Michael Smith

BREAKING: Another Bombshell from Downing Street

Tue Jun 14, 2005 13:58

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BREAKING: Another Bombshell from Downing Street
June 12, 2005

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’
Michael Smith
http://www.livejournal.com/users/mparent7777/82553.html

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

“US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia,” the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality “would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation”.

The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

“It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject,” the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be “most unlikely” to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.

There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month’s publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to “the DSM” on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.

The White House has declined to respond to a letter from 89 Democratic congressmen asking if it was true — as Dearlove told the July meeting — that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” in Washington.

The Downing Street memo burst into the mainstream American media only last week after it was raised at a joint Bush-Blair press conference, forcing the prime minister to insist that “the facts were not fixed in any shape or form at all”.

John Conyers, the Democratic congressman who drafted the letter to Bush, has now written to Dearlove asking him to say whether or not it was accurate that he believed the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. He also asked the former MI6 chief precisely when Bush and Blair had agreed to invade Iraq and whether it is true they agreed to “manufacture” the UN ultimatum in order to justify the war.

He and other Democratic congressmen plan to hold their own inquiry this Thursday with witnesses including Joe Wilson, the American former ambassador who went to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium ore for its nuclear weapons programme.

Frustrated at the refusal by the White House to respond to their letter, the congressmen have set up a website — www.downingstreetmemo.com — to collect signatures on a petition demanding the same answers.

Conyers promised to deliver it to Bush once it reached 250,000 signatures. By Friday morning it already had more than 500,000 with as many as 1m expected to have been obtained when he delivers it to the White House on Thursday.

AfterDowningStreet.org, another website set up as a result of the memo, is calling for a congressional committee to consider whether Bush’s actions as depicted in the memo constitute grounds for impeachment.

It has been flooded with visits from people angry at what they see as media self-censorship in ignoring the memo. It claims to have attracted more than 1m hits a day.

Democrats.com, another website, even offered $1,000 (about £550) to any journalist who quizzed Bush about the memo’s contents, although the Reuters reporter who asked the question last Tuesday was not aware of the reward and has no intention of claiming it.

The complaints of media self-censorship have been backed up by the ombudsmen of The Washington Post, The New York Times and National Public Radio, who have questioned the lack of attention the minutes have received from their organisations.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html

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The People’s Investigative Committee
who will conduct the
1st Public Televised Hearing by this Committee
to Explore Impeaching Bush and Cheney
as the only way to end the Iraq Oil Colony war and make Congress and the voters aware of the realistic Exit Plan immediately available
The People’s Investigative Committee
http://www.billyjack.com/index.php?menuID=Page&pid=94

A Challenge to every rational person

We challenge every reasonable person, including those who were for the war and voted for Bush, to look at the facts printed below that would be presented to the American people via this televised Hearing and not agree that if the voters had this information, Bush would never have been able to invade Iraq.

Imagine it is the Summer of 2002, and Bush is convincingly flooding America with the propaganda that Hussein was involved in 9/11, is allied with bin Laden, and poses an immediate nuclear and WMD terrorist threat to America. Remember Condileezza Rice warning us about the “mushroom cloud” if we don’t act immediately?

America believed every bit of it. There was no effective way to counteract that propaganda and prove they were lies, and it was inconceivable for Americans to believe that their President would deliberately be lying about Hussein’s being an immediate threat.

Now, what if at the same time, the People’s Investigative Committee was holding an open televised Hearing to see whether or not the claims made by Bush were true, and the panel conducting these Hearings was composed of mainstream American voters, some known, some unknown, not politicians, political appointees, or Party hacks?

What if among the panelists were such well known people as Walter Cronkite, or David Gergen, whose impeccable integrity and stable judgment had both Republican and Democratic Presidents seek his fair, objective advice, or Jon Stewart, or Bono to attract a wider mainstream audience, as well as a middle school teacher mother of three, a fireman whose son was killed in the First Gulf War, and other mainstream non-partisan Americans from every walk of life?

What if top Intelligence Agents told America Bush was lying?

What if the witnesses were Intelligence Agency experts from the CIA, the FBI, NSI, etc, and what if expert witness after expert witness told us at this Hearing on national television so every American could hear their testimony first hand, that everything – EVERYTHING -- we were being told by Bush about Hussein being an immediate security threat was a lie?

What if they told the American people back in 2002, on live television, that the evidence their Agencies told Bush and Cheney showed clearly that Hussein was not involved in 9/11, not involved with bin Laden and Al Qaeda, not holding vast stockpiles of WMD, and not even close to building a nuclear bomb – what if every one of these top Intelligence Agents told us that these things Bush was telling the American people were false, deliberate lies?
What if Bush and Cheney buried the evidence and forged their own?

More astonishing, what if these Intelligence officers testified that Bush and Cheney were told by every Agency that Hussein was not involved, and Bush and Cheney buried that evidence, created their own secret Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon, staffed not by Intelligence experts but consultants and lawyers, and then, these witnesses testified, that Bush and Cheney actually forged and manufactured their own false evidence about Hussein in order to scare the Congress and the American people in order to approve their previous decision to invade Iraq for its oil?

These accusations made by top Intelligence experts, would explode in the American collective as a political nuclear bomb that would dominate American and world news and would control the decision of whether or not to approve Bush going to war with Iraq.

Instead of millions of people pouring into the streets in America and around the world, tens of millions of people would have poured into the streets and flooded Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House.

Here is a small sample of the quality of the witnesses and their expertise.

Here is the shocking, sometimes even astonishing, hard facts these witnesses would have said – and will say in our Hearing to Impeach Bush & Cheney
MORE:>>
http://www.billyjack.com/index.php?menuID=Page&pid=94