Will We Learn of the “Many Dark Actors”?
Anyone who has been following over the last eight years will not be surprised that Lord Goldsmith told Tony Blair that the Iraq War was illegal.
On July 29, [2002, Lord Goldsmith] wrote to Mr Blair on a single side of A4 headed notepaper from his office.Friends say it was no easy thing for him to do. He was a close friend of Mr Blair, who gave him his peerage and Cabinet post. The typed letter was addressed by hand, ‘Dear Tony’, and signed by hand, ‘Yours, Peter’.
In it, Lord Goldsmith set out in uncompromising terms why he believed war was illegal. He pointed out that:
- War could not be justified purely on the grounds of ‘regime change’.
- Although United Nations rules permitted ‘military intervention on the basis of self-defence’, they did not apply in this case because Britain was not under threat from Iraq.
- While the UN allowed ‘humanitarian intervention’ in certain instances, that too was not relevant to Iraq.
- It would be very hard to rely on earlier UN resolutions in the Nineties approving the use of force against Saddam.
Lord Goldsmith ended his letter by saying ‘the situation might change’ – although in legal terms, it never did.
I’m more interested, though, in the description of the scrum two Labour officials used to to convince Goldsmith to give the Iraq War some legal sanction.
He was summoned to a No10 meeting with Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and Baroness Sally Morgan, Mr Blair’s senior Labour ‘fixer’ in Downing Street. No officials were present.
A source said: ‘Falconer and Morgan performed a pincer movement on Goldsmith. They more or less pinned him up against the wall and told him to do what Blair wanted.’
After the meeting, Lord Goldsmith issued his brief statement stating the war was lawful.
With this stuff coming out during the Iraq War inquiry, I honestly wonder whether we’ll eventually learn about the “dark actors playing games” who went after David Kelly.
Well, too bad about David Kelly.
The oil contracts are getting signed, so it all seems to have worked out well enough, despite a glitch or two here and there.
/s
Lord Goldsmith’s supporters may find vindication in the letter to Blair, but it is difficult to understand, as a matter of law as opposed to intimidation, how he subsequently convinced himself that the Iraq invasion could be justified on the basis of violation of UN Resolutions, when he previously told Blair that a second Security Council would be needed to make the invasion legal under international law and in compliance with the 1990s resolutions. Much like Colin Powell, he had the option of resignation rather than providing dubious justifications for an illegal war. Many in Britain did resign, including cabinet members such as Robin Cook, over the Iraq invasion.
A historical precedent from an earlier Middle East catastrophe – Anthony Eden was advised by the Attorney General of the time, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, that the Suez action was illegal at international law – Eden ignored him, the AG did not resign, and the rest is history.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1535698/Eden-wanted-legal-team-to-justify-Suez.html
What is heartening about the possibilty that those few Americans who want to know the truth about about the many-sided lies that lead our foolish nation into Iraq
Will learn the corresponding many-sided truths of that collosal cheney-bush-rumsfeld folly
Is that we engaged a conscripted coalition –
Including britain.
In short,
There are many coalition members. I.e., sovereign
Nations who have information about what transpired secretly and illegally,
That the newly formed bush-Obama coalition cannot keep a lid on this disgraceful, senile act of colonialism on
The part of the,
Of our,
American government.
In short,
Obama and Cheney and limbaugh and all the CIA
Directors who ever lived
Cannot coverup for more than a year or two more.
Spain
Italy
Lithuania
Britain.
but I
Think we can count on Israel and the central Asian republics who were part of the soviet union not to squeal on good old us.
Ps
I have taken to using my wife’s itouch,
It is so damned convenient
But the final results are unedited
By my beloved spell-checker
And so are,
How shall we say it,
Very rough.
The world deserves the truth. And so does David Kelley’s ghost.
Pardon the O/T, but for you who are keeping count of the slow Guantanamo attrition:
US transfers two Tunisian Guantanamo men to Italy
“Two Tunisian Guantanamo inmates have been transferred by the United States to Italy where they will face trial, the Italian justice ministry has announced.
“The two were identified as Adel Ben Mabrouk and Riadh Ben Mohamed Nasri, and “were the subjects of Italian arrest warrants and will be tried in Italy,” the ministry said.”
Link.
Here’s a link to an article a few months back from Andrew Worthington when this deal was in the works.
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/07/17/italys-guantanamo-obama-plans-rendition-of-tunisians-in-guantanamo-to-italian-jail/
Only if we can get governments that aren’t afraid of shadows.
The best antidote for dark actors is sunshine. Thanks for shedding some light!
Unfortunately, sunshine isn’t enough. Once the disease has been diagnosed, some strong medicine may be needed.
Bob in AZ
Yes, but how do we get that strong medicine on the table? Indeed, how do we get the Congresscritters to conduct thorough-going, public investigations and follow-through with appropriate action?
(Sorry, Bob, I’m not trying to be snarky nor am I despairing today, but I’m not feeling very cheery, either.)
WHEN and HOW ,fatster?
Oh, when some Neo_CON figures out a way to get the lone patent and obscene profit for that “strong medicine”…MAYBE then….IF accompanied also by a get out of jail free card.
And those who fixed the intelligence around their desires to illegally invade Iraq still walk free.
Was Goldsmith in charge of the Kelly /suicide/death investigation?
Lord Hutton in charge of the investigation
Kelly’s wife reported him missing shortly after midnight that night, and he was found early the next morning.[16] The government immediately announced that Lord Hutton would lead the judicial Hutton Inquiry into the events leading up to the death. The BBC shortly afterwards confirmed that Kelly had indeed been the single source for Andrew Gilligan’s report.
The Hutton Inquiry reported on 28 January 2004 confirming that Kelly had committed suicide. Lord Hutton wrote:
I am satisfied that none of the persons whose decisions and actions I later describe ever contemplated that Kelly might take his own life. I am further satisfied that none of those persons was at fault in not contemplating that Kelly might take his own life. Whatever pressures and strains Kelly was subjected to by the decisions and actions taken in the weeks before his death, I am satisfied that no one realised or should have realised that those pressures and strains might drive him to take his own life or contribute to his decision to do so.
Hutton concluded, controversially, that the Ministry of Defence were obliged to make Kelly’s identity known once he came forward as a potential source, and had not acted in a duplicitous manner. However, Hutton criticised the MoD for not alerting Kelly to the fact that his name had become known to the press.
[edit] Controversial issues
[edit] “I will probably be found dead in the woods”
During the Hutton inquiry, a British ambassador called David Broucher reported a conversation with Kelly at a Geneva meeting in February 2003. Broucher related that Kelly said he had assured his Iraqi sources that there would be no war if they co-operated, and that a war would put him in an “ambiguous” moral position.[6] Broucher had asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded, and Kelly had replied, “I will probably be found dead in the woods.” Broucher then quoted from an email he had sent just after Kelly’s death: “I did not think much of this at the time, taking it to be a hint that the Iraqis might try to take revenge against him, something that did not seem at all fanciful then. I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)#Investigation
Is it true Kelly was working on a book?
A search for the truth amidst dark activity
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
David Kelly was writing book
UK NEWS
KELLY’S BOOK OF SECRETS
Sunday July 5th 2009
WEAPONS inspector David Kelly was writing a book exposing highly damaging government secrets before his mysterious death.
He was intending to reveal that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the British and American invasion.
He had several discussions with a publisher in Oxford and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the law on secrets.
Following his death, his computers were seized and it is still not known if any rough draft was discovered by investigators and, if so, what happened to the material.
Dr Kelly was also intending to lift the lid on a potentially bigger scandal, his own secret dealings in germ warfare with the apartheid regime in South Africa.
US television investigators have spent four years preparing a 90-minute documentary, Anthrax War, suggesting there is a global black market in anthrax and exposing the mystery “suicides” of five government germ warfare scientists from around the world.
Director Bob Coen said: “The deeper you look into the murky world of governments and germ warfare, the more worrying it becomes.”
“We have proved there is a black market in anthrax. David Kelly was of particular interest to us because he was a world expert on anthrax and he was involved in some degree with assisting the secret germ warfare programme in apartheid South Africa.”
http://judithmilleranddrdavidkellyandwmd.blogspot.com/2009/07/david-kelly-was-writing-book.html
Leen at 10
Why wouldn’t the military industrial complex President Esienhower warned us against have gone international and set up a rouge operation to invade and occupy Irak ?
Hells Bells Blackwater/Xe has become as powerful as some nation states.
What might the illegal anthrax market have brought to our shores-and in the context of scaring us into invading Baghdad . Judith Miller was literally and figuratively sleeping with the neo-cons -recall she was Scooter’s ‘aspen rooted’ mistress….
We had some ‘dark actors’ of our own:
Well, that evidence wasn’t available quite YET, but Paul Wolfowitz was working on it.
Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neil has a fair amount to say about Paul Wolfowitz and his focus on Iraq in the very first Bush administration cabinet meetings in Ron Susskinds book the “The Price of Loyalty”. O’Neil claims that Cheney and Wolfowitz were pushing for military action in Iraq far more than Rumsfeld.
Where is that warmongering Wolfowitz? Sure to be part of the team pushing us into a military confrontation with Iran
Phillipe Sand wrote all about this in Lawless World published in 2006, a great indictment of the manufacturing of facts to get everyone on both sides of the Atlantic in line for going to war.
“arguing that the intelligence was inconclusive about the Al Qaeda leader’s location.”
“inconclusive” intelligence never stopped them before. Wonder why they started being concerned about the validity of their intelligence then?
oops wrong thread
That intelligence must have not come from the Office of Special plans, Office of Net Assessments or WHIG.
Somebody was pretty slick about protocol in Bush House when they slipped that Colgate toothpaste in Tony Blairs’ grip. That must have been the secret signal to have Condi E-Mail MI6 to start the propoganda campaign that Kathryn Gun had the guts to spill.
Michael Moore was right in Fahrenheit 911. It was a capitalists’ wet dream, and just a sophisticated heist.
And completely illegal, as the neocons found out:
Baghdad year zero:
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia