(British) Army chiefs feared Iraq war illegal just days before start

posted by admin on Saturday February 28, @04:10PM

· Attorney-General forced to rewrite legal advice
· Specialist unit dedicated to spying on UN revealed

Martin Bright, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff Sunday February 29, 2004 The Observer

Britain's Army chiefs refused to go to war in Iraq amid fears over its legality just days before the British and American bombing campaign was launched, The Observer can today reveal.

The explosive new details about military doubts over the legality of the invasion are detailed in unpublished legal documents in the case of Katharine Gun, the intelligence officer dramatically freed last week after Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, dropped charges against her of breaking the Official Secrets Act.

The disclosure came as it also emerged that Goldsmith was forced hastily to redraft his legal advice to Tony Blair to give an 'unequivocal' assurance to the armed forces that the conflict would not be illegal.

Refusing to commit troops already stationed in Kuwait, senior military leaders were adamant that war could not begin until they were satisfied that neither they nor their men could be tried. Some 10 days later, Britain and America began the campaign.

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The unseen cost of the war in Iraq [Channel 4 UK]

posted by admin on Thursday February 26, @02:15AM

US Politics
Published: 10-Feb-2004
By: Jonathan Miller

More than 11,000 medical evacuees have come through Andrews in the past nine months, the Air Force says. Most, we suspect, from Iraq. But that's 8,000 more than the Pentagon says have been wounded there.

Come November, President Bush, who never fought in South East Asia, may well be up against Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet. Could that be why the dead and wounded return to Washington in the middle of the night with no fanfare?

But when it comes to the wounded, an astonishing situation has arisen: the Pentagon's figures clash wildly with those of the US Army. The Pentagon lists 2,604 wounded in action and just 408 "non-hostile wounded". But the Army says many thousands more have been medically evacuated from the conflict zone.

If the US government was to admit to the true human cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the wounded as well as the dead, then how many Americans would support George Bush and his war?

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Spy case casts fresh doubt on war legality

posted by admin on Thursday February 26, @12:36AM

Richard Norton-Taylor and Ewen MacAskill
Thursday February 26, 2004
The Guardian

Dramatic new evidence pointing to serious doubts in the government about the legality of the war in Iraq was passed to government lawyers shortly before they abandoned the prosecution of the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun.

The prosecution offered no evidence yesterday against Ms Gun, a former GCHQ employee, despite her admitting that she leaked information about an American spying operation at the UN in the run-up to the war.

She said she acted to try to prevent Britain illegally invading Iraq. But the prosecution at the Old Bailey said there was no "realistic prospect" of convicting her. She was arrested nearly a year ago and charged eight months later under the Official Secrets Act.

The leading prosecutor, Mark Ellison, said it would not be "appropriate" to go into the reasons for dropping the case.

But the Guardian has learned that a key plank of the defence presented to the prosecutors shortly before they decided to abandon the case was new evidence that the legality of the war had been questioned by the Foreign Office.

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Bush Administration Officials’ Lies about Iraq’s WMD

posted by admin on Wednesday February 11, @04:10PM

Jackson Thoreau writes"

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- Dick Cheney, speech to VFW National Convention, Aug. 26, 2002

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.
- George W. Bush, speech to UN General Assembly, Sept. 12, 2002

No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
- Donald Rumsfeld, testimony to Congress, Sept. 19, 2002

The world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq.
- George W. Bush, Nov. 23, 2002

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UK Guardian: This war is not yet over

posted by admin on Wednesday February 11, @02:40AM

It's the Alan Clark manoeuvre. When the old Tory reptile found himself assailed by a tricky argument, he would fire back with his most lethal weapon. "This is boring," he would say airily. "You are being the most frightful bore." Clark used the word often, keenly aware of its peculiarly English power to devastate. Now the government is deploying the Clark manoeuvre. Those who still insist on banging on about Iraq and its missing weapons of mass destruction are anoraks, they say, trainspotters on the fast track to Dullsville. Ministers declare that the rest of the country lost interest in this media fixation long ago. Only journalists, with their stained coats and plastic carrier bags, still care.

It is beginning to work. Plenty of those whose blood was up in the immediate aftermath of the Hutton report - the backlash against the whitewash - suspect they ought to drop it now. Better to change the subject than be a bore.

They should think again. For this is more than another political story de jour, one that looms enormous at the time but is soon forgotten. This is not the fuel protest or the Hinduja affair. On the contrary, the legitimacy of the Iraq war is about as serious a question as you could imagine; its answer could determine the way our world is ordered in the 21st century. And this is not abstract, chin-stroking stuff for the seminar room. It has direct political consequences; it could even break the governments of both Britain and the United States.

