Military - new material (68)
01 October 2009
Secret Army Squad ‘abused Iraqis’, Robert Verkaik. The Independent 1.1.10, pp. 1-2. This piece discusses a “secret army interrogation unit accused of being responsible for the widespread abuse of Iraqi prisoners” that “is being investigated by the Ministry of Defence.” The investigation into the Joint Forward Intelligence Unit, which was based at the Shaibah Logistics Base outside Basra between 2004 and 2007, has raised the total number of cases of abuse by British soldiers being investigated by the government to 47.
The Truth of the UK’s Guilt over Iraq, Scott Ritter. The Guardian 27.11.09. Ritter, the chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, who in 2003 publicly argued that there were no weapons of mass destruction in the country, conducts a postmortem of the position of the British government in the cause of illegal US regime change. He writes: “Having played the WMD card so forcefully in an effort to justify war with Iraq, the US (and by extension, Britain) were compelled once again to revisit the issue of disarmament... The decision to use military force to overthrow Saddam was made by these two leaders independent of any proof that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Having found Iraq guilty, the last thing those who were positioning themselves for war wanted was to re-engage a process that not only failed to uncover any evidence [of] Iraq’s retention of WMD in the past, but was actually positioned to produce fact-based evidence that would either contradict or significantly weaken the case for war already endorsed by Bush and Blair.”
Intoxicated by power, Blair tricked us into war, Ken Macdonald. The Times 14.12.09. This feature article by Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions between 2003-2008, describes “a foreign policy disgrace of epic proportions” or the decision to go to war against Iraq. He says of this decision: “It is now very difficult to avoid the conclusion that [prime minister] Tony Blair engaged in an alarming subterfuge with his partner George Bush and went on to mislead and cajole the British people into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn’t want, and on a basis that it’s increasingly hard to believe even he found truly credible.” The former DPP warns that if the ongoing Chilcott inquiry into the war fails to deliver the truth “the inquiry will be held in deserved and withering contempt.”
Blair should answer to Britain, not Britton, Alex Carlile. Independent on Sunday 13.12.09. Carlile, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism laws, comments on Tony Blair’s decision to air a public BBC warm-up interview with Fern Britton as a prelude to giving evidence before the supine Chilcott Inquiry into the war in Iraq. Blair told Britton that: “he would have regarded regime change in Iraq as justifiable anyway, even if there had been no intelligence of weapons of mass destruction at the time when he told Parliament that they could be deployed in 45 minutes.”