony-blair.jpg
Tony Blair refused to be drawn on the outcome of the Chilcot report when interviewed by Sky News (Sky News)
Speaking on Sky News' Murnaghan today, Mr Blair said: "I have said many times over these past years I will wait for the report then I will make my views know and I will express myself fully and properly.
"I'm not getting into the politics or the detail of it before we actually get it".
READ MORE
Everything we know about the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War so far
He has repeatedly denied lying in the run-up to the invasion in May 2003. In October 2015, he apologised for "mistakes" in the planning of the operation and said the intelligence they received was wrong but told CNN he found "it hard to apologise for removing Saddam".
He compared the invasion of Iraq with inaction in Syria saying the West had stood back while hundreds of thousands of people had been killed by President Bashar al-Assad and Isis.
An estimated 460,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the conflict after a US-led invasion toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
The super-secret Bilderberg gang wants a new war to generate immense profits and spend the world out of recession. And they just might get it.
Exclusive to American Free Press By James P. Tucker Jr. - 07Apr02
When Bilderberg luminaries seal themselves off behind armed guards at the Westfields hotel in Chantilly, Va., May 30-June 2, a major topic will be promoting a new war.
Sources within Bilderberg and its junior varsity, the Trilateral Commission, confirmed the war part of the agenda. The Trilaterals are meeting in Washington April 5-7. The two groups have an interlocking leadership and a common agenda.
They believe that public outrage over the 9-11 attacks and the new “war on terrorism” make a new war on Iraq, with the intent of destroying the regime of Sad dam Hussein and seizing Iraqi oil, politically palatable to Americans. If Americans back a new war, they reason, a reluctant Europe will be dragged along.
Bilderberg’s hand was first tipped March 24 when Jim Hoagland, a Bilderberg regular, called for and predicted all-out war on Iraq in a commentary in The Washington Post.
Every Post publisher—now it is Donald Graham—has at tended these secret meetings since the elite first called itself Bilderberg in 1954. Hoagland is also a Bilderberg regular.
President Bush has decided to “remove you from power,” Hoagland wrote, addressing his words to Hussein. “The Pentagon can now go ahead and draw up war plans very quietly for the right time, as it did in 1990.”
Just how casually the Bilderberg-Trilateral troopers spill the blood of young men is demonstrated by Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter and long-time Trilateralist.
Brzezinski, in a 1998 interview with the French news paper Le Nouvel Observateur, said that, contrary to the official version of events, CIA aid to the mujahedeen guerrillas began six months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was intended to provoke the invasion, he said. Brzezinski boasted of “drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.”
When asked about the wisdom of supporting Islamic fundamentalism, Brzezinski offered this chilling dismissal: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire?”
Henry Kissinger, a power in both Bilderberg and the Trilaterals, started the war drumbeat Jan. 13, also writing in the Bilderberg-controlled Post:
“There is no possibility of a negotiation between Washington and Baghdad and no basis for trusting Iraq’s promises to the international community . . .
“But if the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is to be seriously considered, three prerequisites must be met: (a) development of a military plan that is quick and decisive, (b) some prior agreement on what kind of structure is to replace Hussein and (c) the support or acquiescence of key countries needed for the military plan,” Kissinger wrote.
The Bush administration already appears bent on war, according to Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Strom Thurmond (R).
“Before the end of summer or fall we’ll be in a major engagement with Iraq,” Graham was quoted by The Columbia State. “We’re looking at going after Saddam Hussein—not to contain him but to replace him.”
Graham said he based his predictions on “intelligence briefings, contact with the Bush administration and his attendance at a recent international conference in Germany,” the State said.
Please forward to media, anti-war campaigning & legal contacts
Ladies and gentlemen,
As if we needed a reminder of what Bush and Blair immense crimes in beginning the Balkanisation of the Middle East, Sunday's Baghdad bomb killed 250 innocent people.
Iraq sees worst bombing since invasion with 250 deaths
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-36720720
So who was behnd it? The evidence was there in the public domain in 2002, a year before Bush and Blair invaded Iraq.
Bilderberg Plotting To Bushwhack Iraq
The super-secret Bilderberg gang wants a new war to generate immense profits and spend the world out of recession. And they just might get it.
Exclusive to American Free Press - By James P. Tucker Jr. - 7th April 2002
http://www.bilderberg.org/2002.htm#Bushwhack http://www.prisonplanet.com/bilderberg_plotting_to_bushwack_iraq.html
...public outrage over the 9-11 attacks and the new “war on terrorism” make a new war on Iraq, with the intent of destroying the regime of Saddam Hussein and seizing Iraqi oil, politically palatable to Americans. If Americans back a new war, they reason, a reluctant Europe will be dragged along.
