| Author | Message | | MADMAX | |  | | gchq | | Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 4:41 pm Post subject: Inquiry is a stitch-up that kicks truth into the long grass |
| Inquiry is a stitch-up that kicks truth into the long grass
Ken Smith
The Herald
17 Jun 2009
Before a decade's history is interred and erased, I make a humble proposal. Westminster's opposition parties can do with it as they please. The Prime Minister offers an inquiry into the occupation of Iraq that will, he says, be "fully independent of government". A suggestion, then.
Can someone ask Gordon Brown if he will - or why he will not - propose himself as a witness to the investigations to be overseen by Sir John Chilcot? Can the Prime Minister further say that he will give testimony publicly and on the record? If not, why not?
The risk to national security would be slight, at worst. The benefit in terms of what Mr Brown calls reform and transparency would be great. There is a lot that this Prime Minister could tell us.
Could I also refer the current head of government to what my lawyer friends, and his, know as prima facie evidence? The Latin is easy. It means: at first sight; sufficient to bring a charge; grounds for suspicion, et cetera.
It is no doubt lawyerly to avoid the question of securing Iraq testimony under oath - those gimmicks cost money - but dissembling before a parliamentary inquiry still carries penalties.
Mr Brown's briefs might wish to examine the corpus of precedent, then tell me this: why isn't Tony Blair in custody? On sus, if you like.
If none of that works, if employing a figure such as Sir John (disqualified utterly by his role in the Butler "review") Chilcot does not seem - what's the phrase? - a bit obvious, have another go. Can I give evidence?
That's not a joke. I'm no expert. I am no better informed than the hundreds of thousands of others who dispiritedly marched: that's the point. But I can dig out a Hansard record, if needs be, especially the one embedding Mr Blair's explanations for war to the House. I can then trace the way in which all those stories changed, week by week.
I can also find all the copy I filed arguing that there could be no WMD; that the project for a new American imperator had decreed war; that Hans Blix was being hustled; and that Mr Blair was lying. As I said: no expert. But bits of paper have emerged subsequently. The "prima facie" bit looks more than circumstantial. So if Sir John has need of my number, I'm available.
Or call Rose Gentle, mother of 19-year-old Gordon, dead in Basra in 2004, instead. Why not? Because this is a "Franks-style inquiry"? The Prime Minister is a little older than I. Perhaps he hopes that listeners do not know what he knows - and I know - perfectly well. Franks was a whitewash, designed as such. Why did we sink the Belgrano? Historians ponder.
So disreputable has New Labour become, you wind up giving half of a cheer for David Cameron. "Establishment stitch-up"? When an Old Etonian has to say it, attention is required. An inquiry held in private that is designed to report after Mr Brown leaves office - we call that a giveaway - without judicial standing, without an obligation imposed on the American friends, without a balance of expertise, and without a clue?
Here's one clue: when did Mr Blair offer British blood and treasure, without qualification, to the Bush White House? When he was still telling this country's people that the United Nations must be petitioned for a "fresh resolution"? When he was asking his attorney-general to think again about international law? Or two years, as recent documents suggest, before any of that?
The laws of nations: we've done this before. Crudely put, it is illegal to attack someone else's country unless you are already under attack, unless you believe such an attack is imminent or unless you have grounds - verifiable, capable of being documented, something that would stand up in court - to believe an attack is being planned. It is not good enough to say that our former friend Saddam has turned out to be a bad lot. Breach those simple rules of engagement and you are a war criminal.
You can see, therefore, why Mr Brown would rather have none of this on his plate. You can also understand why some of his senior ministers do not wish to be reminded of their failures to enforce authority, cabinet or moral. You can then guess, easily enough, why Mr Brown might prefer not to chat with Sir John and the grandees.
But when the same Prime Minister is lecturing Iran's ruling clique on the virtues of truth and democracy; when America's President Barack Obama is dumping his Guantanamo embarrassments on Bermuda or Italy; when we are losing young people in Afghanistan by the week and the day; there comes a mad idea: how about the facts? Just for once?
What did Mr Blair know, and when did he know it? What - subsequently or simultaneously - did Mr Brown know? Old Harold Wilson liked to associate royal commissions and public inquiries with the long grass beloved of politicians. But there is blood and there are bodies in this dry grass. And Harold at least kept us out of Vietnam.