The Bush administration makes no secret that it sees the Iraq war as the prototype for future conflicts; indeed, it has enshrined the idea in its official national security strategy document. Pre-emption remains the Bush doctrine. Witness Donald Rumsfeld's revealing remarks in Munich last week. Asked whether America is bound by any international system, legal framework or code of conduct, the US defence secretary replied: "I honestly believe that every country ought to do what it wants to do ... It either is proud of itself afterwards, or it is less proud of itself." Translation: the US can do what it likes - including making war on countries that have made no attack on it.

more...
http://www.guardian.co.uk

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Powell says Iraq arms furore gets on his nerves

posted by admin on Saturday February 07, @06:52AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell has accused critics of politicising the United States' failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and said it is getting on his nerves.

"Yeah, it does get on your nerves when you see people trying to use this for straightforward political purposes," Powell said in a television interview on Friday.

...

"But the President was absolutely right in what he did. And we were all standing behind him on this one," Powell told Fox Television's "The Sean Hannity Show."

more...
http://www.reuters.co.uk

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Administration's Message on Iraq Now Strikes Discordant Notes

posted by admin on Saturday February 07, @05:57AM

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 — It will be more than a year before the country hears the conclusions of the commission that President Bush reluctantly appointed on Friday to examine what has gone wrong with American intelligence collection.

But in recent days, it has been obvious in Washington that something has also gone awry in a White House that prides itself on never wavering from its message, especially when the subject is Iraq. At moments, Mr. Bush and his national security team — badgered for explanations about whether the country would have gone to war if it knew then what it knows now — have sounded as if these days, it is every warrior for himself.

Rather than uniform and disciplined, their answers have been ad hoc and inconsistent. And the result is that the president appears very much on the defensive just at a moment when his aides thought he would be reaping the political benefits of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.

…

The change in pitch began with Mr. Bush himself, who in the heady days after Mr. Hussein's fall regularly declared that it was only a matter of time before weapons of mass destruction would be found. When the chief American weapons inspector, David A. Kay, emerged from Iraq and punctured whatever remained of that confidence, Mr. Bush shifted, declaring that the war there had been the right one to fight, for reasons having little to do with any Iraqi weapons that could have been imminently used. Yet he declared his unwavering confidence in the intelligence that lands on his desk every morning at 8, and in the people who provide it.

On Friday afternoon, looking unusually ill at ease in the White House press room while quickly announcing most of the members of his commission, he acknowledged that "some prewar intelligence assessments by America and other nations about Iraq's weapons stockpiles have not been confirmed."

more… http://www.nytimes.com

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Pro-al-Sistani group denies reports of attack on Iraq's top Shiite cleric

posted by admin on Saturday February 07, @03:19AM

Updated: U.N. Elections Team Arrives in Baghdad

The Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera had reported that unidentified gunmen fired on the ayatollah Thursday morning.

CNN reported that four attackers with AK-47s injured an unspecified number of al-Sistani bodyguards during an attempt on the cleric's life at about 10 a.m.

One of the ayatollah's guards, who identified himself as Abu Mohammed, told AP by telephone from Najaf that "there's no truth to this news" of an assassination attempt, adding "these are all lies.

"His eminence is in very good health and hasn't been subjected to any assassination attempts," he said. "There haven't been any threats ... He hasn't been out.... There has been no gunfire."

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Blumenthal: There was no failure of intelligence

posted by admin on Wednesday February 04, @06:01PM

US spies were ignored, or worse, if they failed to make the case for war

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday February 5, 2004
The Guardian

"... On January 28, Kay appeared before the Senate to testify that there were no WMDs. "It turns out that we were all wrong," he said. President Bush, he added helpfully, was misinformed by the whole intelligence community which, like Kay, made assumptions that turned out to be false.

Within days, Bush declared that he would, after all, appoint a commission to investigate; significantly, it would report its findings only after the presidential election.

Kay's testimony was the catalyst for this u-turn, but only one of his claims is correct: that he was wrong. The truth is that much of the intelligence community did not fail, but presented correct assessments and warnings, that were overridden and suppressed. On virtually every single important claim made by the Bush administration in its case for war, there was serious dissension. Discordant views - not from individual analysts but from several intelligence agencies as a whole - were kept from the public as momentum was built for a congressional vote on the war resolution.

...

This week, when Bush announced he would appoint an investigative commission, Powell offered a limited mea culpa at a meeting at the Washington Post. He said that if only he had known the intelligence, he might not have supported an invasion. Thus he began to show carefully calibrated remorse, to distance himself from other members of the administration and especially Cheney. Powell also defended his UN speech, claiming "it reflected the best judgments of all of the intelligence agencies".

more...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1141401,00.html

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Cheney key to Iraq probe, critics say

posted by admin on Tuesday February 03, @03:03AM

An inquiry into intelligence failures must include his and the Pentagon's handling of spy data, officials said.

By Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and Joseph L. Galloway
Inquirer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - What went wrong with intelligence on Iraq may never be known unless the inquiry proposed by President Bush examines secret intelligence efforts led by Vice President Cheney and Pentagon hawks, current and former U.S. officials said yesterday.

