Bliar lied – OFFICIAL

It’s been quite a day for Iraq stories. The US military has been carrying out raids in the western Iraqi province of Anbar in a crackdown on insurgents. The civil war continued, with the US having to launch another fairly major offensive against ‘insurgents’. Of course they’re not insurgents to many of the people of Iraq, but freedom fighters. I can do no better than quote Seymour Hersh on this subject.

Let's all forget this word “insurgency”. It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started -- they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications.

Then, just to prove that the UK army can be as insensitive as the US (not all of it though obviously) Two British soldiers have been found guilty at a court martial of charges relating to abusing Iraqi prisoners. This is just a dreadful. What were they thinking? The pictures and the trial outcome will be broadcast across Iraq and could lead to revenge attacks. When you’re original motive for war turns out to be a sham and you start using human rights as your justification then you have to be whiter than white. It’s especially sad as our troops had enjoyed a good reputation – we started well with Colonel Tim Collins’ speech on the eve of the invasion asking our soldiers to be “ferocious in battle and magnanimous in victory”. Such a shame so much work has been undone.

The biggest story of the day has to be this one though. Important new revelations have emerged on the legality of the war against Iraq which overthrew Saddam. This blows the whole scam out of the water. It seems that the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned less than two weeks before the invasion of Iraq that military action could be ruled illegal. The legal opinion quoted by Bliar in the House of Commons was not written by the government’s legal advisers at all but by a Downing Street team. Surely Bliar’s days are numbered now? He has to resign doesn’t he? Lying to the country, Parliament and even his own cabinet. Watching the headline’s though, none of the UK’s major news channels are leading with the story. Have I missed something? Have we been taken over by Stepford News? The lord chancellor has also today stated that Charles and Camilla’s wedding is legal. I hope they ask for a second opinion.