| [images added by
this website] The
Independent on Sunday
London, Sunday, February 29, 2004 click
image for his March 2003 views  Revealed:
Attorney General changed his advice on legality of
Iraq war
Lord
Goldsmith believed that a 'further UN resolution
was needed'. Blair under increasing pressure to
publish full legal case for Iraq war
By Raymond Whitaker and
Robert Verkaik THE Attorney General, Lord
Goldsmith, changed his advice in the run-up to
war in Iraq to declare that the conflict was legal,
The Independent on Sunday has
learnt. Lord Goldsmith's full opinion on the legality of
the war has never been made public. The desire to
keep it secret is believed to be the main reason
why the Official Secrets Act prosecution of
Katharine Gun, a 29-year-old former employee
of GCHQ, the Government's monitoring centre, was
abandoned at the Old Bailey last week. The case could have revealed that in November
2002 the Attorney General believed Britain required
specific authorisation for war from the UN Security
Council, but that he later changed his stance. Ms Gun admitted leaking an email from the
National Security Agency, the US equivalent of
GCHQ, which called for British help in spying on
diplomats at the United Nations in January last
year. At the time, the US and Britain were seeking
a Security Council resolution, later abandoned,
specifically authorising the use of force against
Iraq. Although Ms Gun acknowledged she had broken the
Official Secrets Act, her lawyers were preparing to
argue that she had acted to prevent British
casualties in an illegal war, and to demand that
the Attorney General's full opinion be made public.
An "advance notice of defence statement" filed in
court highlighted differences in the Government
over the legality of committing British troops
without a UN resolution. Elizabeth
Wilmshurst, a deputy legal adviser to the
Foreign Office, resigned on the eve of war in
protest at Lord Goldsmith's opinion that the
resolution was unnecessary. "Some agreed with
the legal advice of the Attorney General," she
said later. "I did not." But the IoS has learnt from sources
connected to the Gun case that in November 2002,
when the Security Council passed resolution 1441,
threatening "serious consequences" if Iraq did not
"comply with its disarmament obligations", Lord
Goldsmith agreed with the Foreign Office view that
a further resolution would be needed to make war
legal. As the possibility of war without such a
resolution loomed, Britain's military chiefs of
staff argued that they needed a clearer legal basis
on which to proceed. Between November and the end of January 2003,
the IoS was told, the Attorney General's staff
produced a paper dealing with the issues raised by
the military chiefs, but it fell short of the legal
authorisation the chiefs of staff wanted. "The
military said they needed something harder if they
were to commit troops," a legal source said. Lord
Goldsmith's advice argued that a UN resolution from
13 years ago remained in force. Clare Short, the former International
Development Secretary whose UN spying claims caused
a sensation last week, said even the Cabinet had
not been allowed to see the full advice, but it is
believed that Ms Gun's defence team was aware of
its contents. Lord Goldsmith later said the
decision to drop the case had been taken before the
document was filed. The Government continued to insist yesterday
that it would not publish the Attorney General's
full advice. But further court cases are pending in
which lawyers are expected to mount a similar
defence to Ms Gun's, and prosecution may be
hampered if the advice remains secret. Fourteen Greenpeace supporters face trial for a
demonstration at a Southampton military base in
February 2003, and five peace activists are charged
with criminal damage at RAF Fairford. In all cases,
the defence is expected to argue that, like Ms Gun,
they were acting out of "necessity", to prevent an
illegal war. * A Labour peer today raised questions about the
way in which the Attorney General came up with the
advice he gave on the legality of war following
reports it changed in the run-up to the
conflict. Baroness Helena Kennedy QC said the "vast
majority" of lawyers thought the conflict without a
second UN resolution would be unlawful. She said in a GMTV interview: "The vast majority
of lawyers were of one view. "It was interesting that out of
probably only two lawyers who would have argued
for the legality of going to war, one of those
was the person to whom the Attorney General
turned." She added: "I think the lesson from this is that
actually law matters. Before you make those
commitments to your friend or ally you have to talk
about law because it is not some side issue.
 It
is the way we have tried to civilise the world and
we must not forget that." © Copyright
Independent Newspapers Photo:
German field marshal Wilhelm Keitel, hanged
in 1946, his face smashed in by the Nuremberg
gallows trapdoor, for waging an illegal war on
Poland and other countries.
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