Bilderberg’s hand was first tipped March 24 when Jim Hoagland, a Bilderberg regular, called for and predicted all-out war on Iraq in a commentary in The Washington Post. Every Post publisher—now it is Donald Graham—has at tended these secret meetings since the elite first called itself Bilderberg in 1954. Hoagland is also a Bilderberg regular....
I and others have repeated it often enough on global satellite TV interviews
Conspiracy of Silence: Who are the Bilderberg Group?
But somehow John Chilcot missed the fact that Henry Kissinger was advocating for the invasion of Iraq at the Chantilly Bilderberg conference in May 2002, almost a year before the Invasion
Like he forgot to interview first sea lord at the time Admiral Lord West
Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld were all at the Chantilly Bilderberg meeting in 2002, sitting down with Jean-Louis Gergorin, Executive Vice President for Strategic Coordination for Europe's biggest arms manufacturer EADS, former CIA director John Deutch and others.
http://www.bilderberg.org/2002.htm#07Jun02
Yet not a single person on that list of 120 was ever interviewed by John Chilcot. If Nuremberg were any measure of justice today quite clearly George Bush and Tony Blair should be in jail by now, but what about those who organised, financed and profited from the illegal invasion of Iraq which has left around a million innocent people dead?
So what was the strategy behind Bush and Blair's crime?
The 1982 Yinon plan was drawn up with a view to break Iraq, Syria and the wider region up into failed states and ensure Israeli regional superiority
“Greater Israel”: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East
The Infamous "Oded Yinon Plan". Introduction by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/greater-israel-the-zionist-plan-for-the-m iddle-east/5324815
As for the Vatican and the Nazis setting Bilderberg up in the first place, and thoughts about the next war crimes they are planning, do please see my series of interviews recorded in Dresden last month
Bilderberg exposed in Dresden 1. Rich Nuland: Freedom or tyrrany? World Government through a worldwide civil war.
Bilderberg exposed in Dresden 6. Anglo-American Tyranny, Manfred Petritsch: Alles Schall und Rauch
When Germans say Nazis weren't defeated but built aggressive post-war financial empire it's time to pay attention
'....Do not expect a full truth and a full accounting from the Chilcot panel of establishment trusties today. Remember who they are.
Sir John Chilcot
Member of the Butler Inquiry which whitewashed the fabrication of evidence of Iraqi WMD. The fact is that, beyond doubt, the FCO and SIS knew there were no Iraqi WMD. In the early 1990’s I had headed the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre, tasked with monitoring and preventing Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement. In 2002 I was on a course for newly appointed Ambassadors alongside Bill Patey, who was Head of the FCO Department dealing with Iraq. Bill is a fellow Dundee University graduate and is one of the witnesses before the Iraq Inquiry this morning. I suggested to him that the stories we were spreading about Iraqi WMD could not be true. He laughed and said “Of course not Craig, it’s *”. I had too many other conversations to mention over the next few months, with FCO colleagues who knew the WMD scare to be false.
Yet Chilcot was party to a Butler Inquiry conclusion that the Iraqi WMD scare was an “Honest mistake”. That a man involved on a notorious whitewash is assuring us that this will not be one, is bs.
Sir Roderick Lyne
A good friend and former jogging partner of Alastair Campbell.
Last time I actually spoke to him we were both Ambassadors and on a British frigate moored on the Neva in St Petersburg. Colleagues may have many words to describe Rod Lyne, some of them complimentary, but “open-minded” is not one of them.
If the Committee were to feel that the Iraq War was a war crime, then Rod Lyne would be accusing himself. As Ambassador to Moscow he was active in trying to mitigate Russian opposition to the War. He personally outlined to the Russian foreign minister the lies on Iraqi WMD. There was never the slightest private indication that Lyne had any misgivings about the war.
From Uzbekistan we always copied Moscow in on our reporting telegrams, for obvious reasons. Lyne responded to my telegrams protesting at the CIA’s use of intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers, by requesting not to be sent such telegrams.
Sir Lawrence Freedman
Lawrence Freedman is the most appalling choice of all. The patron saint of “Justified” wars of aggression, and exponent of “Wars of Choice” and “Humanitarian Intervention”. He is 100% parti pris.
