Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Diplomat Gives Explosive Evidence on Iraq
A senior diplomat has launched an astonishing attack on the government for its behaviour over Iraq. Click HERE for the details. Carne Ross, who resigned from the Foreign Office over the Iraq war told the Intelligence Committee that the government had "manipulated" the evidence over weapons of mass destruction. He accused the Foreign Office of being "politicised" and most explosively that the legal advice from the FO on the legality of the war was ignored (i.e. politically inconvenient / not supporting Blair's narrative for war). It raises many questions, not least this one: Are the mandarins now clearing their conciences and reputations at the fag-end of the Blair regime? Expect NuLab smears against Ross, shortly.
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31 comments:
Are you sure there is nothing about this on the BBC.
I wouldn't trust the word of a Diplomat, ex or otherwise. The Foreign Office is a joke. The sooner Whitehall is 'sanitized' the better. For too long those in the 'know' have been allowed to function without scrutiny. Sack the top 10% of the Civil Service and make 50% of the leftovers redundant. Then and only then can we start to sort out the incompetence that infests our Public Services.
Apparently the PMOS has suggested Ross is an Arsenal fan -- nuff said.
How can you calim this is explosive? Some geezer didn't agree with the war, indulges in the usual twaddle - eg claims there was a conspiracy to manipulate evidence but produces no evidence for such a claim...
Consider the counter factual - buter Saddam could have easily killed tens or hundreds of thousands by now, he could have finally got his WMD programmes back on track, he could be getting in on the Hamas game too.
The war has happened. It didn't happen because of lies (read Ian Lucas MP's speech in last week's debate for the view of a decent and honest opponent of the war for that) and nor was it all down to Tony Blair - Parliament voted for it.
You do yourself no favours, Iain, by trying to make some political capital out of this.
I'm not sure Carne Ross's own mother would have referred to him as a "senior diplomat"
Expect any reasonable criticism of Carne Ross to be branded as a "smear".
Rather shots a large hole in the 'independent' Hutton Report, no wonder Hutton felt the need to go 'public' with a thin skinned diatribe to his detractors (us, the public, who did not believe a word of it)recently.
Do you not get the feeling that everybody is diving for cover over their part in the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Carne Ross features on the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust website. Does that make him a LibDem?
"He has founded a new organisation, Independent Diplomat, to provide these governments and groups with high-level diplomatic advice, expertise and assistance to help them make an impact in the closed and complex world of international relations."
Independent diplomat? Him and whose army?
If you go down to the woods some day ... you might find an ex diplomat. Suicide. So sad.
Iain - Does this mean you have always been against the war in Iraq ?
This story was on the BBC headlines for a short while. Now it has been replaced by a story titled "cell transplants restore sight".
Good to see no journalists are keen to follow Gilligan, Hutton will be delighted.
His submission adds to the weight of evidence against TWiIq but his cry of politicisation is almost meaningless. Labour sympathisers within have merely been emboldened for a season, and their time is nearly up. When the prevailing wind changes they will melt away into the background and you would not guess they were ever there.
The FO is full of Arabists and they no doubt would prefer to get their sinecures with some Arab bank or lobby group together with Mandarin Pension.
I would prefer we reversed Macmillan's block on MI6 SO Division from doing "wet jobs" as it did under George Young, and that we expand SO to do assassinations and other activities so we make our influence felt in the Middle East.
It is time to ditch the Americans and pursue our own interests as we did before Allen Dulles screwed us over Suez and Macmillan had to crawl to get Ike to be nice to us and let the CIA do whatever it wanted.
We need to liquidate some of our enemies and it would be better if SO were expanded
I'd like to take a few swipes at the government over this myself, but does the timing strike anyone else as a bit odd? How did these claims remain hidden after so many committees and investigations?
I'm not suggesting for one second that the Hutton Report et al were up to the job but I can't help feeling that something isn't quite right about this.
Hardly explosive - not much if anything new here. He said all this to the Guardian and I am sure a few other newspapers last year.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/interviews/story/0,,1510368,00.html
Anonymous 3:40 pm : Is that you again Alistair? Let go manyam
Guthrum writes: "illegal invasion of Iraq."
Illegal? How? According to which law?
The Laughing Cavalier - Dr Kelly wasn't a diplomat.
I agree with Theo.
Between our own FO , the US State Dept and the EU countries FO's the years since Jimmy Carters half arsed stupities have been largely an unmitigated disaster in respect of the ME.
The 73 oil crises turned everybodies trousers brown and the panic ethos that ensued has malignly influenced the diplomatic services ever since.
It is long past time for a cull of those of the Arabist persuasion.
You dont have to be an ex diplomat to spot the carnage in Iraq as a f***ing disaster. An entirely predictable scenario. What is wrong with you lot? How many dead do you want?
Al Quaida schmaida. If the CIA reports that the war on terror has whipped up a hornets nest then you have some apologising to do. Ungracious in defeat it's called, as well as being wrong.
