UK: Goldsmith 'scraped legal barrel' over Iraq war

[emad]

The UK's Guardian reports today that legal arguments justifying the invasion of Iraq were highly flawed, according to a top UK judge and law reform expert:

<snip>:

A leading legal peer accused the attorney general last night of "scraping the bottom of the legal barrel" to give legitimacy to the war on Iraq. Lord Alexander of Weedon QC, chairman of the all-party law reform group, Justice, said it was "risible" for the government to rely on a UN resolution passed in 1990 as the basis for an invasion of Iraq in 2003 - which ministers knew the security council would not authorise. Lord Alexander, a former chairman of the bar and ex-chairman of NatWest, called on the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to disclose all of his advice to the government that a unilateral strike would be justified under international law so its context could be properly understood.

....Lord Alexander said he found it "almost incomprehensible" that the attorney general refused to release the rest of his judgment. This meant the rationale for the decision to go to war was never exposed to public debate.

"They had to find some other way of justifying their action in international law," he said. "So they fell back on the 12-year-old resolution 678 of 1990 passed for the purpose of authorising the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and the restoration of peace in the Middle East. An old resolution passed for a different and more limited purpose was ingeniously used as a cloak for the very action which the United Nations would not currently countenance."

The government was "driven to scrape the bottom of the legal barrel" because other possible justifications for war under international law, such as self-defence or humanitarian intervention, did not apply. The great majority of the public international lawyers who had expressed a view did not agree with the attorney general's advice, he said.

<snip>

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1063130,00.html


Another nail in the coffin, Tony.........Just how many more do you need???

[Capt_Nemo]

1. This story deserves a bump!

[gratuitous]

2. The "rationale . . . was never exposed to public debate"

Well gawwww-lee! Color me just whomper-jawed! The true rationale and motive for invading Iraq were never exposed to public debate??? I can't imagine such a thing!

[emad]

3. Blair was SO confident about the end justifying the means

he bought into a whole heap of counter-intelligence centred on WMDs and fissile materiel from Niger, knowing he and Dumbo could railroad the whole thing without any true debate.

Another thing: in the UK no one can start a war or join a war without the Monarch's Official Assent: Queen giving permission for her troops to be used for act(s) of warfare.

Where was the assent?

No legal debate, no assent.