Here is part of his evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution on 18 January 2006:
The basic idea here is that our armed forces prepared for what we might call wars of necessity, that the country was under an existential threat so if you did not respond to that threat then in some very basic way our vital interests, our way of life, would be threatened, and when you are looking at certain such situations, these are great national occasions. The difficulty we are now facing with wars of choice is that these are discretionary and the government is weighing a number of factors against each other. I mentioned Sierra Leone but Rwanda passed us by, which many people would think was an occasion when it would have been worth getting involved. There was Sudan and a lot of things have been said about Darfur but not much has happened…
…Iraq was a very unusual situation where it was not an ongoing conflict. If we had waited things would not have been that much different in two or three months’ time and so, instead of responding either to aggression by somebody else, as with the Falklands, or to developing humanitarian distress, as in the Balkans, we decided that security considerations for the future demanded immediate action.”
Sir Martin Gilbert (died in course of Inquiry)
Very right wing historian whose biography of Churchill focussed on Gilbert’s relish for war and was otherwise dull. (Roy Jenkins’ Churchill biography is infinitely better). Gilbert was not only rabidly pro-Iraq War, he actually saw Blair as Churchill.
Although it can easily be argued that George W Bush and Tony Blair face a far lesser challenge than Roosevelt and Churchill did – that the war on terror is not a third world war – they may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Their societies are too divided today to deliver a calm judgment, and many of their achievements may be in the future: when Iraq has a stable democracy, with al-Qaeda neutralised, and when Israel and the Palestinian Authority are independent democracies, living side by side in constructive economic cooperation.
Baroness Prashar
A governor of the FCO institution the Ditchley Foundation – of which the Director is Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK Ambassador to the UN who presented the lies about Iraqi WMD and was intimately involved in the lead in to war. So very much another cosy foreign policy insider.
So, in short, the committee – all hand-picked by Gordon Brown – could not have been better picked to ensure a whitewash.
Over 50% of the British population were against the Iraq War, including for example many scores of distinguished ex-Ambassadors, many military men and many academics. Yet Brown chose nobody on the Inquiry who had been against the Iraq War, while three out of five were active and open supporters of the war.
Do not expect to see this truth reflected in any of the mainstream media coverage.'
Pity Chilcot didn't interview Craig! _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
I was digging into this yesterday after hearing Cambo say the inquiry was, "Totally independent".
Yeah right, just like all the others. Confidentiality agreements make the whole thing a very expensive charade, but it brought them all out the woodwork and hopefully inspires more people to come forward.
Essentially the story has been rodeoed into making a big deal about 179 casualties on our side, 160-170,000 innocent civilians.
Doesn't quite equate to the Somme. So roughly, for every casualty we had, Iraq took a thousand. Going after infrastructure, is i'm afraid, "a crime against humanity".
Especially for countries in the dessert, and with the effects of drought, which goes by undocumented.
We live in a world where we're addicted to oil and the main industrial powerhouses drive that model.
Rather than send in "automated war machinery", whether hardware or software based, why not actually go in to these places and use that to drive renewable technology? Partly driven by a huge energy reserve?
Why not try and legitimize the Opium trade, taking it off the streets and forming an Iraqi National Health Service.
THese are the kind of "good" things we could have adapted into a plan, if it had been not done as some sort of sick firework show.
I'm no expert, but putting some design thinking principals into any plan like this would not be difficult. It could have brought Europe into the project, Russia too.
So an opportunity to unite people, instead becomes a driver for carnage which has a ripple effect for all the wrong reasons.
We live in a society ran by nepotism, driven by the global kakistocracy, which is just the way it has always been.
The one thing they cannot shy away from is the environmental issue, and it's about the only thing we can really batter them over the head with. It's the one thing that won't go away. Nothing else will work, and we are fast approaching a tipping point, with the population of the world, being enough for 1.5 planet Earth's and jumps up to a population for three planet Earth's by 2050.
Sorry for going off topic, but the whole energy crisis thing seems to have skipped by the entire issue, although, i'm sure you guys have covered this somewhere in this huge database you've built.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2016 10:37 pm Post subject:
The German secret service actually had more to do with providing justification for the US invasion of Iraq than it would now like to admit.
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder -- like his colleagues in Paris and Moscow ( and many others) k -- was a vehement opponent of the war. But of all people, his own agents provided Washington with the key bit of evidence which helped fuel the war hysteria: the story about the mobile biological weapons laboratories. It was information that helped justify a war that has cost more than 500,000 lives and plunged the Middle East into chaos. And this information came from just one man: Curveball.