Things do not end because a Prime Minister finds his nibbled pencil and "draws a line". Memories fade, true enough, and the world is never short of fresh horrors. Meanwhile, I was never much of a fan of the movement to impeach Mr Blair: I prefer feasible.
So, imagine my amazement. On the day after Mr Brown announces his thoroughly forensic inquiry into Iraq, an ambassador - who must know all there is to know about the James Bond stuff - is appointed as the new head of MI6.
Sir John Sawers has many virtues, no doubt, but in November he will replace Sir John Scarlett, a gentleman who was chair of the Join Intelligence Committee just when ideas for a certain war were being formulated. Scarlett thereafter supported every one of Mr Blair's versions of events. This may be an excellent time to retire.
The insinuation could be disputed, of course. But only in public. And on the record. Just for once.
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | gchq | | Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 2:06 pm Post subject: No room for closure |
| No room for closure
Peter Wilby
The New Statesman
18 Jun 2009
. . . on the Iraq inquiry, public spending cuts and Mandy’s manoeuvres
I do not care whether the Iraq inquiry is held in public or private. It is a waste of time and money. Like, I would guess, most NS readers, I think Tony Blair and his aides decided to follow US instructions, distorted the intelligence, and prepared inadequately for the consequences of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Blair should have been forced from office, and possibly indicted as a war criminal, once it became clear there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The five Establishment figures appointed to hold the inquiry cannot turn back the clock and are unlikely to recommend that our former prime minister be hauled before the beak in The Hague. Indeed, it is hard to say what they can do. Lord Butler has already been over the intelligence (anybody who reads his report, rather than accepting Labour’s post-publication spin, will see he did a fairly good job) and, given that the inquiry members, apart from a war studies academic, lack significant military knowledge, they do not seem equipped to pinpoint military failings, as the Esher committee did after the Boer War. Many people want to hear a stirring denunciation of what were essentially political shortcomings, thus providing what is now called “closure”. But Blair would still swan around the world, collecting fat lecturing and “consultancy” fees while pretending to be a peacemaker.
No inquiry was held into the Second World War. Post-1945 governments just got on with building a welfare state. More pertinently perhaps, there was no inquiry into Suez. Britain just accepted its imperial days were over. Now our politicians should accept that we shouldn’t be accomplices to US imperial projects.
Peter Wilby was editor of the Independent on Sunday from 1995 to 1996 and of the New Statesman from 1998 to 2005. He writes a weekly column for the NS.
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | gchq | | Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:11 pm Post subject: Tony Blair knew of secret policy on terror interrogations |
| Tony Blair knew of secret policy on terror interrogations
The Guardian
18 Jun 2009
Letter reveals former PM was aware of guidance to UK agents
Tony Blair: it remains unclear what he knew of the policy's consequences.
Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty
Tony Blair was aware of the existence of a secret interrogation policy which effectively led to British citizens, and others, being tortured during counter-terrorism investigations, the Guardian can reveal.
The policy, devised in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, offered guidance to MI5 and MI6 officers questioning detainees in Afghanistan who they knew were being mistreated by the US military.
British intelligence officers were given written instructions that they could not "be seen to condone" torture and that they must not "engage in any activity yourself that involves inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners".
But they were also told they were not under any obligation to intervene to prevent detainees from being mistreated.
"Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this," the policy said.
The policy almost certainly breaches international human rights law, according to Philippe Sands QC, one of the world's leading experts in the field, because it takes no account of Britain's obligations to avoid complicity in torture under the UN convention against torture. Despite this, the secret policy went on to underpin British intelligence's relationships with a number of foreign intelligence agencies which had become the UK's allies in the "war against terror".
The policy was set out in written instructions sent to MI5 and MI6 officers in January 2002, which told them they might consider complaining to US officials about the mistreatment of detainees "if circumstances allow".
Blair indicated his awareness of the existence of the policy in the middle of 2004, a few weeks after publication of photographs depicting the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
It was around this time, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, told MPs on Tuesday, that the policy was changed, becoming more "comprehensive and formal".
