Truth and the Chilcot Inquiry

The First Post has an interesting angle on this week's evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry. The First Post report thus:

" Two former government lawyers are set to blow the Chilcot Inquiry wide open tomorrow. In the week that Tony Blair and his good friend Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General, are due to appear before the panel to explain why Britain went to war against Iraq in March 2003 - Goldsmith on Thursday, Blair on Friday - the two lawyers could help Chilcot put Britain's former prime minister on the spot.

Quite simply, the two lawyers, who for different reasons have never publicly told their stories, will say that they always advised that war against Iraq was illegal without a second UN resolution and that Blair went ahead anyway because he was determined to help George Bush remove Saddam Hussein.

The two lawyers are Sir Michael Wood, who was the senior Foreign Office lawyer at the time, and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst. They are both fascinating witnesses - for quite different reasons.

Among friends, Wood is supposed to have made no secret ever since the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 that it would not be legal without a second UN resolution. Publicly, however, he has never broken his silence on the matter.

A year after the invasion, he was awarded a knighthood. In 2006 he left the Foreign Office to become a barrister in private chambers in London.

Yesterday, a senior legal source told the Observer that the advice Wood gave "consistently" to Lord Goldsmith was that war would be unlawful.

"The important thing is that Foreign Office advice was given consistently in one way, and then the Attorney General, right at the end, gave advice to the contrary," the source told the newspaper. "That is what will come out."

It is also understood that Wood's legal advice from 2003 could be published for the first time by the Chilcot inquiry.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst is in a very different position - because she she was convinced the planned war was "a crime of aggression" and chose to resign on principle from the Foreign Office on the eve of the invasion. Until now, she has never given a public account of her decision to quit.

According to a report in the Independent on Sunday, she will tell the Chilcot inquiry that she was not "a voice in the wilderness' in harbouring doubts about an invasion and that many senior Foreign Office colleagues agreed with her.

If both Wood and Wilmshurst say tomorrow what their friends are expecting of them, the Chilcot inquiry might finally get to the truth of what persuaded Blair, against public opinion and legal advice, to attack Iraq. Some believe it will also take him a step closer to being charged one day for war crimes."

Interesting, very interesting. This and the report that Dr David Kelly's post mortem and other documents are to be kept secret for 70 years really should be headline news. I wonder if any MPs would like to tackle Gordon Brown about these matters at PMQs on Wednesday? Mind you even they do no doubt Gordon Brown will evade answering the question, he usually does. And if he does the BBC will no doubt protect him form scrutiny.

Truth will out

Maybe Shakespeare was correct when he wrote "murder cannot be hid long; a man's son
may, but at the length truth will out".

I see that:

"Ministers have been ordered to release minutes of the cabinet meetings which discussed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Information Tribunal upheld a decision by the Information Commissioner that details of the March 13 and 17 sessions should be disclosed.

The meetings considered the issue of whether the invasion was allowed under international law.

The government failed in its bid to block a Freedom of Information request asking for the release of the minutes.

The Cabinet Office now has 28 days to decide whether to appeal to the High Court against the ruling.

A Downing Street spokesman said they were "considering our response".

Cabinet minutes are not normally released until at least 30 years after the event - but the Tribunal stressed that disclosure of the Iraq material would not necessarily set a precedent."

Whether these documents are eventually released I doubt, as an excuse will be found not to release them. Which is a shame as I would have enjoyed seeing what Lord Goldsmith said and how much Gordon Brown was implicated in the decision-making process.





The BBC piece on this news story is currently quite aggressive towards the Labour government line, as you would expect from an organisation that was so against the Iraq invasion. I have no doubt that they will eventually succumb to pressure to reign back their coverage, so I have reproduced below the whole page as it is at 17:20 - the page claims to have been last updated at 16:52:

"Iraq minutes 'must be released'

Ministers have been ordered to release minutes of the cabinet meetings which discussed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Information Tribunal upheld a decision by the Information Commissioner that details of the March 13 and 17 sessions should be disclosed.

