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Iraq war was illegal and we said so, lawyers will claim
Chilcot inquiry: two senior Foreign Office lawyers could drop Blair and Goldsmith in it
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. ·
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It isn't Britain's business or that of the Prime Minister of Great Britain acting independently of his colleagues to take this country to war, killing countles people and losing many British soldiers lives based on a pack of lies Dee. We are not the world's policeman and have no right (or in the case of the vast majority of British people, wish) to wade into another country murdering and calling it right because we're more powerful at the time and whose going to argue anyway? The arrogant belief of bullies like Blair that he could do what he wanted whilst in power and get away with it is not that far removed from the same kind of arrogance that Sadam had. Iraq is a screwed up mess because of the thoughtless and murderous acts of Blair and his fellow criminal Bush. It must be said though, many people, myself included, loathe what he did to our country through mass immigration alone (allegedly for his own amusement to bait the Tories), that I would pay to see him swing.
I love it when the illiterate try and post comments, it makes such interesting reading and confirms my belief that the education system in many countries has finally given up trying to teach people spelling and good, grammatically correct sentence construction. And I bet you any money that Dee is a Jeebus Freak too!
If it is indeed true that Lord Goldsmith (Blair's attorney general) overruled the legal advise of his experts and gave his PM the opposite opinion vis. the invasion of Iraq -- it will remove any doubt in my mind that Goldsmith was part and parcel of the larger Neocon conspiracy to snooker America and its proxies into this terrible war to benefit Israel's strategic goals.
I am not sure what Blair was expecting to get out of it though. All his accomplishments as a prime minister will now be overshadowed by this major 'error' that has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. And the world is no more "safer" than what it was before the invasion. Perhaps, it can be argued, the prognosis for Western interests in that part of the world have deteriorated further. Wonder how Mr. Blair can see himself in the mirror everyday?
What's wrong with this picture? Your leaders, that you have elected, they try to keep you safe, and you want to kill them for it. Is this a mental disease? Are you being politically correct ? Chasing after acceptance ? Blair commited war crimes ? saddam hussein commented the crimes, he had already murdered hundreds of his own kind, and tried to invade kuwait, you were in his sites at some point in the future fool! You will all be the muslims slaves one day soon anyway, they are smarter than you, and care nothing about your snobbery and *political correctness show* you put on for the world
This was all transparently obvious at the time. With the UN inspectors about to announce no WMDs, and with the troops massed at the border, Bush and Blair were gagging for the killing tyo start. Nothing stood in their way, including David Kelly.
" Oh what a wicked web we weave when we practise to deceive . "
Thankfully our Candian Prime Minister had the chutzpah not to get involved in the Iraq war without a UN mandate , much to the chagrin of our cousins down south .
"Some believe it will also take him a step closer to being charged one day for war crimes."
Yeah and some believe in faeries.