In a letter to the intelligence and security committee (ISC), the group of MPs and peers that provides political oversight of the UK's security and intelligence services, on May 24 2004, Blair said that rather than considering making a complaint, "UK intelligence personnel interviewing or witnessing the interviews of detainees are instructed to report if they believe detainees are being treated in an inhumane or degrading way".
The Guardian has learned from a reliable source that MI5 officers are now instructed that if a detainee tells them that he or she is being tortured they should never return to question that person.
It remains unclear what Blair knew of the policy's consequences. The Guardian has repeatedly asked him what role he played in approving the policy, whether he was aware that it had led to people being tortured, and whether he made any attempt to change it.
His spokesman said: "It is completely untrue that Mr Blair has ever authorised the use of torture. He is opposed to it in all circumstances. Neither has he ever been complicit in the use of torture.
"For the record, also, Mr Blair believes that our security services do a superb job of protecting our country in difficult circumstances and that it is not surprising following the attacks of September 11 2001 that there was a heightened sense of the dangers the country faced from terrorism. None of this amounts to condoning the use of torture."
When the Guardian pointed out to Blair that it had not suggested he had authorised the use of torture, but had asked whether he had played any role in the approval of a policy that led to people being tortured, his spokesman replied: "Tony Blair does not condone torture, has never authorised it nor colluded in it at any time." But there is growing evidence of MI5's collusion in the torture of British terrorism suspects in Pakistan, where officers of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), an agency whose routine use of torture has been widely documented, were asked by MI5 to detain British citizens and put questions to them prior to an interrogation by MI5 officers.
Two high court judges say they have seen "powerful evidence" of the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who returned from Guantánamo Bay in February, before he was questioned by an MI5 officer in May 2002.
In a separate case, a court has heard that MI5 and Greater Manchester police drew up a list of questions to be put to another man, Rangzieb Ahmed, who was detained by the ISI in August 2006, despite having reason to believe that he was in danger of being tortured.
By the time Ahmed was deported to the UK after a lengthy period of unlawful detention three of his fingernails were missing.
Several other men have come forward to say they were questioned by British intelligence officers after suffering brutal torture at the hands of Pakistani agents, and there have been similar allegations of British collusion in the torture of British citizens in Egypt, Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates.
While a small number of the victims were subsequently tried and convicted in the UK, most were released without charge.
International concern about Britain's involvement in torture has been mounting for some time. In February Martin Scheinin, a UN special rapporteur on human rights, reported that British intelligence personnel had "interviewed detainees who were held incommunicado by the Pakistani ISI in so-called safe houses, where they were being tortured".
Scheinin added that this "can be reasonably understood as implicitly condoning torture."
In March, after the Guardian disclosed the existence of the interrogation policy, and reported on the growing number of allegations of British collusion in torture, Gordon Brown announced that the policy was to be rewritten by the ISC.
In what was seen at Westminster as an acknowledgement that the secret policy had been open to abuse, Brown also pledged that the rewritten policy would be made public and that a former appeal court judge would monitor the intelligence agencies' compliance with it, and report to the prime minister each year.
On Tuesday Miliband said the existing policy, as amended in 2004, would not be published.
But the discovery that Blair was aware of the secret interrogation policy appears certain to fuel the growing demand for an independent inquiry into aspects of the UK's role in torture and rendition.
So far, those who have called for such an inquiry include the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders David Cameron and Nick Clegg; Ken Macdonald, a former director of public prosecutions; Lord Carlile of Berriew, the government's independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation; Lord Howe, who was foreign secretary between 1983 and 1989 in the Thatcher government; and Lord Guthrie, a former chief of defence staff
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | gchq | | Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:51 pm Post subject: Britain: For a war crimes trial over Iraq invasion |
| Britain: For a war crimes trial over Iraq invasion
WSWS
20 Jun 2009
If Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s announcement of a new inquiry into the Iraq war was intended to bury questions over the contentious invasion, it has backfired.
Brown announced the fresh investigation earlier this week. It will be the fifth inquiry touching on the Iraq war held since 2003. These include the Hutton inquiry into the circumstances behind the apparent suicide of leading weapons inspector David Kelly and the Butler inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the invasion.
All of these earlier inquiries dealt only with specific questions connected to the war, not with the war itself. And all ended in a whitewash.
The claim is that this inquiry will be different. It will cover the period from 2001 to the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq earlier this year. But Brown stressed that its purpose “will be to identify lessons learned. The committee will not set out to apportion blame or consider issues of civil or criminal liability.”
To this end, Brown said the inquiry—to be led by a committee of privy counselors headed by Sir John Chilcot— will take place behind closed doors, with the “most secret of information” withheld from the public on the grounds of “national security.” Its findings will not be published until after the general election, due in March 2010.
That Brown has been forced to convene another inquiry is symptomatic of the political crisis engulfing his government. Not only has Labour forfeited popular support, it has also lost the backing of sections of the ruling elite who have run out of patience with its apparent inability to take the kind of decisive actions they believe are necessary.
Having acceded to an inquiry that for years it had opposed, Brown hoped to keep its deliberations under wraps. Almost immediately, however, his plans began to unravel, and he is said to have conceded that some of the inquiry may have to be public.
Tory leader David Cameron, amongst others, criticized the wholly secretive character of the proposed inquiry, arguing that “some proper public sessions” must be “part of the building of public confidence that is absolutely necessary.”
The Conservative Party supported the Iraq invasion. Cameron acknowledged that “the Iraq conflict caused great division.” But, he continued, “Things we can all unite over are the professionalism and the bravery of our Armed Forces, the service they gave to our country, and the debt we owe to all of those who lost their lives.”
There have been broader complaints about the restricted character of Brown’s proposal from others supportive of the war, including over the exclusion of military personnel from the deliberations.
Such criticisms of the government’s secretive hearings have nothing to do with genuine democratic accountability. For the powers-that-be, “restoring” the image of the British Army and “learning the lessons” of the Iraq war are essential to their long-term objectives.
The right-wing Telegraph agreed with Brown that the “primary purpose of the inquiry must not be to ‘apportion blame’.” But it editorialised that an examination of “this costly foreign policy intervention” was essential. Most important was to draw the lessons from what it complains was the absence of any “post-war plan,” which led to the UK being drawn into an extended occupation.
“With British forces deployed in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, it is more vital than ever that we learn from the mistakes made in Iraq,” it warned.
In the Guardian, Jonathan Steele postulated that there were two possible models for an inquiry. One kind, “and what many families of fallen British troops want— would seek to settle accounts by naming all those who took the key decisions, both officials as well as ministers. Another type of inquiry would be aimed at lesson-learning,” he wrote.
Steele continued, “My own view is that an account-settling inquiry is not the best route to follow.... It would give an essentially punitive air to proceedings and lead at best to buck-passing between officials and ministers, and at worst to a media-stimulated search for heads to roll.”
For the Guardian commentator, “The wider issue is to ensure that Britain enters no such ‘war of choice’ again.”
In the Times, defence editor Michael Evans, expressed hope that the inquiry would examine “at what stage did the Blair Government decide that removing Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was no longer the only objective and that regime-change was the real aim?” And what was really “going on behind the scenes” when—in face of opposition from France and Germany—the British government abandoned its attempts to secure a second United Nations resolution supporting an invasion.
“War of choice,” “regime change,” machinations “behind the scenes”? The use of such language points to the real issue—that the invasion and occupation of Iraq constituted acts of aggression, and that for all the talk about Saddam Hussein posing a grave danger to the world, the real practitioner of violence, death and destruction was US imperialism, aided by its British lickspittle.
Claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction served as the pretext for the drive by the US to offset its economic decline relative to its major rivals by utilizing America’s superior military power to violently impose its geo-strategic interests in the oil-rich Middle East.
With the UK hoping for a share in the spoils, the political representatives of the financial oligarchy in the US and Britain hatched a conspiracy against both the oppressed peoples of the Middle East and their own populations.
Evidence already in the public domain shows that Prime Minister Tony Blair signed off in private on US war aims. In public, however, his government doctored and manufactured intelligence reports on Iraq’s supposed WMD.
In the face of widespread condemnation, Blair declared that the test of government was its ability to ignore the popular will. In this, he had the support of virtually the entire political establishment and the media.
Estimates of the number of Iraqi lives lost as a consequence of the war and occupation are as high as 1 million. Iraq has been reduced to rubble, its infrastructure largely destroyed, while millions have been turned into refugees and millions more face unemployment and grinding poverty. Some 179 British service personnel and 4,315 US troops have been killed.
The cold fact for the British bourgeoisie, and the Labour government in particular, is that even an investigation aimed solely at “lesson learning” in preparation for future wars of conquest immediately opens the door for legal proceedings against the war’s architects.
The prosecution of high-ranking Nazis at the end of the Second World War established that the deliberate commissioning of an aggressive war constituted a criminal violation of international law.
Indeed, this was the first charge leveled against the Nazi leadership. As the International Tribunal convened in Nuremberg explained: “To initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
In the case of the Iraq war, this “accumulated evil” has found its malignant expression in mass killings, torture, “extraordinary rendition,” illegal detention and far-reaching attacks on basic democratic rights of the working class.
What is called for is not yet another government-sponsored inquiry into the Iraq war, but the assembling of a war crimes tribunal to prosecute Bush, Blair and their co-conspirators for their murderous actions.
This is not merely a matter of retribution against these individuals. For crimes of this scale to go unpunished would have catastrophic implications for the political, social and moral life of Britain, the United States and indeed the whole world. It would only facilitate new and even more terrible wars of aggression and the atrocities that flow from them.
Julie Hyland
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | gchq | | Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 2:45 am Post subject: Blair pushed Brown to hold Iraq war inquiry in private |
| Tony Blair pushed Gordon Brown to hold Iraq war inquiry in private
The Guardian
21 Jun 2009
• Former PM feared facing 'show trial'
• Leak reveals plan to provoke invasion
Tony Blair announces on 20 March 2003 that British servicemen and
women are engaged from air, land and sea in the war against Iraq.
Photograph: PA
Tony Blair urged Gordon Brown to hold the independent inquiry into the Iraq war in secret because he feared that he would be subjected to a "show trial" if it were opened to the public, the Observer can reveal.
The revelation that the former prime minister - who led Britain to war in March 2003 - had intervened will fuel the anger of MPs, peers, military leaders and former civil servants, who were appalled by Brown's decision last week to order the investigation to be conducted behind closed doors.
Blair, who resisted pressure for a full public inquiry while he was prime minister, appears to have taken a deliberate decision not to express his view in person to Brown because he feared it might leak out.
Instead, messages on the issue were relayed through others to Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, who conveyed them to the prime minister in the days leading up to the announcement of the inquiry last week.
A Downing Street spokesman last night said: "We have always been clear that we consulted a number of people before announcing the commencement of the inquiry, including former government figures. We are not going to get into the nature of those discussions."
Blair is believed to have been alarmed by the prospect of giving evidence in public and under oath about the use of intelligence and about his numerous private discussions with US President George Bush over plans for war. A spokesman for the former Labour leader would only say last night: "This was a decision for the current prime minister, not for Tony Blair."
The Observer reveals today that six weeks before the war, at a meeting in Washington, the two leaders were forced to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second UN resolution legitimising military action.
Bush told Blair that the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, painted in UN colours, over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes, he would put Iraq in breach of UN resolutions and legitimise military action.
Last night, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, whose party opposed the war from the outset, said: "If this is true about Blair demanding secrecy, it is outrageous that an inquiry into the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez is being muzzled to suit the individual needs of the man who took us to war."
Brown provoked uproar in the Commons on Monday when he announced the inquiry's scope, membership and remit. Following protests from military leaders and mandarins, including former cabinet secretary Lord Butler, he announced a partial retreat on Thursday, asking the inquiry chairman, Sir John Chilcot, to consider opening a few sessions to the public.
But the move did not ease pressure for a total climbdown. Last night, Brown appeared cornered as MPs of all parties prepared for a Commons debate on Wednesday in which they look certain to back calls for the inquiry to hold sessions in public "whenever possible".
A Tory motion likely to win wide cross-party backing also calls for the committee to include military experts. The Lib Dems are demanding that it also include constitutional and legal experts to assess the legality of the invasion.
In a sign that the government is preparing to retreat, Chilcot is to meet both Clegg and the Conservative leader, David Cameron, on Tuesday, before the debate. MPs believe that he may then announce a bigger public element to the inquiry in order to avoid the humiliation for Brown of defeat in the Commons.
Chilcot will come under pressure from both leaders to open up the inquiry. Clegg wants a guarantee that witnesses such as Blair will give evidence under oath, while Cameron will ask if the committee can issue an interim report early next year, ahead of a likely spring election.
The Tories say that if Brown does not order a U-turn, an incoming Conservative government will "reserve the right" to widen the scope of the inquiry and increase its powers where necessary after an election.
Sir Christopher Meyer, who was the British ambassador in Washington in the run-up to the war and is likely to be called to give evidence to the inquiry, yesterday backed calls to make it public. "It should be open," he said. "I think it should also have powers of subpoena and people should give evidence on oath. I would be perfectly comfortable with that."
He said the case for openness was increased because there had been "a ton of stuff" published in the US, both via official inquiries and in memoirs written by key players, making public what had previously been confidential. "I would be perfectly happy for the whole embassy archive in Washington [to be disclosed]," he added. "I haven't got a problem with that being made available. Things were very sensitive then, but this is 2009."
On his blog, Alastair Campbell, Blair's former spin doctor, says that "on balance" he believes Brown was right to order the inquiry to be held in private. "I can see the arguments for both sides - openness and transparency favours a public inquiry, but it may well be that the inquiry will do a better job freed from the frenzy of 24-hour media."
In a letter to the Observer, a group of current and former Labour MPs, headed by Alan Simpson, the chairman of Labour Against the War, demands a complete rethink. "Neither the public nor parliament will understand how the prime minister's 'new era of openness' can begin with an Iraq inquiry held behind closed doors," says the letter.
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
http://www.petitiononline.com/BWCF/petition.html | | | | gadfly | | Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 1:54 pm Post subject: |
| Tony Blair ,the poodle of Bush.
The shame of England and the World.
And also ...of the Catholic Church. | | | | gchq | | Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 1:59 pm Post subject: What Bush Told Blair Could End the Wars |
| What Bush Told Blair Could End the Wars
American Chronicle
22 Jun 2009
In May 2005 we launched www.AfterDowningStreet.org to publicize the Downing Street Minutes. By June we'd had great, if fleeting, success. During the following months and years, mountains of new memos and statements emerged on the Iraq War lies, many of them more damaging than the Downing Street documents. But increasingly nobody cared, because evidence of crimes was less interesting once Congress had dropped the pretense that it might take action. The single most powerful, and yet largely ignored, document yet to emerge, might, now in 2009, finally, produce results. And, of course, it is our friends over in England who are, as always, two steps ahead of us.
This document, or rather, reports of it, emerged in February 2006. We labeled it the White House Memo and began promoting awareness of it. We did not get far with the US corporate media. This is the same document that Vincent Bugliosi refers to as "the Manning Memo" in his book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder". Bugliosi rightly makes it central to his case. Part of the conversation recorded in the memo is recreated in Crawford, Texas, rather than the White House, in Oliver Stone´s 2008 film "W."
The memo was first mentioned in Philippe Sands' 2005 book "Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules." And it was Sands, an attorney from England, who publicized the memo in February 2006. Now the British media is questioning whether the British government's upcoming review of the Iraq War lies will include such damning pieces of evidence as the White House Memo. And Philippe Sands is advocating for its inclusion. Peace groups led by the Stop the War Coalition in England are planning a rally at Parliament on Wednesday to demand that the governmental inquiry be public. Secrecy, after all, is what allowed the war in the first place.
And what difference might it make if the public in the United Kingdom or (can you imagine it!) in the United States knew about this memo? Well, this is a document that goes beyond proving that Bush wanted war and lied about the reasons for it (That's so 2002). This document proves that Bush was willing to provoke Saddam Hussein into attacking Americans.
