COVER STORY
High crimes and misdemeanours
All the evidence shows that the
Prime Minister misled Parliament and the people on the eve of the
Iraq war. Now, as Peter Oborne reveals, a group of MPs are determined
to impeach him
Peter Oborne
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Next month a group of British MPs will launch impeachment proceedings
against Tony Blair. This is a very dramatic and powerful act, rooted
deep in British history. Though once a commonplace sanction against
abuse of power by the executive, the instrument of impeachment has
not been used since 1848, when it was alleged that Lord Palmerston,
while foreign minister, had entered into a secret treaty with Russia.
Nevertheless, impeachment remains part of parliamentary law, a recourse
for desperate times. Many MPs feel certain that the moment critique
has now arrived. They remain in a state of despair at the way the
Prime Minister systematically misled the House of Commons and the
British people over the Iraq war. For several weeks a powerful draft
document — provisionally entitled ‘A Case to Answer: A Report on the
Possibility of the Impeachment of the British Prime Minister Tony
Blair for High Crimes and Misdemeanours in relation to the Invasion
of Iraq’ — setting out the charges, has been in private circulation.
It is powerful and compelling, and will soon be published. It sets
out with great clarity the numerous falsehoods and misrepresentations
made by Tony Blair, both to the British people and within the House
of Commons.
It has only been possible to write this document since the publication
of the Butler report in July. Though Butler’s conclusions were insipid
and in one or two cases contradicted the evidence he himself presented,
his report has nevertheless brought a great many fresh intelligence
documents into the public arena. When these documents are compared
with contemporaneous statements made by the Prime Minister, the audacious
scale of the deception perpetrated against Parliament and the British
people becomes very clear.
Tony Blair was not merely wrong about Iraqi WMD in retrospect. Thanks
to Butler, it is now possible to show that his statements clashed
with the state of knowledge within the intelligence community at the
time. It is possible to demonstrate that the Prime Minister was guilty
of at best a culpably negligent failure to acquaint himself with the
true state of affairs, at worse mendacity and bad faith. Tony Blair
at no stage gave the British people the chance to make up their minds
ahead of the war, because the relevant evidence was manipulated and
in some cases suppressed.
The Prime Minister made numerous assertions about weapons of mass
destruction that were contradicted by his intelligence assessments.
On 3 April 2002 he made the following confident assertion to NBC news:
‘We know that he [Saddam Hussein] has stockpiles of major amounts
of chemical and biological weapons.’ Compare this (and numerous other
pronouncements of equal certainty made by Tony Blair around the same
time) with what the Prime Minister was being told by the Joint Intelligence
Committee. Its assessment of 15 March 2002, brought to light by Butler,
stated that ‘intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is
sporadic and patchy ...from the evidence available to us, we believe
Iraq retains some production equipment, and some small stocks of chemical
warfare agent precursors, and may have hidden small quantities of
agents and weapons.’ The discrepancy between the Prime Minister’s
version of events (‘we know he has stockpiles of major amounts of
chemical and biological weapons’) and the JIC’s cautious view that
Iraq ‘may have hidden small quantities of [chemical] agents and weapons’
beggars belief.
There was a similar massive discrepancy between Tony Blair’s apocalyptic
claims about the threat posed by Iraq in the wider Middle East, and
the sober guidance he was receiving from the intelligence services.
The resolution before the House of Commons on 18 March 2003, supporting
the war on Iraq, read as follows: ‘This house recognises that Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and its continuing
non-compliance with Security Council Resolutions, pose a threat to
international peace and security.’
Today we can see that this statement was nonsense, and in no way calibrated
with the intelligence available to the Prime Minister. Two conditions
needed to be in place for Tony Blair’s claim about Iraq’s ‘severe
threat to the wider world’ to be even faintly plausible: namely, evidence
that Iraq possessed the necessary weapons along with the accompanying
delivery capability, and some proof that Saddam Hussein intended to
use them on his neighbours. The Butler report demonstrates that both
propositions were tested, and found wanting, by the intelligence services.
In sharp contrast to the Prime Minister’s statement to the Commons,
intelligence assessments during 2002–3 make no reference to any Iraqi
intention to employ WMD outside its borders. The only situation in
which British experts envisaged Saddam making use of these weapons,
supposing they existed in the first place, was if he himself was attacked.
Lord Butler quotes one piece of interdepartmental advice to ministers,
drawing heavily on JIC assessments, which makes this view quite explicit:
‘Saddam has not succeeded in seriously threatening his neighbours
...Saddam has used WMD in the past and could do so again if his regime
was under threat.’
This remained the JIC view right up to the eve of publication of the
notorious dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction of September
2002. So overwhelming was this conclusion that Jonathan Powell, the
Downing Street chief of staff, emailed JIC chairman John Scarlett
that ‘we will need to make it clear in launching the document that
we do not claim that we have evidence that he [Saddam] is an imminent
threat.’ This piece of advice was ignored, and the final version of
the dossier gave no indication of any kind that Tony Blair’s lurid
assertions about the looming menace of Saddam Hussein was unsupported
by evidence.