He was, as Tenet said then, an "invaluable asset." Today, it is clear that "Curveball" is an imposter, a fabulist, a man who, in the US, is referred to as the "con man who caused the war." "Curveball," writes spy-thriller author Frederick Forsyth, is responsible for the "biggest fiasco in the history of secret intelligence."
Germany's BND is the agency responsible for this man. And the most important question surrounding "Curveball" still hasn't been answered
Question Time audience shouts in protest as Lord Falconer defends Tony Blair over the Iraq War
Lord Falconer was given a rough reception on the BBC's flagship debate show in Brighton a day after the release of the 6,000-page Chilcot Report. As he protested Mr Blair was telling the truth the audience scoffed, shouted and heckled.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/question-time-audience-shouts-pro test-8375397
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS AT 10 DOWNING STREET: A Crucial Behind the Scenes Episode in the Run-up to the Illegal War with Iraq
By Stephen Frost
Global Research, January 25, 2012
25 January 2012
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/behind-closed-doors-at-10-downing-street- a-crucial-behind-the-scenes-episode-in-the-run-up-to-the-illegal-war-w ith-iraq/28859
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS AT 10 DOWNING STREET: A Crucial Behind the Scenes Episode in the Run-up to the Illegal War with Iraq
The Iraq War … Lord Goldsmith “pinned to the wall” (Chilcot Inquiry) by Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan (all three unelected) at a meeting without minutes at 10 Downing Street
Lord Goldsmith, Lord Falconer, Baroness Morgan (all three unelected) and their crucial roles in waging war on Iraq.
1) Lord Boyce, the then Chief of the British Armed Forces, after seeking his own private legal advice, formally sought an assurance from Tony Blair on 13 March 2003 that the proposed imminent waging of war on Iraq would be legal.
2) Lord Goldsmith, the then Attorney General, was asked to attend a meeting (unminuted) at 10 Downing Street later that same day with Lord Falconer (the then Lord Chancellor and Minister for Constitutional Affairs, and best friend of and fixer-in-chief for Tony Blair) and Baroness Morgan. I believe Lord Falconer lied on BBC’s Question Time when he claimed that Lord Goldsmith had asked for that meeting … it was OBVIOUSLY the other way around.
3) Lord Goldsmith gave the impression in his evidence to the Butler Inquiry (see transcript) that he had NOT written the crucial 17 March 2003 legal advice which was presented in the form of a Parliamentary Answer. I believe Lord Goldsmith lied in the run-up to the 2005 General Election when, under intense pressure, he DENIED that he had NOT written it. It is thought that Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan wrote the infamous 17 March 2003 Parliamentary Answer (on a single sheet of A4) which represented the final legal advice (and crucially was the only legal advice shown to Cabinet and Lord Boyce), devoid of all caveats present in Goldsmith’s 7 March 2003 written legal advice, purporting to be a summary of the 7 March 2003 advice when it was no such thing, the 7 March 2003 advice itself representing Goldsmith’s FIRST change of mind.
Goldsmith tried to claim in evidence to Chilcot that his mind had been changed by the Americans when he visited the US … Bellingham said that they (the Americans) had had trouble with our (the UK’s) Attorney General but that they had got him there in the end (or similar). In fact, the second MUCH MORE IMPORTANT change of mind was forced on Goldsmith by Falconer and Morgan. Goldsmith should have resigned … had he done so Blair could not (and Boyce would not) have gone to war, and (whatever the US says now) that would have prevented the US from going to war, because Blair had been used by the US to legitimise the war in the eyes of the American public.
So, it turns out that Goldsmith (a lawyer, bound by professional standards) was arguably the most culpable of all in enabling the US, the UK, Australia, Denmark and Poland to wage aggressive war on a sovereign state, thereby committing “the supreme international war crime” according to the Geneva Conventions (as well as being clearly illegal according to the United Nations Charter). And, not only was that war crime committed, there was also a conspiracy to concoct the legal advice (in addition to a conspiracy to concoct the Intelligence) to enable the crime to be committed, and of course after the crime had been committed there were numerous conspiracies to cover up the crime and all the resulting crimes.
To clarify, the Intelligence was concocted to create the impression that Iraq was “a clear and immediate threat to the United Kingdom” but many including Lord Boyce were highly sceptical, so it was necessary at a very late stage (in panic) to lean on Lord Goldsmith (to pin him to the wall) to allow the legal advice to be concocted (and remember Goldsmith was not an international law expert, unlike the lawyers at the Foreign Office, Wood, Wilmshurst et al., who all took the view that the war would be illegal).