On January 31, 2003, prior to the full-scale invasion of Iraq in March, President George W. Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the White House. After their meeting, they spoke to the media (video) and claimed not to have decided on war, to be working hard to achieve peace, and to be worried about the imminent threat from Iraq to the American people. They claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to al Qaeda, and -- Bush implied, but avoided explicitly stating -- to the attacks of September 11, 2001. They also claimed to have UN authorization for launching an attack on Iraq. These were all blatant lies, as revealed in the White House Memo, which recorded what Bush and Blair had talked about behind closed doors just prior to the press conference. And yet, to my knowledge, not one of the reporters you see in the above video has made a peep about it.
Blair advisor David Manning took notes that day. The accuracy of his memo has never been challenged by Bush or Blair. According to Manning, Bush proposed to Blair a number of possible ways in which they might be able to create an excuse to launch a war against Iraq. One of Bush´s proposals was "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours [sic]. If Saddam fired on them," Bush argued, "he would be in breach" of UN resolutions. In other words, Bush wanted to falsely paint US planes with UN colors and try to get Iraq to shoot at them. This is what Bush really thought about the horrible, evil threat of Saddam Hussein: he wanted to provoke him. He wanted to get US pilots shot at in order to start a war that Congress would then fund for years, and perhaps decades, on the grounds that doing so would "support the troops."
Bush understood that the United Nations had not passed a resolution to legalize an attack on Iraq. The White House Memo describes Bush telling Blair that "the US would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would 'twist arms' and 'even threaten'. But he had to say that if ultimately we failed, military action would follow anyway." (These are Manning's notes of what Bush said.) In other words, going to the United Nations was not actually an attempt to avoid war, but an attempt to gain legal cover for a war that would be launched regardless of whether that project succeeded. And Bush wasn´t kidding about twisting arms; that very same day the National Security Agency (NSA) launched a plan to bug the phones and e-mails of UN Security Council members.
At this time, a month and a half before the full-on invasion of Iraq, the US military was already engaging in hugely escalated bombing runs over Iraq and redeploying troops, including to newly constructed bases in the Middle East, all in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, and all with money that had not been appropriated for these purposes. The reporters who questioned Bush and Blair on January 31, 2003, did not know about or ask about those activities.
That Bush was interested in provoking Iraq is confirmed by extensive covert operations called DB/Anabasis reported by Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their 2006 book "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War." These operations "envisioned staging a phony incident that could be used to start a war. A small group of Iraqi exiles would be flown into Iraq by helicopter to seize an isolated military base near the Saudi border. They then would take to the airwaves and announce a coup was under way. If Saddam responded by flying troops south, his aircraft would be shot down by US fighter planes patrolling the no-fly zones established by UN edict after the first Persian Gulf War. A clash of this sort could be used to initiate a full-scale war. On February 16, 2002, President Bush signed covert findings authorizing the various elements of Anabasis. The leaders of the congressional intelligence committees -- including Porter Goss, a Republican, and Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat -- were briefed."
A similar story came out about Dick Cheney with regard to Iran in 2008. Journalist Seymour Hersh reported at a journalism conference in 2008 that at a 2008 meeting in the Vice President´s office, soon after an incident in the Strait of Hormuz in which a US carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats, "There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don´t we build -- we in our shipyard -- build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy Seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can't have Americans killing Americans. That's the kind of -- that's the level of stuff we're talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected."
After the invasion of Iraq, with no weapons or ties to 9/11 having been found, Diane Sawyer asked Bush on camera (ABC News, December 16, 2003) about the claims he had made about "weapons of mass destruction," and he replied: "What´s the difference? The possibility that [Saddam] could acquire weapons, if he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger."
Iraqi deaths as a result of the invasion and occupation, measured above the high death rate under international sanctions preceding the attack, are estimated at 1.2 to 1.3 million by two independent sources (Just Foreign Policy´s updated figure based on the Johns Hopkins / Lancet report, and the British polling company Opinion Research Business´s estimate as of August 2007). According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the number of Iraqis who have fled their homes has reached 4.7 million. If these estimates are accurate, a total of nearly 6 million human beings have been displaced from their homes or killed, as of August 2008. Many times that many have certainly been injured, traumatized, impoverished, and deprived of clean water and other basic needs.
That we can't prosecute torture is bad enough. That you have to cross an ocean to even find a discussion of accountability for war lies is worse.
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Tony Blair - War Criminal
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