There is no space here to do more than summarise the numerous other
false assertions and mendacious claims made by the Prime Minister
over Iraq. Downing Street asserted that the UN inspectors ‘proved’
that illicit weapons existed inside Iraq. Actually they merely said
that the materials were unaccounted for; the distinction was clearly
made in intelligence reports but not by the Prime Minister to Parliament.
Tony Blair told the House of Commons on 24 September 2002 that Saddam’s
WMD programme was ‘active, detailed and growing’, in flat contradiction
to intelligence assessments showing that programmes had been frozen
or ‘hindered’. He claimed that material found in Iraq after April
2003 was part of a covert weapons programme, despite lack of intelligence
to support these claims.
The greatest deception of all relates to the way that Tony Blair presented
intelligence material. On 24 September 2002, while presenting his
Iraq dossier to the Commons, he told MPs, ‘I am aware, of course,
that people are going to have to take elements of this on the good
faith of the intelligence services. But this is what they are telling
me, the British Prime Minister, and my senior colleagues. The intelligence
picture they paint is ...extensive, detailed and authoritative.’ In
fact, as the Butler inquiry demonstrated with great clarity, the Prime
Minister was in a position to know that this statement was false:
over four fifths of the intelligence about Iraqi deception and concealment
came from just two sources, both of which have since been recognised
as dodgy. Furthermore, the Prime Minister was aware of this shameful
paucity of material. As Butler records, ‘the Chief of SIS had a meeting
with the Prime Minister on 12 September to brief him on SIS operations
in respect of Iraq. At the meeting he briefed the Prime Minister on
each of the SIS’s main sources.’ As Butler himself remarked, in a
rare moment of criticism: ‘We were struck by the relative thinness
of the intelligence base supporting the greater firmness of the JIC’s
judgments on Iraqi production and possession of chemical and biological
weapons.’
There is no graver charge that could be laid against a serving Prime
Minister than that he misled the British people on the eve of conflict.
The impeachment document, written by Dan Plesch and Glen Rangwala
for Adam Price, the Plaid Cymru MP, makes a potent case with great
intellectual clarity. It charges that the Prime Minister was forced
to resort to such a flimsy and fallacious justification for war because
he had already entered into what amounted to an arrangement with President
George Bush to invade Iraq well before Parliament voted for war in
March 2003. The document cites the powerful testimony of Clare Short,
Chris Meyer and the author Bob Woodward in this regard. The allegation
of a secret treaty is hard to prove; nevertheless these three individuals
could be called to give evidence as to whether Tony Blair entered
into a private agreement to take Britain to war. This, along with
deceiving the Commons, is an impeachable offence.
The trouble is that none of the currently used mechanisms of Parliament
has proved capable of holding the Prime Minister to account. Indeed
MPs are unable to make even the allegation that Tony Blair has lied
for fear of being rebuked for using unparliamentary language. When
the MP John Baron claimed during the Butler debate last July that
the country was ‘misled by the Prime Minister’ over the 45-minute
claim, he was cautioned by the Speaker.
So MPs have been banned from making the fundamental case against Tony
Blair over his conduct of the war. The effect of this convention has
been crippling: the Prime Minister has not been judged even by the
fairly lax standards he applies to his own ministers. Last winter
the Home Office minister Beverley Hughes resigned her portfolio following
charges that she lied to MPs. Hughes told the Commons that she accepted
that she ‘may have given a misleading impression’ to MPs over immigration
controls. That, for her, was grounds to leave office. By any criteria
the case against Tony Blair is far stronger than the case against
Hughes, and the issue — a war in which tens of thousands have died
— of infinitely greater importance. Yet the Speaker bans discussion
of the Prime Minister’s integrity on the floor of the Commons.
By contrast it will be hard for Speaker Michael Martin to resist debate
on an impeachment motion. It is true that in Britain we think of impeachment
as part of the American, rather than the British, constitution. But
the United States inherited the practice from this country, where
for many centuries it was used as the ultimate response to attempts
to subvert the structure of government or undermine the integrity
of office. Far from being archaic, impeachment remains soundly based
in British law. William Holdsworth, whose work is still used to train
British lawyers, concluded his analysis of impeachment with an urgent
call for its revival, stating that it ‘does embody the sound principle
that ministers and officials should be made criminally liable for
corruption, gross negligence, or other malfeasances in the conduct
of the affairs of the nation. And this principle requires to be emphasised
at a time when the development of the system of party government pledges
the party to defend the policy of its leaders, however mistaken it
may be, and however incompetently it may have been carried out; at
a time when party leaders are apt to look indulgently on the most
disastrous mistakes because they hope that the same indulgence will
be extended to them when they take office; at a time when the principle
of the security of the tenure of higher permanent officials is held
to be more important than the need to punish their negligences and
ignorances. If ministers were sometimes made criminally responsible
for gross negligence or rashness, ill-considered activities might
be discouraged, real statesmanship might be encouraged and party violence
might be moderated.’
Holdsworth could not have described more lucidly the case for impeaching
Tony Blair over the Iraq war.
© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
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