The Truth About Chilcot 145


The death toll from the horrific recent Iraq bombings has risen over 250. If Blair had not been absolutely determined to attack Iraq on the basis of a knowing lie about WMD, they would be alive now, along with millions of other dead. ISIS would never have taken control of territory in Iraq and Syria. Al Qaeda would never have grown from an organisation of a few hundred to one of tens of thousands. We would not have a completely destabilised Middle East and a massive refugee crisis.

Do not expect a full truth and a full accounting from the Chilcot panel of establishment trusties today. Remember who they are.

Sir John Chilcot

Member of the Butler Inquiry which whitewashed the fabrication of evidence of Iraqi WMD. The fact is that, beyond doubt, the FCO and SIS knew there were no Iraqi WMD. In the early 1990’s I had headed the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre, tasked with monitoring and preventing Iraqi attempts at weapons procurement. In 2002 I was on a course for newly appointed Ambassadors alongside Bill Patey, who was Head of the FCO Department dealing with Iraq. Bill is a fellow Dundee University graduate and is one of the witnesses before the Iraq Inquiry this morning. I suggested to him that the stories we were spreading about Iraqi WMD could not be true. He laughed and said “Of course not Craig, it’s bollocks”. I had too many other conversations to mention over the next few months, with FCO colleagues who knew the WMD scare to be false.

Yet Chilcot was party to a Butler Inquiry conclusion that the Iraqi WMD scare was an “Honest mistake”. That a man involved on a notorious whitewash is assuring us that this will not be one, is bullshit.

Sir Roderick Lyne

A good friend and former jogging partner of Alastair Campbell.

Last time I actually spoke to him we were both Ambassadors and on a British frigate moored on the Neva in St Petersburg. Colleagues may have many words to describe Rod Lyne, some of them complimentary, but “open-minded” is not one of them.

If the Committee were to feel that the Iraq War was a war crime, then Rod Lyne would be accusing himself. As Ambassador to Moscow he was active in trying to mitigate Russian opposition to the War. He personally outlined to the Russian foreign minister the lies on Iraqi WMD. There was never the slightest private indication that Lyne had any misgivings about the war.

From Uzbekistan we always copied Moscow in on our reporting telegrams, for obvious reasons. Lyne responded to my telegrams protesting at the CIA’s use of intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers, by requesting not to be sent such telegrams.

Sir Lawrence Freedman

Lawrence Freedman is the most appalling choice of all. The patron saint of “Justified” wars of aggression, and exponent of “Wars of Choice” and “Humanitarian Intervention”. He is 100% parti pris.

Here is part of his evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution on 18 January 2006:

The basic idea here is that our armed forces prepared for what we might call wars of necessity, that the country was under an existential threat so if you did not respond to that threat then in some very basic way our vital interests, our way of life, would be threatened, and when you are looking at certain such situations, these are great national occasions. The difficulty we are now facing with wars of choice is that these are discretionary and the government is weighing a number of factors against each other. I mentioned Sierra Leone but Rwanda passed us by, which many people would think was an occasion when it would have been worth getting involved. There was Sudan and a lot of things have been said about Darfur but not much has happened…

…Iraq was a very unusual situation where it was not an ongoing conflict. If we had waited things would not have been that much different in two or three months’ time and so, instead of responding either to aggression by somebody else, as with the Falklands, or to developing humanitarian distress, as in the Balkans, we decided that security considerations for the future demanded immediate action.”

Sir Martin Gilbert (died in course of Inquiry)

Very right wing historian whose biography of Churchill focussed on Gilbert’s relish for war and was otherwise dull. (Roy Jenkins’ Churchill biography is infinitely better). Gilbert was not only rabidly pro-Iraq War, he actually saw Blair as Churchill.

Although it can easily be argued that George W Bush and Tony Blair face a far lesser challenge than Roosevelt and Churchill did – that the war on terror is not a third world war – they may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Their societies are too divided today to deliver a calm judgment, and many of their achievements may be in the future: when Iraq has a stable democracy, with al-Qaeda neutralised, and when Israel and the Palestinian Authority are independent democracies, living side by side in constructive economic cooperation.