The meetings considered the issue of whether the invasion was allowed under international law.

The government failed in its bid to block a Freedom of Information request asking for the release of the minutes.

The Cabinet Office now has 28 days to decide whether to appeal to the High Court against the ruling.

A Downing Street spokesman said they were "considering our response".

Cabinet minutes are not normally released until at least 30 years after the event - but the Tribunal stressed that disclosure of the Iraq material would not necessarily set a precedent.

'Public interest'

The Tribunal said: "The decision to commit the nation's armed forces to the invasion of another country is momentous in its own right, and ... its seriousness is increased by the criticisms that have been made (particularly in the Butler Report) of the general decision-making processes in the Cabinet at the time.


"There has also been criticism of the Attorney General's legal advice and of the particular way in which the March 17 opinion was made available to the Cabinet only at the last moment and the March 7 opinion was not disclosed to it at all."

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas said he was "pleased" the Tribunal had upheld the decision he made in February last year that "the public interest in disclosing the official Cabinet minutes in this particular case outweighs the public interest in withholding the information".

He added: "Disclosing the minutes will allow the public to more fully understand this particular decision."

'Angry'

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Ed Davey welcomed the tribunal's ruling saying it could be "critical" to how the decision to go to war is viewed by history.

He denied releasing documents before the normal 30 year time limit risked damaging the effective running of government, arguing that many people were still "angry" about the Iraq war.

"The people who took these decisions, which were incredibly controversial, should be held to account," he told the BBC News channel.

"And unfortunately the Labour government has put up a wall of secrecy, in the years since 2003, and prevented the full facts from coming out."

He repeated the Lib Dems' call for a full inquiry into the Iraq war, something the government has agreed to in principle without setting a date for it.

Legal questions

The release of the cabinet minutes would reopen controversy over the then attorney general Lord Goldsmith's legal advice on the war.

On the eve of war, 17 March, Lord Goldsmith's opinion unequivocally saying military action was legal was presented to cabinet, MPs and the military and published.

However, after long-running reports that he had changed his mind as the planned invasion approached, his initial lengthy advice given to Tony Blair on 7 March was leaked and then published in 2005.

This advice raised a number of questions and concerns about the possible legality of military action against Iraq without a second UN resolution and was never shown to the cabinet.

The then prime minister Tony Blair defended his decision not to show the cabinet the full advice, saying that Lord Goldsmith had attended the cabinet in person and was able to answer any legal questions and explain his view."

"A police state would be where ministers were directing an investigation"

According to Jack Straw

"We don't have a police state here, despite many of the ridiculous newspaper headlines. A police state would be where ministers were directing an investigation... "

Then we do have a police state because the BBC reported in 2006 that:

"The Serious Fraud Office has dropped a corruption probe into a defence deal with Saudi Arabia, after warnings it could damage national security.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said the SFO was "discontinuing" its investigation into Britain's biggest defence company, BAE Systems.

The reversal follows reports that Saudi Arabia was considering pulling out of a deal to buy Eurofighter jets from BAE.

Lord Goldsmith said he thought that a prosecution "could not be brought".

He said the decision had been made in the wider public interest, which had to be balanced against the rule of law.

Lord Goldsmith also told peers that Prime Minister Tony Blair had agreed that the continuation of the investigation would cause "serious damage" to relations between the UK and Saudi Arabia."

Any comment Jack Straw...? Do you accept that we are in fact living in a police state, a state where the police are directed by ministers?

"We know a word for this sort of behaviour, don't we children"

"Lord" Goldsmith has apparently declared himself against the extension of the maximum period pre-charge detention of terror suspects from 28 to 42 days. It seems that whilst giving evidence to the Commons' Counter-Terrorism Bill standing committee, Lord Goldsmith said:

"The case has not been made out for that extension and I can't personally support it."

Of course "Lord" Goldsmith was the Attorney General when the same Labour government tried to get the increase to 90 days through Parliament?



Maybe you know a word for this sort of behaviour? If you are going to suggest anything on this blog be careful, Joyce Grenfell might be reading from above.