Iraq: The war was illegal

Taken form the Independent, UK, Sunday, 29 November 2009
By Brian Brady

Tony Blair will be quizzed over a devastating official memo warning him that war on Iraq would be illegal eight months before he sent troops into Baghdad, it was claimed last night.

The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war will consider a letter from Lord Goldsmith, then Mr Blair's top law officer, advising him that deposing Saddam would be in breach of international law, according to a report in The Mail on Sunday.

But Mr Blair refused to accept Lord Goldsmith's advice and instead issued instructions for his long-term friend to be "gagged" and barred from cabinet meetings, the newspaper claimed. Lord Goldsmith apparently lost three stone, and complained he was "more or less pinned to the wall" in a No 10 showdown with two of Mr Blair's most loyal aides, Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan. Mr Blair also allegedly failed to inform the Cabinet of the warning, fearing an "anti-war revolt".

Lord Goldsmith allegedly threatened to resign over the issue, but was "bullied" into backing down. He eventually issued carefully drafted qualified backing for the invasion.

But according to The Mail on Sunday, his advice was radically different in July 2002, when ministers were allegedly told the US and UK planned "regime change" in Iraq. Then Lord Goldsmith reportedly wrote a letter to Mr Blair on 29 July, flagging up the legal difficulties of the plan of campaign he had apparently thrashed out with President George Bush. The letter pointed out: (1) Although UN rules permitted "military intervention on the basis of self-defence, they did not apply in this case as Britain was not under threat from Iraq; (2) While the UN allowed "humanitarian intervention" in certain cases, that too was not relevant to Iraq; (3) It would be very hard to rely on earlier UN resolutions in the Nineties approving the use of force against Saddam.

Lord Goldsmith ended by saying "the situation might change" – although, in legal terms, it never did. The advice, and the decision to commit it to an official record, reportedly caused great friction between the two men, as it was feared publication of the details could undermine the case for war and damage Mr Blair's credibility.

The revelations follow testimony from a series of by figures at the Chilcot inquiry who have questioned Mr Blair's judgement and honesty, and the legality of the war. The Independent on Sunday understands, after only four days of testimony, the former prime minister was already furious that his reputation could be "shredded" by senior civil servants taking revenge on him during the inquiry into the Iraq conflict, it emerged last night.

Mr Blair has been appalled by the high-profile evidence given by mandarins who have appeared before the Chilcot inquiry since the first round of public hearings began last Tuesday, close friends have revealed. His image has taken a battering over the past six days, as a series of current and former public servants have given evidence that conflicts with the Government's account of the intelligence assessment of Iraq's weapons capability before the invasion in March 2003.

Among the devastating details presented to the inquiry was the revelation that British spies reported 10 days before the invasion that Iraq had "disassembled" what chemical weapons it had – but Mr Blair went ahead and sent troops into battle. Britain's former ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, claimed Mr Blair and Mr Bush had signed a secret deal "in blood" to remove Saddam almost a year before the invasion. He said the agreement in effect left officials scrabbling to find "a smoking gun" to justify going to war.

Mr Blair's friends claimed last night that he has found some of the evidence given so far "distasteful", and potentially damaging to his reputation. "It is clear that the headlines so far have not been helpful to him," a former minister said. "But more troubling is the sense that some of the people involved are so keen to stick the knife in. It is quite distasteful."

Another Blair ally said the former leader had made clear his concern that "his reputation could be shredded by the Chilcot process". "He is furious that mandarins are seeking revenge and discovering their principles after the event," one friend added.

Sir Christopher Meyer has attracted much criticism from Blairites following a flamboyant appearance during which he claimed Mr Blair's view on "regime change" in Iraq hardened after a private meeting with Mr Bush in 2002. He also compared Mr Blair unflatteringly to Margaret Thatcher. The former diplomat told the inquiry on Thursday: "She would have insisted on a clear, coherent political/diplomatic strategy and I think she would have demanded the greatest clarity about what the heck happened if and when we removed Saddam."

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who worked beside Mr Blair in his attempts to gain UN blessing for the invasion, said the war was of "questionable legitimacy" even though it is unlikely to be proved illegal. The former UK ambassador to the UN said the invasion did not have the backing of most UN members or the British public.

Mr Blair assured MPs in the run-up to the invasion that "extensive, detailed and authoritative" intelligence showed "beyond doubt" that Saddam had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons; tried to develop nuclear weapons; and that he had already produced chemical weapons – and used them on his own people. His government produced two dossiers on Saddam's weapons capability, to back up the case for war.