Baroness Prashar

A governor of the FCO institution the Ditchley Foundation – of which the Director is Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK Ambassador to the UN who presented the lies about Iraqi WMD and was intimately involved in the lead in to war. So very much another cosy foreign policy insider.

So, in short, the committee – all hand-picked by Gordon Brown – could not have been better picked to ensure a whitewash.

Over 50% of the British population were against the Iraq War, including for example many scores of distinguished ex-Ambassadors, many military men and many academics. Yet Brown chose nobody on the Inquiry who had been against the Iraq War, while three out of five were active and open supporters of the war.

Do not expect to see this truth reflected in any of the mainstream media coverage.


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145 thoughts on “The Truth About Chilcot

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  • Je

    [ Mod: Caught in spam-filter, timestamp updated]
    —-

    The Guardian set up a page asking if anyone has spotted something they missed in Chilcot. So I pointed out that the words “Sharon” and “Mossad” aren’t in the report… even though they were fingered by the Guardian’s own article from 2003 as behind the fraudulent WMD.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/17/iraq.usa

    You’d think they’d now be shouting and screaming about having had all that – that wasn’t in Chilcot.

    I’ve actually had posts removed from Guardian comments in the past that contained nothing but a reference to that… their own… article. Or anything suggesting a connection between Friends of Israel lobbying and the invasion of Iraq.

    • Ba'al Zevul

      Ah, the OSP. Integral to PNAC and ‘A Clean Break’. Mossad allowed where the Pentagon couldn’t go. I remember it well. Yes, we could do with a little more information on who Blair met in the US when he wasn’t slobbering into the seat of Bush’s pants. From Michael Levy onwards, Blair has always had friends known for their devotion to Israel. The Milken connection might be worth exploring, these days.

  • Paul Merron

    I have video of demonstrators back decades ago in Knightsbridge London marching to Downing Street on a Sunday night around midnight (The time allocated for them to protest) against UK supplying chemical weapons to Saddam and training his scientists at Porton Down just after he used these weapons. Guilty parties should be accountable and those responsible taken to trial. From what I have heard these weapons were supplied by UK and USA. Why were they ever issued if that is the case? To destabilize region? Blood is on hands of Blair & Bush. I now live in fear of my life because London, UK is now a prime target. These fools have created home grown terrorists which effect us all in these nations and already have killed many people in Iraq & Afghanistan. Support for Israel disgusts me as they are war criminals. Until the West stands up against such tyranny we shall all live in fear and have our lives effected. Chilcot report has been a total whitewash with hand picked people who appear not to be neutral in this case. Many of us will not rest or be happy until those guilty are accountable both here and in USA for their duplicity or crimes including Rumsfeld, Blair, Bush, Rice, Straw and Cheney.

    • Macky

      @Paul Merron, I would be interested to know if George Galloway appears in any of your videos; the reason for this is that certain right wing commentators always try to deny that Galloway ever opposed Saddam, even when I quote from the earliest Hansard records I can find from the 1980’s.

  • fwl

    Thank goodness for CM, no saint, not always right, but a voice worth hearing. Where is the newspaper proprietor with the guts to give Craig an unedited column a day and £250k per year.

  • Je

    Well the Independent has started moderating my comments after I started posting about Chilcot, Iraq and Friends of Israel etc.

    After being baffled as to why the Tories voted for the invasion nearly to a man… then twigging when I discovered over 80% of their MPs were in Conservative Friends of Israel… and learning about the people surrounding Bush and Blair… I’ve spent ever since having posts and comments about it deleted or getting moderated for it. British newspapers like the Independent and the Guardian are such hypocrites. They’re scared of the truth about the invasion of Iraq being voiced on their own websites.

    Most of the population are still scratching their heads as to why Iraq was invaded. Not a word in Chilcot about Friends of Israel or Sharon providing the fraudulent WMD.

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