Archive for 'Iraq Planning' Category
War planning wholly irresponsible, say senior military figures
by Chris Ames The Guardian again steps into the vacuum left be the absence of a report from the Inquiry as the 10th anniversary approaches. As part of the paper’s Iraq war: 10 years on strand, my collegue Richard Norton-Taylor reports that: The way Britain was led into war with Iraq 10 years ago was [...]
Major new questions for Blair
by Chris Ames The Sunday Telegraph has put together three different angles for its lead story today Iraq War: major new questions for Tony Blair. But how much of this is new? A lot of it seems like familiar ground to those people who have followed what the Inquiry has thrown up and what has [...]
Forthcoming event – the dossier 10 years on
by Andrew Mason The University of Westminster (in conjunction with the Media Society and Biteback Publishing) will be hosting a debate about the continuing and serious fallout that the publication of the notorious September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and the following ‘dodgy’ February 2003 paper on Iraq’s infrastructure of concealment, deception [...]
CIA ‘mea culpa’ published
by Andrew Mason Washington, DC, September 5, 2012 – The online magazine ForeignPolicy.com today published an extraordinary CIA document on the recent Iraq war which the National Security Archive obtained through a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) request to the CIA. The document, “Misreading Intentions: Iraq’s Reaction to Inspection Created Picture of Deception,” dated January 5, [...]
New moves towards Australian Iraq inquiry
by Andrew Mason A group of leading Australians have now started a campaign to gain a full inquiry into their country’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Their reasoning for this move has been set out in a newly published booklet – Why Did We Go to War in Iraq? A call for an [...]
Countdown to Iraq
by Andrew Mason Alastair Campbell is scheduled to release Volume Four of his diaries on 20 June. This further edition, entitled ‘The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq’, is the final planned part of his series, although this new volume apparently indicates that he continued to keep a diary beyond 2003, the entries from which may [...]
My pick for the end of the (war) year
by Andrew Mason Never Forget the Iraq War Paul R. Pillar was the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005. In early 2006 he became publicly critical of the Bush Administration’s political use of intelligence material to evidently justify the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. He wrote [...]
Blair and regime change
by Brian Jones From declassified documents released in May, it has become clear that, in early 2002, Tony Blair’s overriding wish was to use Iraq as the next step in the application of the political philosophy of “liberal intervention” to which he had become wedded in his first term of office. This was made plain [...]
What really happened is in the redactions
by Chris Ames It may be that the most revealing piece of testimony of all comes in a passage from the secret session with the MI6 witness identified as SIS1, a passage that has been almost entirely redacted. It starts off with a redacted question: SIR RODERIC LYNE: I want to look at the period [...]
The UN route to removing Saddam
by Chris Ames The recently published transcript of the “private” (ie secret) hearing with Sir Tony Brenton, who was “Minister and at times Chargé d’affaires” at the British Embassy in Washington between January 2001 and March 2004 is both fascinating and revealing. The session took place on 17 January this year, just before Tony Blair’s [...]