It has since been shown that much of the intelligence received by the Government in the run-up to the war was confused and inaccurate. Sir William Ehrman, the Foreign Office director general for defence and intelligence at the time, told the inquiry that a report suggested Saddam may not have been able to use chemical weapons. A separate report suggested Iraq might also "lack" warheads capable of spreading chemical agents.

Tim Dowse, the director of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office between 2001-2003, said most evidence suggested Iraq's chemical and biological programme was largely "destroyed" in 1991. He said intelligence in late 2002 suggested Iraq was rebuilding its capability, although its actual position was unclear after weapons inspectors were expelled in 1998.

And now it appears the inquiry could become more uncomfortable for Mr Blair. It is understood the Chilcot panel has already been given Lord Goldsmith's letter. The two are both likely to be interrogated about it when they give evidence in the new year.

Critical evidence from key figures to Chilcot inquiry
# Sir Peter Ricketts "We quite clearly distanced ourselves from talk of regime change... that was not something we thought there would be any legal base for."
# Sir William Patey "We were aware of those drumbeats from Washington [about regime change]. Our policy was to stay away from that end of the spectrum."
# Sir Michael Wood "[Establishing no-fly zones over Iraq] was very controversial ... The US government was very careful to avoid taking any real position on the law."
# Sir William Ehrman "We did, on 10 March, get a report that chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and Saddam hadn't yet ordered their assembly."
# Sir Christopher Meyer "Suddenly, because of the unforgiving nature of the military timetable, we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun."
# Sir Jeremy Greenstock "I regarded our participation in the military action against Iraq in March 2003 as legal, but of questionable legitimacy."

CIA Reveals Decades Of Plots, Kidnaps And Wiretaps

The New York Times today reported that for four years, Vice President Dick Cheney had resisted routine oversight of his office’s handling of classified information, and when the National Archives unit that monitors classification in the executive branch objected, the vice president’s office suggested abolishing the oversight unit, according to documents released yesterday by a Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California. What is Cheney trying to hide from the public in the week that this is happening...

Taken from The Guardian, UK, June 23, 2007
By Simon Tisdall

The CIA is to declassify secret records detailing operations including illegal domestic surveillance, assassination plots and kidnapping, undertaken from the 1950s to the early 1970s, at the height of the cold war and the Vietnam conflict.The records were compiled in 1973 at the behest of the then CIA director, James Schlesinger, and collected in a 693-page dossier known as the "family jewels". Although some of its contents have been leaked, the CIA has refused until now to put the full dossier in the public domain.

Mr Schlesinger acted after discovering that veteran CIA officers whose burglary of a Washington hotel room triggered the Watergate scandal, had received the agency's cooperation in carrying out "dirty tricks" for President Richard Nixon.According to the National Security Archive at George Washington University, Mr Schlesinger directed his officials to collate details of any other current or past agency activity that "might fall outside CIA authority" - that was, in other words, illegal. The results of the internal trawl were breathtaking. But within months of finalising the dossier, William Colby replaced Mr Schlesinger as CIA chief.

When the New York Times published a report on the CIA's domestic surveillance operations in December 1974, apparently based in part on the dossier, panic erupted inside the administration of President Gerald Ford, who had succeeded Nixon. At a damage-limitation meeting in January 1975 with James Wilderotter, the deputy attorney-general, Colby laid bare the "skeletons" in the dossier.

Minutes of the meeting, obtained by the National Security Archive and posted at gwu.edu yesterday, list the skeletons one by one.

Domestic operations include the illegal detention and interrogation of a Russian defector, the wiretapping of columnists Robert Allen and Paul Scott, and the surveillance of other journalists including the late Jack Anderson. Several illegal break-ins are also listed.

In the minutes, Colby says some US citizens had been subjected to "unwitting" CIA drug experiments to induce "behaviour modification". The CIA also illegally amassed 9,900 files on Americans involved in anti-war activities.

The minutes state that the CIA "plotted the assassination of some foreign leaders including [Fidel] Castro, [Patrice] Lumumba [Democratic Republic of Congo] and [Rafael] Trujillo [Dominican Republic]." They go on: "With respect to Trujillo's assassination on May 30 1961, the CIA had 'no active part' but had a 'faint connection' with the groups that in fact did it."

In an official record of a White House meeting with President Ford the next day, on January 4 1975, a rattled Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state and national security adviser, argues that the existence of the "family jewels" dossier, and its partial leaking, may turn into a major scandal - with the FBI investigating the CIA.

"What is happening is worse than in the days of McCarthy. You will end up with a CIA that does only reporting, not operations ... What Colby has done is a disgrace," Mr Kissinger tells Ford.

"All these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy [the former attorney-general] personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro."

Announcing the decision to release the dossier next week, plus 11,000 pages of "hard target" intelligence gathered about the USSR and China from 1953-73, General Michael Hayden, the CIA director, said they offered a "glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency".

Liar In The White House: Cheney Aide Found Guilty In CIA Leak Case

Saga of Washington's discredited WMD claims leads to the conviction for perjury of Dick Cheney's key aide

Taken from The Independent, UK, 07 March 2007
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

In a massive new blow to the credibility of the White House, Vice-President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Lewis Libby has been convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to the FBI, during the investigation into the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent.

After a seven-week trial, the jury found Libby guilty yesterday on four of the five counts against him. Ever calm in court, Libby merely blinked as the verdict was read out. Defence lawyers immediately said they would seek a fresh trial, and if that failed, lodge an appeal. In theory Libby faces up to 25 years in jail, though federal sentencing guidelines mean he is likely to receive a far shorter term.

The case arose from the investigation into the leak in July 2003 of the name of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent whose husband, the former ambassador Joseph Wilson, had been a virulent critic of the Iraq war. Ms Plame's identity was revealed a few days after Mr Wilson had written a New York Times column debunking White House claims that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium in Africa, and accusing the Bush administration of deliberately manipulating pre-war intelligence. Libby was not accused of leaking the name deliberately, which is a criminal offence.

His crime was to lie to the FBI and the grand jury investigating the case, by maintaining he only learnt who Ms Plame was from a reporter, two days before her name appeared in print.

But some of the most celebrated journalists in Washington went into the witness box to testify they had been told by Libby in person that Mr Wilson's wife worked for the CIA - in one case three weeks before Libby said he became aware of the fact.

Defence lawyers contended that if he made a mistake, it was simply because of a faulty memory caused by pressure of work. But the jury decided that Libby had directly lied. The motive, one juror explained to reporters afterwards, was to cover up the involvement of the Vice-President himself in the campaign to discredit the former ambassador.

In a statement, Mr Cheney said he was "very disappointed with the verdict". At the White House the mood was equally grim. George Bush respected the result of the trial, but was "saddened for Scooter Libby and his family", a spokesman said.

But there is no concealing the extent of the damage. Libby is not only the most senior Bush administration official to face - and now be convicted of - criminal charges. As chief of staff to arguably the most powerful vice-president in US history, he was one of the two or three most important policy-makers at the White House after the President and Vice-President.

The trial, in which neither Libby nor his former boss testified, threw no new light on the handling of the WMD intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But it revealed the obsessive sensitivity of the Vice-President's office to any attack on its pre-war use of intelligence, and its determination to discredit critics.

At one point the prosecution produced a specimen of the offending article, annotated by Mr Cheney himself, asking who Mr Wilson was, and whether he had been sent on his 2002 fact-finding mission to Africa as a "junket" organised by his wife. The guilty verdict against Libby is thus bound to tarnish further the reputation of both Mr Bush and Mr Cheney, whose approval ratings are even lower than those of the President.

Libby, said Denis Collins, one of the 11 jurors, seemed to be the "fall guy" who had been given the job of talking to reporters by the Vice-President. There was "a tremendous amount of sympathy" for him, Mr Collins said, but in the end they could not believe that a man whose exceptional grasp of detail had been attested to in court had simply forgotten when and with whom he had discussed Ms Plame.

The chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald denied suggestions that he had made more of the affair than it merited. Mr Fitzgerald was named special prosecutor in November 2003, after the Justice Department opened an investigation into the leak.

"We could not walk away from the facts of the case that we knew in December 2003. Any lie under oath is serious," he said.

Libby's appeal could run for many months through the courts, possibly as far as the Supreme Court.

If the case is not settled by the time a new president is elected in November 2008, Mr Bush could pardon Libby.

But Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, flatly opposed any pardon, saying: "It's about time someone in the Bush administration has been held accountable for the campaign to manipulate intelligence and discredit war critics."

The fallen war advocate
Until October 2005, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was the chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney and a powerful influence within the White House, particularly on matters of national security.

He was among the loudest voices making the case for war with Iraq and helped put together the dossier that Secretary of State Colin Powell notoriously revealed to the United Nations in the spring of 2003.

A former private lawyer, Libby joined the government in the early 80s, joining the State Department where he served under his former law professor Paul Wolfowitz. After a brief departure from government to return to public practice, Libby returned to work for Mr Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in 1989.

He was also a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, a right-wing group seeking the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

When he became Mr Cheney's chief of staff he received the name "germ boy", so named because of his insistence on universal smallpox vaccination.

But his closeness to the Vice-President also earned him the title "Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney".

In 1996 Libby published a novel, The Apprentice, that told the story of a group of travellers stranded in northern Japan in 1903. The publishers described it as "an everyday tale of bestiality and paedophilia in 1903 Japan... [and] packed with sexual perversion, dwelling on prepubescent girls and their training as prostitutes".
Andrew Buncombe

A LIAR IN THE WHITE HOUSE

The Lie
The Blair Government's September 2002 dossier claims Saddam Hussein has sought to buy uranium for his nuclear weapons programme from Niger. George Bush, in his State of the Union address in January 2003, ignores CIA reservations and repeats the assertion. The claim becomes a central plank in the argument for war.

The Doubts
The CIA dispatches a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to investigate the Niger claims, which he concludes are false. Related documents are subsequently obtained by Italian authorities and passed to the UN nuclear agency which declares them to be crude forgeries in March 2003, just before the invasion.

The Whistle-Blower
When no WMD are found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, Joseph Wilson accuses the Bush administration of deliberately manipulating intelligence before the war. His views are first aired in an off-the-record interview with The Independent on Sunday in June of that year, before he goes public in American newspapers.

The Smear Campaign
Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson's wife, is identified as an undercover agent by columnist Robert Novak on 14 July 2003 and the search is on for the source of the leak within the Bush administration, accused of deliberately smearing Ms Plame while potentially endangering her life by exposing her as a CIA agent. Revealing a CIA agent's identity is against the law.

The Cover-up
A special prosecutor is appointed to uncover the leaker, with suspicion falling on the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, whose chief of staff, Lewis Libby, takes pains to protect his boss. Although no charges are brought over the leak itself, Mr Libby is put on trial for trying to frustrate the investigation.

The Conviction
Lewis Libby becomes the first Bush administration official to be convicted over the flawed intelligence used to justify the war when he is found guilty yesterday of obstructing justice, lying and perjury. He faces up to 25 years in jail. Many in Washington say it was, in effect, the trial of Mr Cheney, who was responsible for the actions of his aide.

Pentagon Report Condemns Misleading Iraq Intelligence

Taken from The Guardian, UK, February 9, 2007
By Mark Tran

The row over the use - or misuse of intelligence - in the run-up to the Iraq war reignited today when a watchdog concluded that top Pentagon officials wrongly insisted on a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

The Pentagon's acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, told the senate armed services committee that the office headed by Douglas Feith, formerly the number three man at the defence department, took "inappropriate" actions in pushing the al-Qaida connection not backed up by America's intelligence agencies.



But Mr Gimble said the actions of the office of the undersecretary of defence for policy "were not illegal or unauthorised".

"I can't think of a more devastating commentary," the Democratic senate armed services committee chairman, Carl Levin, said.

Mr Feith ran the Pentagon's secretive office of special plans when the Bush administration was making the case for invading Iraq. Created by the then-secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, the office reviewed intelligence on Iraq as the Bush administration lacked full confidence in information coming from the CIA.

Mr Feith, who resigned in 2005, was a major cheerleader for invading Iraq, to the irritation of some of the Pentagon's generals. General Tommy Franks, the military commander of the 2003 war in Iraq, once referred to Mr Feith as "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth".

A summary of the inspector-general's report cited the defence policy office's allegations of links between Iraq and al-Qaida, in particular an alleged 2001 meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta, the leader of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, and an Iraqi intelligence officer. The claim turned out to be unfounded.

"That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war," Carl Levin, the chairman of the senate armed services committee, who has accused the administration of manipulating intelligence material before the war, told the Associated Press.

The Pentagon report was requested in 2005 by a Republican senator, Pat Roberts, Mr Levin's predecessor on the senate intelligence committee. The committee and a number of official inquiries had criticised the administration's prewar intelligence, but Democratic senators, led by Mr Levin, demanded further investigation of Mr Feith's operation.

Mr Feith told the Associated Press that he was pleased to hear that the report had concluded that his office's activities were neither illegal nor unauthorised. He took strong issue, however, with the finding that some activities had been "inappropriate".

He described as "bizarre" the inspector general's conclusion that some intelligence activities by the office of special plans were inappropriate but not unauthorised.