The critics said Bush may limit the inquiry's scope to the CIA and other agencies, and ignore the key role the officials said the administration's own internal intelligence efforts played in making the case for war.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, did not dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq's weapons programs. But they said intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions.

Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaeda and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/front/7859646.htm

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BBC: Blair confirms Iraq WMD inquiry

posted by admin on Tuesday February 03, @02:53AM

There will be an independent inquiry into the intelligence which led Britain to war over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Tony Blair has told MPs.

Mr Blair said there were issues over how intelligence was gathered and used by government. He said details would be given later by the foreign secretary.

But he stressed the government had been cleared of "sexing up" its dossier about Iraq's weapons.

"The issue of good faith was determined by the Hutton inquiry," he said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3453305.stm

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A Democracy Worth Reclaiming

posted by admin on Tuesday February 03, @01:31AM

An interview with former Ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson. He's down on our foreign policy but upbeat about America.

by Geov Parrish

Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson was a diplomat for 25 years, but it took the Bush administration to bring him into the public eye. At government request, Wilson traveled to Africa in 2001 to investigate claims that Iraq had been buying yellow-cake uranium. He reported back that the reports were false—months before the purported sale was cited, in the State of the Union address in 2003 and elsewhere, to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Last July, Wilson went public with the information from his trip and the subsequent apparent distortion by the Bush camp. Coincidentally, a short time later, someone in the White House leaked to the press that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. A federal grand jury is now investigating the leak. Wilson served in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1976 to 1998. Among his posts: deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 1988–91; acting ambassador to Iraq during Operation Desert Shield; ambassador to Gabon; and director for African affairs at the National Security Council in 1997–98. As an experienced hand in the heart of the U.S. diplomatic community, Wilson was ideally suited for the uranium mission. His outspokenness in its wake, against all his training, underscores the radical nature of the Bush administration. Diplomats don’t usually sound off like this.

We interviewed Wilson recently in anticipation of his appearance at McCaw Hall on Friday, Feb. 6, as part of the “American Voices” series sponsored by Foolproof Performing Arts and co-sponsored by Seattle Weekly.

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Bush to Announce Iraq Intelligence Probe This Week

posted by admin on Sunday February 01, @02:18PM

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a reversal of his position, President Bush (news - web sites) will announce this week the establishment of a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate apparent flaws in intelligence used to justify the Iraq war, senior administration officials said on Sunday.

Bush, who had earlier opposed such a commission, was under strong pressure from Republicans and Democrats in Congress to support an independent probe into intelligence that said Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons when in fact none have been found.

Assertions that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction was the main reason cited by Bush for the war, in which more than 500 U.S. troops have died.

"The president wants a broad, bipartisan and independent review of our intelligence, particularly relating to weapons of mass destruction and counter-proliferation efforts," said a senior Bush administration official, who asked to remain unidentified.

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Iraqgate: New Evidence about Fake Intel Data

posted by ewing2001 on Sunday January 04, @10:41AM

Intelligence: Who's Fueling the Rumors That Just Won't Die?

The search goes on: New evidence of Iraq's pre-war WMD program has been called into question

Newsweek -Jan. 12 issue -

Critics of Bush Administration policy in Iraq have chastised the Pentagon for relying too heavily on questionable prewar intelligence from exile groups, particularly the Iraqi National Congress, about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's Qaeda links. But now a different exile group known for its close relationship with the CIA and Britain's M.I.6—no friends of the INC—is the source of recent news leaks hyping similar claims.

A Washington, D.C., representative for Iyad Allawi, leader of the CIA/M.I.6- favored Iraqi National Accord, has confirmed that his group originated two fresh leaks about alleged prewar WMD deployments and evidence linking Saddam to 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta. (The spy agencies say the stories are uncorroborated.)

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U.S. bombs Baghdad, holds Reuters Staff near Falluja

posted by ewing2001 on Friday January 02, @10:32PM

U.S. Bombs S. Baghdad After Copter Crash

U.S. Holds Reuters Staff Near Chopper Crash in Iraq

AP -January 3

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military bombarded southern Baghdad with artillery to root out insurgents believed to be launching mortar shells and rockets, hours after a U.S. military helicopter was shot down west of the capital, killing one soldier.

...there was confusion since Reuters news agency reported that its team at the scene was fired at by U.S. troops and three were later detained by the military.

Reuters -January 3, 2004

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - American soldiers on Friday detained three Iraqis working for Reuters as they covered the aftermath of a U.S. helicopter crash near the volatile town of Falluja.

A Reuters driver who was working with the three said they had earlier been fired on by U.S. troops as they filmed a checkpoint close to the site where a Kiowa observation helicopter was shot down by guerrillas.

One pilot was killed and another injured in the crash.

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