Many say now that international law is not clear. That argument matters not one jot. The inescapable fact is that had Goldsmith resigned on 13 March 2003, as he should have done as a member of the legal profession if for no other reason, there would have been no war on Iraq.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/behind-closed-doors-at-10-downing-street- a-crucial-behind-the-scenes-episode-in-the-run-up-to-the-illegal-war-w ith-iraq/28859?print=1
Lord Goldsmith, Lord Falconer, Baroness Morgan (all three unelected) and their crucial roles in waging war on Iraq.
1) Lord Boyce, the then Chief of the British Armed Forces, after seeking his own private legal advice, formally sought an assurance from Tony Blair on 13 March 2003 that the proposed imminent waging of war on Iraq would be legal.
2) Lord Goldsmith, the then Attorney General, was asked to attend a meeting (unminuted) at 10 Downing Street later that same day with Lord Falconer (the then Lord Chancellor and Minister for Constitutional Affairs, and best friend of and fixer-in-chief for Tony Blair) and Baroness Morgan. I believe Lord Falconer lied on BBC’s Question Time when he claimed that Lord Goldsmith had asked for that meeting … it was OBVIOUSLY the other way around.
3) Lord Goldsmith gave the impression in his evidence to the Butler Inquiry (see transcript) that he had NOT written the crucial 17 March 2003 legal advice which was presented in the form of a Parliamentary Answer. I believe Lord Goldsmith lied in the run-up to the 2005 General Election when, under intense pressure, he DENIED that he had NOT written it. It is thought that Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan wrote the infamous 17 March 2003 Parliamentary Answer (on a single sheet of A4) which represented the final legal advice (and crucially was the only legal advice shown to Cabinet and Lord Boyce), devoid of all caveats present in Goldsmith’s 7 March 2003 written legal advice, purporting to be a summary of the 7 March 2003 advice when it was no such thing, the 7 March 2003 advice itself representing Goldsmith’s FIRST change of mind.
Goldsmith tried to claim in evidence to Chilcot that his mind had been changed by the Americans when he visited the US … Bellingham said that they (the Americans) had had trouble with our (the UK’s) Attorney General but that they had got him there in the end (or similar). In fact, the second MUCH MORE IMPORTANT change of mind was forced on Goldsmith by Falconer and Morgan. Goldsmith should have resigned … had he done so Blair could not (and Boyce would not) have gone to war, and (whatever the US says now) that would have prevented the US from going to war, because Blair had been used by the US to legitimise the war in the eyes of the American public.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/behind-closed-doors-at-10-downing-street- a-crucial-behind-the-scenes-episode-in-the-run-up-to-the-illegal-war-w ith-iraq/28859
On March 13, Goldsmith met with Baroness Morgan, Blair’s director of political and government relations, and Lord Falconer, a Home Office minister. At this meeting, he dropped all of his previous warnings and approved the legality of the government’s line.
Four days later, Goldsmith’s opinion was presented to parliament, with no reference to any of his previous warnings and equivocations. According to the Guardian, transcripts of evidence from last year’s Butler inquiry suggest that the attorney general did not even write the public statement that was issued in his name. The newspaper alleged that it was penned by Morgan and Falconer, two of Blair’s closest associates. Goldsmith has denied this, saying that the transcripts were incorrect.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/03/iraq-m01.html
In them, the attorney general suggests his parliamentary statement giving legal backing to Britain's participation in the invasion was "set out" by Charles Falconer, then Home Office minister, and Baroness Morgan, the prime minister's director of political-government relations.
Lord Goldsmith told Lord Butler that he had discussed his new - changed - view about the legality of military action with Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan at a meeting in Downing Street on March 13 2003.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/feb/24/iraq.iraq
Goldsmith also insisted he had not come under political pressure to issue the statement, saying he did not "recall" Tony Blair raising the subject at a key meeting in Downing Street on 11 March.
Reports that he had been "pinned" to the wall by Labour peer Lord Falconer, a close ally of Tony Blair, during a meeting on the issue was "complete and utter nonsense".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8481759.stm
While we welcome the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry's report, there was never any question that Tony Blair was a key accomplice in the launching of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Holding Blair accountable will advance the principle of accountability as well for the U.S. architects of the Iraq War.
We need these steps toward truth and reconciliation if the United States and NATO nations are ever to shake the war habit.
