By Dave Lindorff, The Public Record, Nov 24, 2009
Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2009. Photo by Andy Mettler/flickrMost Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British leaders that led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday, news began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that the government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the public about the country’s involvement in war planning.
Britain’s Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published documents from British military leaders, including a memo from British special forces head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been instructed to begin “working the war up since early 2002.”
This means that Blair, who in July 2002, had assured members of a House of Commons committee that there were “no preparations to invade Iraq,” was lying.
Things are likely to heat up when the commission begins hearing testimony. It has the power, and intends to compel testimony from top government officials, including Blair himself.
While some American newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, have run an Associated Press report on the new disclosures and on the commission, key news organizations, including the New York Times, have not. The Times ignored the Telegraph report, but a day later ran an article about the British commission that focused entirely on evidence that British military leaders in Iraq felt “slighted” by “arrogant” American military leaders who, the article reported, pushed for aggressive military action against insurgent groups, while British leaders preferred negotiating with them.
While that may be of some historical interest, it hardly compares with the evidence that Blair and the Bush/Cheney administration were secretly conspiring to invade Iraq as early as February and March 2002.
Recall that the Bush/Cheney argument to Congress and the American people for initiating a war against Iraq in the fall of 2002 was that Iraq was allegedly behind the 9-11 attacks and that it posed an “imminent” danger of attack against the US and Britain with its alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, such arguments, which have subsequently been shown to have been bogus, would have had no merit if the planning began a year earlier, and if no such urgency was expressed by the two leaders at that time. Imminent, after all, means imminent, and if Blair, Bush and Cheney had genuinely thought an attack with WMDs was imminent back in the early days of the Bush administration, they would have been acting immediately, not secretly conjuring up a war scheduled for a year later. (The actual invasion began on March 19, 2003).
As I documented in my book, The Case for Impeachment, there is plenty of evidence that Bush and Cheney had a scheme to put the US at war with Iraq even before Bush took office on Jan. 20, 2001. Then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in his own tell-all book, The Price of Loyalty, written after he was dumped from the Bush Administration, recounts that at the first meeting of Bush’s new National Security Council, the question of going to war and ousting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was on the agenda.
Immediately after the 9-11 attacks, NSC anti-terrorism program czar Richard Clarke also recalled Bush ordering him to “find a link” to Iraq. Meanwhile, within days, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ordering top generals to prepare for an Iraq invasion. Gen. Tommy Franks, who was heading up the military effort in Afghanistan that was reportedly closing in on Osama Bin Laden, found the rug being pulled out from under him as Rumsfeld began shifting troops out of Afghanistan and to Kuwait in preparation for the new war.
It is nothing less than astonishing that so little news of the British investigation into the origins of the illegal Iraq War is being conveyed to Americans by this country’s corporate media—yet another example demonstrating that American journalism is dead or dying.
It is even more astonishing that neither the Congress nor the president here in America is making any similar effort to put America’s leaders in the dock to tell the truth about their machinations in engineering a war that has cost the US over $1 trillion (perhaps $3 trillion eventually when debt payments and the cost of veterans care is added in), and over 4000 lives, not to mention as many as one million innocent Iraqi lives.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net
Peace and Justice Post 
Iraq inquiry – another whitewash?
November 25, 2009Britain’s most wide-ranging inquiry into the Iraq war is under way – but in a country where two previous inquiries were branded little more than “establishment whitewash” – is it likely the latest examination will satisfy the public?
The opening of the official inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war began with a promise on Tuesday.
John Chilcot, the former civil servant heading the investigation, pledged that his committee would be “thorough, impartial, objective and fair” in its examination of the six-year conflict.
Along with four other panel members, he has been tasked with examining the reasons Britain entered the war, the equipment and training of forces in Iraq, and the foreign policy and military lessons that can be used by future governments.
Chilcot has insisted that there will be no cover-up and institutions or individuals will face criticism if it is deserved.
Public scepticism
But scepticism remains high among a public left disappointed by the two previous inquiries looking at aspects of the conflict.
In 2004 the Hutton report, which examined the circumstances leading to the death of David Kelly, a former government adviser, was attacked for its lack of criticism of the government and its refusal to investigate its reasons for joining the war.
The Butler report, which followed shortly after, did find that key intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq was unreliable, but did not accuse the government of misleading the public over the reasons for going into war, or apportion blame.
Lindsey German of the Stop the War Coalition believes Chilcot’s inquiry will be no different.
“This is a committee that is founded within the British establishment which will do nothing serious to challenge the British establishment,” she told Al Jazeera.
“It’s not a genuine cross-section of British opinion – it has no anti-war opinion on the committee.”
Anti-war voice
She criticised the inclusions of Lawrence Freedman, an adviser to former British prime minister Tony Blair, Martin Gilbert, a “pro-war historian”, and Sir Roderic Lyne, who took up a post as an advisor to BP, which led a consortium that secured an Iraqi oil contract, on the inquiry’s five-member panel.
Vincent Moss, political editor of the Sunday Mirror newspaper
“Why shouldn’t a member of the military be a member of the panel, why shouldn’t there be people who opposed the war from the beginning?” German asked.She believes the decision to hold a public inquiry, rather than a judicial one, is a key failing of the investigation.
“I don’t see the point of having an inquiry if at the end of it is says there is no one to blame for that.”
Her views were echoed by Sabah al-Mukhtar, an Iraqi lawyer and president of the Arab Lawyers’ Association, who has questioned the motives behind the inquiry.
“The government for the first time sets up an inquiry, which it sets out a time limit for … not when it finishes, but not to finish before [the general election]. One can imagine why it is being done this way.
“Certainly this is the most comprehensive [inquiry] … but don’t forget, not many other countries [have seen] their politicians explicitly accused by other politicians of misleading the public and parliament as it happened here.
“Here we would have thought that if somebody of that calibre is accused of this you would have to have a judicial inquiry… not to have just a whitewash, which just looks at the technicalities and the papers.”
‘Massive pressure’
But others remain more positive that the latest investigation can uncover some of the reasoning that led Britain into the much-criticised conflict.
Vincent Moss, the political editor of Britain’s Sunday Mirror newspaper, believes the inquiry has no choice but to be transparent.”[Chilcot] is under such massive pressure from the media and the relatives to be as transparent and open as possible, and to be fair to him his opening remarks said that’s what he’s determined to do,” he said.
“Most of it will be public and all the key players are going to be up there and answering questions. It will probably be the most forensic inquiry into Iraq anywhere in the world. We’ve not seen anything like this in the States.
Moss said the new inquiry is likely to knock the Hutton and Butler reports into the shade due to the “deluge” of documentary evidence and “the number of people they’re able to call in”.
‘Detailed scrutiny’
But he cautioned that those who dream of seeing Tony Blair “tried, convicted and dragged off in chains” are likely to be disappointed.
“I think what we’ll end up with is a good look at everything that happened in detailed scrutiny … but for those who hoped it would be some kind of old fashioned English court … those people will claim it’s a whitewash.
“You’ll see a bit of lessons learnt, but if you think there’s going to be a tabloid headline saying ‘Tony Blair guilty as charged’, it’s not going to happen.”
George Eaton, a journalist for Britain’s New Statesman magazine, also believes Chilcot will “not go soft on the government”.
“He’s already ensured that as much of the inquiry as possible will be held in public. so I’m not cynical about this. I think Chilcot will do the job he’s set out to.
But, as Moss points out, the proof of the pudding will be seen in the next few months.
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Tags:Iraq war inquiry, John Chilcot, Lawrence Freedman, Lindsey German, public scepticism
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