This is not news. It's not explosive and it's not surprising. Just to recap, anyone who thought other than 'shoulder to shoulder' did with 'you're either with us, or against us' was ignored. Let me be clear. We want Blair and Bush up for warcrimes in the Hague. We talk about it openly and we wont forget how you lie so convincingly Tony.
Charles.
Charles,
They weren't ignored. They lost the argument. Our parliament voted against them. Never mind anything else, we had a revolution in this country to stop foreign potentates (aka the Hague) interfering in the decisions of our parliament. If you don't like the decision, fair play. But drop all the "war crimes" BS.
Iain
I've just been watching 18 Doughty Street and I think you'd better get over there quick.
I've heard better discussions at chucking out time in my local.
Where do you find these people?
What one thinks about the nead for the Iraq war and how the government spun things to get us into it are quite destinct and seperate issues.
Not exactly like finding out that when we arrived in Germany in 1945 that the holacaust, the Nazi invasion of Poland and most of the rest of Europe had never happened, but I think some will get the point.
We unlike the Americans were fed spin instead of given true wartime leadership. This was done simply to get a large number of wavering LABOUR MPs on side. There is no other resonable explanation.
As we can all imagine, right of wrong, if we had had a Conservative prime minister almost all Tory MPs would have simply voted to support our American Allies whatever.
Just think of the aragance of Tony Blair being so tottaly confident that he had enough of BBC and MSM on his "payrole" that he could get away with such obvious deception. No wonder he and his head propergandist were so pissed when they found out that on this issue alone the BBC were not going to play the governments game.
The BBCs exception that prooved more then just the rule.
This Carne Ross? Was he the tea boy at the Tristan da Cuna and Antarctic Territories desk or Head of the Middle East WMD Office?
Did he really resign on principle or because he was miffed at not being promoted?
Having slated the greenies for their poor approach to verifiable evidence I guess I have to be even handed and ask for a little bit more evidence about Mr Ross. "Senior diplomat" is a description that covers a lot of ground. Even the embassy filing clerk is senior to the deputy embassy filing clerk.
And adopting the mantle of principled victimhood is sometimes a very good way for a disgruntled non-entity to achieve some of the recognition/income which he feels his due.
Then again, were Mr Ross in a position to know and should he have concrete evidence, then yes this could be explosive. Otherwise it's just hearsay evidence and even Blair is enough of a lawyer to realise that makes for a very flimsy case.
Surely this is not news, even though it deserves regurgutating from time to time. There was that female senior lawyer in the FO who resigned over this same issue, and Robin Cook got so het up for the same reasons. Clare Short also reminded us that there was meant to be a high level committee chaired by Blair to discuss these serious matters before anything was allowed to happened - and it never ever met.
Theo Spark, your wide-ranging experience of Whitehall is what, exactly?
Every one of his assertions is what he 'thought' or 'thinks'.
No proof and no bollocks.
Thought thought he shit himself and when he looked, he had.
Another crap diplomat that knows that his ilk are above politicians and the people that elected them and who also knew all along, that Diplomats would make better politicians.
Give me a politician every time. If I grow tired of them, I can rid myself of them.
Doom.
Anonymous 10:47 AM said...
Theo Spark, your wide-ranging experience of Whitehall is what, exactly?
If Mr Spark had 'wide-ranging experience' of Whitehall, he would be part of the problem.
And if, as I suspect, you are a Civil Servant of EO grade or above, do not your terms of employment expressly forbid the making of comments in public forums?
With the honourable exception of the Armed Forces of the Crown, the Senior Civil Service, along with those of equivalent grade in all other Public Institutions, have, for the last 9 years of NuLab Cultural Marxist Revolution, been actively engaged in the destruction of the very society they exist to serve.
On the one hand, we have had the disastrous social experiment in reverse discrimination, in which white males have now become enemies of the 'people', and which has tied the hands of those trying to defend us against the rise of Militant Islamists. On the other, the handing over control of our country lock, stock and barrel to control by the European Union.
Mr Spark's prescription is too mild. Mine would be summary execution for treason and/or profligate waste of taxpayers' money.
The video of him giving evidence to the committee is Here. skip forward 70 minutes to 01:10.
"Mr Ross, who was head of strategy for the UN mission in Kosovo, and played a leading role in devising policy on Iraq and Afghanistan, said there was a "political element at work in promotions to the most senior levels of the foreign office".
Though he mentions the unconcern about the legality of the iraq war he either wasn't asked &/or didn't say what the government's interest in the legality of the Pro-KLA war was.
As a result of an FOI query the government have not only refused to say what the legal advice about bombing Yugoslavia was, they have refused to confirm that they ever even asked whether this was criminal.
This was probably because they already knew there was no serious doubt that, under international law, the war against Yugoslavia was a war crime, as was the deliberate civil bombing. Further that in supporting the KLA both during the war & in the subsequent occupation in deliberate genocide many senior UK politicians & civil servants were & are guilty of both war crimes & crimes against humanity.
I suspect Mr Ross, who at the very least was "head of strategy" for the genocide under occupation, a charge much more serious than that for which Serbs are currently serving 40 years, will wish to remain silent on this.
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