Please sign this:
'Tony Blair should be impeached and prosecuted right now for his role in launching war on Iraq.' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
'In another example of outrageous British Establishment mendacity, the inexpert, Zionist-subverted, UK Iraq Inquiry, aka the Chilcot Inquiry, criticized intelligence failures re non-existent Iraqi WMD but whitewashed the US-, UK- and Australia-complicit, 1990-2011 Iraqi Genocide and Iraqi Holocaust in which 4.6 million Iraqis died from violence (1.7 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.9 million) by (a) suggesting that about 150,000 Iraqis may have died due to the 2003-2011 invasion and occupation, (b) ignoring Coalition war crimes including the illegality of the invasion per se, (c) ignoring the real reasons for the invasion (oil, US hegemony and Apartheid Israel) , and (d) implicitly approving such war criminal invasions if done better.....' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2016 7:20 pm Post subject:
WOW
SAS chief in Iraq angry at UK running ‘Latin American-style death squads’
Published time: 12 Jul, 2016 10:54
Details have emerged of how US and UK Special Forces clashed and drifted apart over the conduct of the Iraq occupation, with one British officer complaining about the use of tactics more akin to “Latin American-style” death squads than a modern military.
The details of the Balad special forces base and its operations, which came to shape the war, are not recounted in last week’s long-awaited report by Sir John Chilcot.
https://www.rt.com/uk/350768-sas-death-squad-chilcot/
However, kill or capture operations in and around Baghdad, launched from the Balad base 50 miles (80km) north of the city, were a key if little known chapter in Britain’s shadow war, the Independent reports.
Despite killing or taking as prisoner up to 3,500 insurgents, the mission against the Sunni insurgency caused deep rifts to the point where a senior commander, himself ex-SAS, demanded to know why the UK Special Forces were “helping to run Latin American-style death squads?”
The mission, under now-famed US General Stanley McChrystal, involved a shift from searching for apparently non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to man-hunting.
Antagonism over the tactics led to UK troops being banned from some operations and a UK SAS commander lodging a complaint with US authorities for talking about British involvement in operations. Another SAS colonel was also ostracized from his regiment after serving under McCrystal.
Chilcot does sketch out some of the details of the growing rift, though his report appears to leave out direct references to Special Forces operations.
“US and UK strategies had, in effect, been on different courses since the UK decision to focus its attention on MND (SE) [Multi-National Division South East, the British run zone] in 2003.
As result of this decision, the UK had acquired distinctly different priorities from the US,” the 2.6-million-word report argues.
It says the UK was then only “marginally involved in the central tasks of stabilizing the Iraqi government in Baghdad and managing sectarian divisions, while it had come to see its main task in Basra as one of keeping the situation calm while building the case for withdrawal.”
From that point on, it appears, the US became increasingly concerned that a wavering UK was chiefly focused on getting out of the unpopular war in the best order it could and as soon as possible.
In 2006, a former SAS soldier blew the whistle on some of the tactics used in and around Baghdad. Ben Griffin was later gagged by the UK courts for talking about his experiences, but before he was silenced told the Telegraph, “The Americans had this catch-all approach to lifting suspects. The tactics were draconian and completely ineffective.”
“The Americans were doing things like chucking farmers into Abu Ghraib [the notorious prison in Baghdad where US troops abused and tortured Iraqi detainees] or handing them over to the Iraqi authorities, knowing full well they were going to be tortured,” he said at the time.
It may be of note that the SAS commander’s reference to “Latin American-style deaths squads” appears to ignore the fact that at time of the Iraq war, in July 2003, the UK was itself stepping up training of Colombian paramilitary forces.
Commenting on the revelations at the time, human rights NGO Amnesty International warned “the Colombian government has not implemented the UN human rights recommendations and military assistance only gives a green light to the army to carry on as before.” _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
This is a story about liars and criminals who are protected by an elite propaganda machine, a highly educated yet moronic atheist class, a heavily armed and corrupt justice and military system, and their incompetent and naive institutional lapdogs.
This is a story about the man who exposed them for what they really are. It is a story about their attempts to silence him using every method available. But they failed...
Clash of Loyalties: Saddam Hussein's answer to Lawrence of Arabia
Soon after he took power, the Iraqi dictator decided to make an epic movie about the birth of the nation. What happened to it?
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Clash of Loyalties: Saddam Hussein's answer to Lawrence of Arabia
By Vincent Graff
Sunday 24 July 2016 at 1:30PM
You’re a Middle Eastern dictator looking to burnish your image. You want to tell the world that your country walks tall and that your people are noble, brave and strong. So what do you do?
