“If Wars Can Be Started By Lies, Peace Can Be Started By Truth.” - Julian Assange
Julian Assange is being wrongly punished for revealing war crimes, but to this day, no one has been held accountable for these crimes…
It is time to re-examine this absurdity in light of the Wikileaks publisher's ongoing torment.
In 2003, the UK, under Tony Blair's government, joins the US in the invasion of Iraq - based on lies. 1).
In 2016, after 7 years of inquiry, Sir John Chilcot delivers a scathing report. He recognises that the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq was unnecessary, and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals, and the displacement of over 4 million others.
Despite all efforts to prosecute the ones in charge, the UK High Court ruled in 2017 that there is no crime of aggression in British law under which the former prime minister could be charged.
However, in the 1940s, the international crime of a war of aggression was accepted by the then UK attorney general Sir Hartley Shawcross QC during the trials of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg.
The UK government has been given “de facto domestic immunity” because “as long as it fails to enact legislation which makes the crime of aggression a domestic criminal offense, any leader can act as he/she chooses knowing that whatever action they take, it can be taken with complete impunity“ (Imran Khan, solicitor for plaintiff).
The UK government has received so many complaints from Iraqis who were unlawfully detained and allegedly mistreated by British troops that its defence ministry says it is unable to say how many millions of pounds have been paid to settle the claims.
In late 2020, The International Criminal Court says it will take no action against the UK, despite finding evidence that British troops committed war crimes in Iraq…2)
In April 2021, UK government passed a bill that decriminalises torture and war crimes. Innocuously titled 'The Overseas Operations Bill', the new piece of legislation makes it even harder to prosecute British soldiers for crimes committed more than five years ago. 3) 4)
Will Tony Blair and his co-conspirators ever be held accountable for their wrongdoings, and their consequences on the lives of millions of people ?
“Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.” –John Pilger
“The Right Honourable” Tony Blair, is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 .
construction
private security
private security
petroleum
financial
power
power
Private security
financial
private security
Although he denies it, Blair is estimated to have earned between £50-100 million since stepping down as UK prime minister 25)26)27).
Since he left office at 10 Downing Street, he has been operating as a shadow 28) government 29) 30); using a variety of consulting companies to broker business deals between heads of state he had met during his mandate.
Document publications by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks shed important light on the foreign policies of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown Labour governments. They particularly reveal the closeness of the US-UK special relationship and the willingness of the UK to act in support of the US and to protect the latter’s interests, in addition to examples of the UK’s own duplicitous foreign policy decision-making.
For shining a light on the UK governments’ wrongdoings, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is paying a heavy price. That’s why WikiLeaks and Assange deserve our full solidarity. Thanks to their bravery, we care better equipped to consign New Labour’s terrible foreign policy to history.
The Brown government undermined the Chilcot Inquiry it launched in 2009 by immediately making promises to the US. As the enquiry was just beginning, Jon Day, MOD Director for security policy, promised a senior US official that his government had “put measures in place to protect your interests” during the inquiry.39) According to the US cable:
“He [Day] noted that Iraq seems no longer to be a major issue in the U.S., but he said it would become a big issue – a “feeding frenzy” – in the UK “when the inquiry takes off.”40)
It is not known what this protection amounted to, but it appears to have been substantial. No US officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. Evidence from some US officials was only heard in private during visits by inquiry members to the US. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between George Bush and Tony Blair written in 2002 in the run-up to the war, even though they were referred to in evidence.41)
WikiLeaks’ files highlight the legacy of Tony Blair in Iraq. In October 2010, WikiLeaks published the largest classified military leak in history – the “The Iraq War Logs”, which consist of 391,832 reports documenting the war and occupation in Iraq from 2004-09 as told by soldiers in the US Army on the ground in Iraq.
The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of
The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths.42)
A UK military report of 2006 on the war in Iraq published by WikiLeaks damns UK and US war planning, which, it says, “ran counter to potential Geneva Convention obligations” – and lead directly to the post invasion collapse of Iraqi society. It noted: “Leaders should not start an operation without thinking…it is not enough just to identify the desired end-state”.
The report also reveals that Whitehall had been secretly planning the war during 2002 and that the Blair government kept the pending invasion (“Telic”) secret from all but an inner circle of officers and officials until three months before the start of hostilities. It stated:
“In Whitehall, the internal OPSEC (operational security) regime, in which only very small numbers of officers and officials were allowed to become involved in TELIC business, constrained broader planning for combat operations and subsequent phases effectively until 23 December 2002.”
Although the UK wanted UN Security Council approval, the UK found itself tied to a US ideological agenda and timetable. The report states:
“The UK had to work to a timetable and strong ideological views set in the United States. As one Senior Officer put it: ‘the train was in Grand Central Station, and was leaving at a time which we did not control'”.
The combined secrecy and ideology was a planning disaster that directly lead to the collapse of the Iraqi society.
Not only was the military at large kept in the dark until the end of 2002, but contractors vital to the reconstruction and stabilisation of the country were not contacted until the end of the invasion in late April 2003:
“The requirements to plan, find resources for, and undertake interim government and reconstruction in Iraq, the non-military tasks, were discussed in outline across Whitehall, but approaches to potential contractors were not made until combat operations were coming to an end. Planning was not done in sufficient depth, and, at the outset of Phase IV [post combat operations] little finance was requested (and approved) for reconstruction purposes…. [T]he UK Government, which spent millions of pounds on resourcing the Security Line of Operations, spent virtually none on the Economic one, on which security depended”.
The report argues the result was a breach of Geneva Convention obligations, for which coalition governments are legally responsible.43)
The invasion of Iraq has long been criticised for being a war for oil and for years many commentators sought information on whether Britain would encourage its oil companies to profit from this widely-condemned war.
A US cable from April 2009 - six years after the invasion of Iraq - shows Peter Mandelson, a chief architect of Tony Blair’s election victory and then Trade Secretary in the Brown government, pushing British oil and other corporate interests in Iraq. Mandelson attended the Basrah Investment Conference which brought together 23 UK-based companies such as Shell, BP, Rolls Royce and HSBC. The region was significant to the UK since this was the principal area occupied by UK military forces after the 2003 invasion.
The US cable notes: “According to Basrah HMG officials, UK delegates were able to establish or strengthen relationships with key business figures in Basrah”. Attendees also included the directors of oil investment in Basrah and the commander of Iraqi security forces in the region alongside “UK Force Commander Tom Beckett and several Basrah-based UK military officials”. The cable added:
“Lord Mandelson opened the conference by looking back at the UK’s long relationship with Basrah, and looked forward to closer economic cooperation ahead… The conference also demonstrated to local players that there are serious and respected UK multinational companies ready to do business in Basrah”.44)
Another WikiLeaks file shows how the US and Britain rigged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to stop it being able to hold Blair and Bush accountable for the crime of aggression over Iraq.
During the 1998 negotiations on the Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding treaty, many of the 160 states attending argued for the Court to be given jurisdiction over the crime of aggression but the US and the UK, amongst other states, were to opposed it. A compromise was struck in which the crime of aggression was included in the Rome Statute but the Court would not exercise jurisdiction over this crime until a definition, along with the conditions under which the court could exercise jurisdiction, had been agreed. Discussion of these matters was put off until a conference in Kampala, Uganda, in 2010, ahead of which the US, France and the UK sought to influence the outcome of discussions. 45)
According to a February 2010 cable from the US Embassy to the UN in New York, the Obama administration wanted decisions on the crime of aggression to be deferred yet again after discussions in Kampala. Failing that, the US wanted to ensure that the ICC’s jurisdiction over the crime would be subject to a “Security Council trigger”, that is, the Court would only be able to act after the Security Council had determined that an act of aggression had taken place.46) The governments of France and the UK agreed, along with Russia and China. By keeping the power to determine aggression within the Security Council where they have veto power, the five permanent members can prevent cases of aggression being brought at the ICC against themselves or their allies.47)
US files published by WikiLeaks show Tony Blair seeking Hillary Clinton’s help to become President of the European Council.
An October 2009 file reveals “a message from Tony” from Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff. Powell wrote to Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal, stating:
“If Hillary had a chance to say something about TB being a good President of the European Council if asked about it during her remaining time in Europe that would be v helpful, The Austrian Chancellor has said today he doesn’t want TB because he was for Bush rather than the new Democratic Administration”.
Blumenthal then recommended to Clinton that she say some “nice words… without an explicit endorsement” since “the rap against him is that he’s ‘Bush’s poodle’, and your positive comments would help erase that taint”.48)