Archive for 'Issues' Category
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 [...]
Report: De-Baathification Still Haunts Iraq
by Chris Ames One of the lessons of the invasion that everyone seems to agree with is that de-Ba’athification – the removal of Ba’ath party members from Iraqi institutions (along with the disbandment of the army) was a major mistake. The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) has today released a report today detailing this [...]
Ten years on – War, Lies and Video
by Andrew Mason From Point du Jour International – coming shortly (currently in production, available at the end of February). The trailer: The promotional description: On the occasion the 10th anniversary of the start of the War in Iraq. Ten years after the start of a war that left between 100 000 and 250 000 [...]
Ten years on – the reflection begins
by Andrew Mason As we now approach the tenth anniversary of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq it appears that there is likely to be some significant re-examination of some of the supposedly “solid” evidence that became the major casus belli for this now recognisably illicit military intervention – namely that Iraq remained in possession [...]
Stumbing quietly into the debate?
by Andrew Mason The publication of Kevin Marsh’s new book ‘Stumbling Over Truth’ seems to have attracted little media attention and has so far generated no wider commentary about the circumstances it describes and the issues it raises. John Kampfner, writing for the Observer last Sunday, appears to be the only mainstream journalist to have [...]
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, [...]
On the WMD ‘lie’
by Andrew Mason Kevin Marsh, formerly the editor of the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme at the time when Andrew Gilligan made his now most infamous comment that Tony Blair’s government probably knew that the 45 minute claim was wrong (even before it was written into the September 2002 Iraq WMD dossier), has now entered [...]
An open letter to the Information Commissioner
by Andrew Mason Following the non-release by means of veto of the March 13 and 17 2003 cabinet minutes, Dr Christopher Lamb, the originator of two Freedom of Information requests seeking the release of these records, has now written an open letter to the Information Commissioner. This letter asks the Commissioner to commission his lawyers [...]
Blair silent on FOI review
by Andrew Mason This short piece by Nigel Morris in today’s Independent should be of interest to many of the Digest’s regular commentators, in particular those who make FOIA requests themselves. It would appear that former PM Tony Blair could not find the time to personally fulfil a request by a Parliamentary committee to give [...]