Well, what Saddam Hussein did just months after becoming President of Iraq in 1979, was to commission a multimillion-dollar, Hollywood-style movie portraying the birth of modern-day Iraq in 1932 and recounting how the Iraqi people escaped the clutches of evil British colonial rule.
Mildly surprising perhaps, but the startling part of the story was that he signed up Oliver Reed to be the star of his propaganda film.
The story behind Clash of Loyalties, as the movie was called, or Al-mas’ala Al-Kubra as it’s sometimes referred to, is a bizarre tale, from start to finish. The film – “Saddam’s version of Lawrence of Arabia”, according to one of the actors – also featured James Bolam, who was at the time appearing in the BBC’s When the Boat Comes In, and John Barron, best known as the brilliant CJ in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. And it was put together by a producer based in Surrey.
Having the world’s most famous drunkard as your lead actor is bound to bring complications, and it certainly did, as we shall see, but the shoot, in Baghdad and the Iraqi desert, faced a much more fundamental problem than that.
A few months after the paperwork was signed, but before a single scene could be filmed, Saddam invaded neighbouring Iran, sparking a bloody war that was to rage for eight years.
But the Iraqi dictator – then, of course, an ally of the UK – wasn’t going to let a mere war prevent his movie from being made. He’d invested millions in the project – it had roughly the same budget as Return of the Jedi, which was also being made around that time – and was determined to see it through. As a result, when filming began in 1981, the cast and crew had to work their way around a real war that was raging a few miles away. Fighter jets would fly overhead on their way to the front, tanks would rumble past on the streets.
Producer Lateif Jorephani recalls: “I had 140 people out in Iraq during a war. These people were accustomed to making movies in Shepperton, Pinewood, Hollywood – not being in the middle of nowhere while real missiles and bombs were going off all over the place.”
Stephan Chase, who played an army captain in the movie, says that until he flew out, he’d not paid any attention to the fact that Iraq was at war.
But he realised things were not normal while on board the plane flying him, Reed and other cast members out to Iraq. “There’d been lots of drink, some arm wrestling and some press-ups on the plane but, apart from that, nothing untoward. Until, that is, we looked out of the window and saw that a fighter plane was escorting our jumbo,” he says. “I thought, ‘They’d only put a fighter jet up there if they were seriously worried that we might get shot down’. We landed in the middle of the night, in total darkness. It was scary.”
On set, the war brought other complications. Some comical, some far less so. Scenes had to be reshot after local actors suddenly went missing. “We’d start a sequence with an Iraqi actor, and come the second or third day, he suddenly didn’t appear. He’d been called up [into the army],” recalls crew member Roger MacDonald. “Then three or four weeks later we’d get a message back saying the poor actor had been killed.”
Meanwhile, war or no war, there was Oliver Reed to deal with. He’d flown in with his 17-year-old girlfriend – later to become his second wife – and a raging thirst. Stephan Chase recalls how Ollie would often be “pickled by the hotel pool in the morning, dreaming up things for us all to do”. This might involve being dangled by his ankles from a hotel balcony, or simply starting a fight.
Jorephani remembers: “One day Ollie was in the restaurant, got hold of an empty wine bottle and urinated in it. Then he called the waiter over, and asked him to send the bottle over to the next table, ‘with my compliments’.” The result? An overturned table, fists thrown – and a demand, which was later rescinded, from the Iraqi government that Reed be fired. “Ollie was a weapon of mass destruction,” says one of his colleagues.
But Reed wasn’t the only actor in trouble. Fellow cast member Marc Sinden, son of actor Donald, was in his early 20s when he got a role on the film.
Before he flew out to Iraq, he says he was approached by a UK government official and told that the security services would be “very interested in seeing my holiday snaps”.
“I said, ‘Of course. What sort of holiday snaps are you interested in?’ They said, ‘Radio communications towers, palaces...’”
Sadly, Sinden’s snaps led to a sharp tap on the shoulder from an Iraqi secret policeman – and three days spent in a grim cell. His release only came when he told his captors how he and Ollie Reed had been dining with the Iraqi president just ten days earlier.
So much for the off-screen drama. But what happened to the finished movie? It was shown at several film festivals but never secured a distribution deal. It’s quite possible that no more than a few hundred people have ever seen it. Then, when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, any hopes for it were killed stone dead. Today, one of the only known copies of the movie is in Jorephani’s garage in Surrey.
So, is it any good? “It could have been,” says Jorephani. “Ollie was absolutely brilliant. And James Bolam was great. But the director wasn’t experienced in shooting movies and unfortunately, it could have been a great deal better.”
