The British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq that military action could be ruled illegal.
The government was so concerned that it might be prosecuted that it set up a team of lawyers to prepare for legal action in an international court.
And a parliamentary answer issued days before the war in the name of Lord Goldsmith -- but presented by ministers as his official opinion before the crucial Commons vote -- was drawn up in Prime Minister Tony Blair's office in Downing Street, not in the attorney general's chambers.
The full picture of how the government manipulated the legal justification for war, and political pressure placed on its most senior law officer, was revealed in the London-based Guardian newspaper yesterday.
It appears that Lord Goldsmith never wrote an unequivocal formal legal opinion that the invasion was lawful, as demanded by Lord Boyce, chief of defense staff at the time.
In her letter of resignation in protest against the war, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser at the Foreign Office, described the planned invasion of Iraq as a "crime of aggression."
She said she could not agree to military action in circumstances she described as "so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law."
Her uncompromising comments, and disclosures about Lord Goldsmith's relations with ministers in the run-up to war, appear in a book by Philippe Sands, a QC in the Matrix chambers of Blair's wife, Cherie Booth, and professor of international law at University College London.
Lord Goldsmith warned Blair in a document on March 7, 2003 that the use of force against Iraq could be illegal. It would be safer to have a second UN resolution explicitly sanctioning military action.
"So concerned was the government about the possibility of such a case that it took steps to put together a legal team to prepare for possible international litigation," Sands wrote.
The government has refused to publish the March 7 document. It was circulated to only a very few senior ministers. All Lord Goldsmith gave the Cabinet was a later oral presentation of a parliamentary answer issued under his name on March 17.
This appears contrary to the official ministerial code, which states that the complete text of opinions by the government's law officers should be seen by the full Cabinet.
On March 13, 2003, Lord Goldsmith told Lord Falconer, then a Home Office minister, and Baroness Morgan, Blair's director of political and government relations, that he believed an invasion would, after all, be legal without a new UN security council resolution, according to Sands.
On March 17, in response to a question from Baroness Ramsay, a Labour peer, Lord Goldsmith stated that it was "plain" Iraq continued to be in material breach of UN resolution 1441.
"Plain to whom?" Sands asks. It is clear, he says, that Lord Goldsmith's answer was "neither a summary nor a precis of any of the earlier advices which the attorney general had provided."
He adds: "The March 17 statement does not seem to have been accompanied by a formal and complete legal opinion or advice in the usual sense, whether written by the attorney general, or independently by a barrister retained by him."
A spokeswoman for Lord Goldsmith said yesterday: "The attorney has said on many occasions he is not going to discuss process issues."
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS