case against iraq whistleblower collapses

[Pinball]

Ooh, it's enough to make you hard encrypt your emails with PGP and buy one of those fancy scrambler phones. Oh they're illegal you say? There's a surprise...

[Timmay]

What's illegal? PGP and scrambler phones?

[Ambient Sheep]

Lengthy but interesting article in The Observer today, including an interview with Katharine Gun at the start of it.

One of the more interesting points to come out of it was that apparently our Attorney-General knows fuck-all about international law, by trade he's a commercial and property lawyer.

By contrast the Foreign Office's international law expert believed and still believes that the war was illegal, and resigned just before it in protest (which I hadn't heard before).

Here's some of the bits about that particular point:

The key question was that without a second UN resolution would Ministers and military commanders be breaking international law by ordering the troops into battle.

If the answer was yes, then Ministers, generals and even soldiers could face the possibility of being prosecuted for war crimes. Britain could also face multi-million pound claims from international businesses who might claim financial loss caused by any illegal invasion. It is no understatement to say that the issue of legality was one of the momentous decisions of law for a generation.

The man on whose shoulders this historic question rested was Peter Goldsmith, the 53-year old millionaire barrister Blair chose to be his Attorney-General in 2001. As the Government's chief in-house lawyer, Goldsmith's duty was to advise Ministers on the legality of their actions.

Yet what did Goldsmith know about international law? Before he was appointed, this bespectacled QC was one of the select club of barristers earning a £1m-a-year the lucrative field of banking and commercial law...There was no doubt that this son of a solicitor from Liverpool who was educated at Cambridge was one of the brainiest corporate lawyers of his generation. But he had earned his formidable legal reputation and his fortune dissecting complex financial matters not United Nation resolutions.

Now his legal brain would be turned to making a judgment that would seal the fate of thousands of lives and Blair's political legacy. For Goldsmith, the stakes could not have been any higher.  Rumours were circulating that the Labour peer was on the brink of resigning because he believed it was necessary for Blair to obtain a second UN resolution. His private political secretary, the Labour MP Michael Foster, was about to tender his resignation over this issue.

Yet even more troubling for Goldsmith was the legal advice from a formidable legal team working within the bowels of the Foreign Office. Deputy legal adviser Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a government lawyer for 29 years and an expert on international law, had no doubts about the need for a second UN resolution: 'I did not agree that the use of force against Iraq was legal,' she has told friends.

Wilmshurst was not alone in that view - it was shared by the entire legal team of the Foreign office. Yet this highly-respected lawyer, who is now head of the International Law Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, was alone in what she chose to do next. So outraged at what she believed was the inevitable decision to go to war despite her legal advice, she quit.
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The Observer has now learnt that only days before military action was due to begin, the Attorney-General's original advice was not deemed strong enough for senior figures in the armed forces. Sir Michael Boyce, the Chief of Defence Staff, is understood to have warned Blair that some of his senior military chiefs had serious doubts about the legality of the war and were unhappy about sending in troops on Goldsmith's original advice. For Blair this was a crisis of monumental proportions. Britain already had its troops in Kuwait prepared for battle and had given George Bush a promise that British troops would join US soldiers in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The exact details of what happened next is not known. But one key figure that emerged is Professor Christopher Greenwood, a leading international lawyer at the London School of Economics and a barrister at Essex Court Chambers. He has already made his views public that he did not believe a second UN resolution was necessary and the right to use force against Saddam derived from UN Security Resolution 678, the resolution that first authorised force to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1990.

His argument was that as Saddam was thought to have weapons of mass destruction he had not disarmed according to terms of the ceasefire agreed with Iraq more than a decade ago. Greenwood believed that because the unanimous UN resolution 1441 passed in November 2002 declared Iraq in 'material breach' of its ceasefire obligations, the original resolution 678 was revived, permitting US and Britain to use any 'necessary means'. This was a highly controversial view, rejected by many leading international lawyers who insisted that any use of force required a new resolution.

Greenwood confirmed to The Observer that he did advise the Government along these lines, but refused to say when. 'Like all barristers, I have a duty of confidentiality to my client,' he said.

Yet it now appears that Greenwood's advice played a key role. On Monday 17 March, Blair called an emergency Cabinet meeting. Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, had just announced his resignation. With the doors to the Downing Street garden opened to cool the heated atmosphere, Goldsmith took the seat of Cook and circulated two sides of A4 spelling out the the legal authority for going to war with Iraq. No discussion was allowed. Former Cabinet Minister Clare Short tried to ask why the legal advice had emerged so late and whether there was any doubt, but she was not allowed to speak. Goldsmith's final legal advice closely followed Greenwood's and it was clear the the military chiefs were now happy. 'Shock and Awe' was less than two days away.

Also an article about "How Britain and the US listen to the rest of the world" here.  It mentions the "E-word".