Goldsmith advice finally published
28 April 2005It’s taken a while, but finally Blair has been forced to publish Lord Goldsmith’s advice on the legality of the Iraq war (Full PDF version). Months of demands from those wishing to see it have finally been answered; what irks me is why it was withheld in the first place. The government can bleat all it wants about confidentiality between a client and its lawyer, but when the client is working on the public’s behalf then the public have a right to know. The ‘national security’ justification for withholding doesn’t really apply, this was a document analysing what legal support, such as UN resolutions and existing international law, were needed for the war to be legal, rather than the existence of WMD; besides, the government had already made much intelligence information available to the public.
But Blair was stubborn, he knew he was right; it didn’t matter to him whether the legal advice was full of caveats and equivocations. It was just a rubber-stamping of his intentions, and one he didn’t want to be subject to public scrutiny; it would all be forgotten about, he hoped, come the next election, so he decided not to make the advice public. Now we know the truth – the Attorney General wasn’t sure whether the war would be legal or not based on past resolutions, and it was dependent on there being “hard evidence” of WMD programmes – sadly for Tony this was not the case. With a delicious irony it’s come back to bite him on the arse now, a week before polling day.