And all these years on, how does Jorephani reflect on the experience of making a movie for Saddam Hussein? “Today, more than 30 years later, one can sit back and say it was a great deal of fun,” he says. “But, believe me, it wasn’t.”
Saddam Goes to Hollywood: Sunday 9pm C4
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-07-24/clash-of-loyalties-saddam-hu sseins-answer-to-lawrence-of-arabia _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2016 9:49 am Post subject:
Wow!!! 'The Killings of Tony Blair' https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/ A blog to watch, and a film to see!!! _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2016 12:52 am Post subject:
Here's a part of the panel discussion - not excellent quality, but better then nothing:
THE KILLING$ OF TONY BLAIR - PANEL DISCUSSION:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuDbjwt-AC8
Someone videod it and put it up on Craig Murray's blob. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
'.........It became absolutely clear to me from maybe the spring of 2002 that we were going to invade Iraq.
Motivation is something we all wondered about at the time. It seemed to me to be primarily a matter of Tony Blair’s huge desire for Britain to be seen as a great power and important in the world, and the way to do that was to be indispensably connected to the United States. I don’t think it was much more detailed than that.
So just imperial prestige as an end in itself? Just to appear important?
Yes, I think so. Because if the United Kingdom was an extremely important international player, that made Tony Blair also an extremely important international player. I think it was a sort of dying imperial reflex or something.
Obviously, yes, there were hard-nosed interests in oil and gas and so on, and my guess is that if Iraq didn’t have these resources then this whole thing would never have happened.
But I don’t think that was the driving motivation. It was driven more by this kind of messianic power hunger from Number 10 [the prime minister].
Did any of the conclusions of Chilcot surprise you, and do you think that, despite its obvious limitations, we can use any of that evidence to push things further, ultimately to see Blair charged with war crimes or something like that?
Well, I don’t think there’s enough whitewash in the world to completely cover up what happened. So I’m not surprised that the main outlines of the report are broadly correct.
But I was surprised at how firm Chilcot’s opening statement was. There was much less fudge than I expected.
As to legality and questions of prosecuting Blair and others involved, he said that he didn’t have the power to determine whether it was illegal or not, but that the procedures on the legal advice were wrong. This came as close as he possibly could to saying it was illegal.
So he left the question open, with a strong hint that it was illegal. In this regard, I thought it was much stronger than I expected, given the thoroughly establishment nature of the committee.
On the other hand, I think it was unfortunate that he fudged the question of how the intelligence was put together. He managed to say that it wasn’t the JIC’s fault, because they’d given an honest assessment that had been presented wrongly by Number 10.
But at the same time, he managed to say that the compilation of the dossier itself that presented the intelligence wrongly was also done with good intentions! So he completely avoided the lie that was at the center of this, which is absolutely what I expected.
But within that boundary, the criticisms were very fierce, including the criticisms of postwar planning. I wasn’t surprised by that at all, because that actually fits in with the message that what we have to do is spend more on our armed forces.
But he was harder on Tony Blair and on the decision to go to war, and on the fact the Blair had irrevocably committed to war long before he’d claimed to the public, and of the damage he did to the United Nations through how he went about getting resolutions — all that was much firmer than I thought it might be.
Can we speculate as to why Chilcot was firmer than we thought he might be? Is this, as will be claimed, an example of the British state and the procedures of accountability showing that they are actually functional, or do you think that his firmness was more due to the huge public outrage and mobilization around the war?
Or perhaps even more than that, the divisions within the British state itself, with some parts of the military and intelligence community, for example, being very angry about Iraq?
The Chilcot inquiry made very plain that there were major parts of the British establishment that were not at all happy about what had happened. The main anger and opposition came from the Army, the Defense Intelligence Service, Mi5, and the Foreign Office legal department — which contains some of the world’s most respected public international lawyers, who had unanimously advised that the war would be illegal.
So there are important sectors of the British establishment that were outraged by what had happened, and the power of those parts of the establishment comes through in the report.
But of course, by his avoidance of the problems of the actual preparation or fabrication of the intelligence and the lies told to Parliament, he’s let the security services off the hook. He hasn’t actually criticized Mi6. And most importantly, he’s avoided criticizing anyone who is still a senior government official or telling the truth about the knowing distortion of intelligence.
A lot of the officials who were involved in that are still there. So in a sense, he has focused the resentment on people who are now out of office. That’s an important part of the analysis that seems largely to have been missed.........' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
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