Apologies for the late update to the site on this. Of course, Campbell’s appearance was designed to smooth the way for Blair when he attended recently.

Campbell, as predicted continued his web of deceit and backed Blair to the hilt, and himself of course, as although he wasn’t a politician in the true sense, he had access to all areas of Government. He was the one called upon to spin the information.

Blair’s official spokesman defiantly, and unbelievably, stated at the inquiry:

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I “defend every single word” of the 2002 dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Parts of the dossier could have been “clearer” but it did not “misrepresent” Iraq’s threat.

The UK should be “proud” of its role “in changing Iraq from what it was to what it is now becoming”

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He also said that Mr Blair told President Bush privately in 2002 “the UK would back military action if necessary.”

Without any approval from Parliament, Blair felt he had the right to sign away the British Army as if it were his own Private army. Our men and women’s lives, and the lives of approximately a million Iraqi lives!

All to feather his own nest, for grace and favours and to massage his over inflated ego.

It is almost becoming a daily routine in Britain these days to see Political statements and activities that you couldn’t make up. No-one would believe you.

After 7 years, and more coming, of abject disaster, and countless lost lives and destroyed lives, along with our reputation as a country in tatters, Campbell added:

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I was privileged to be there and I’m very very proud of the part that I was able to play.”

He added: “I think that Britain, far from beating ourselves up about this, should be really proud of the role that we played in changing Iraq from what it was to what it is now becoming.”

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Campbell also revealed that  Blair had written to President Bush during 2002  saying: “If that cannot be done diplomatically and it is to be done militarily, Britain will be there. That would be the tenor of the communication to the president.”

The Lib Dems, who opposed the invasion, have called for the letters to be published, saying Mr Campbell’s evidence cast further doubt on the legality of the war.

Former Conservative Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who opposed the invasion, said the letters would show the extent to which Tony Blair and George Bush were “hand in glove” over the issue and should be available to the public.

Campbell did admit a few important failings though:

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Campbell said he was “never in doubt” that Iraq would be found to have weapons of mass destruction and the realisation that they did not was “very difficult”.

On the invasion’s aftermath, he said it became clear within a week that things were not going well and there was a lack of “grip”. </blockquote>

Campbells’ testimony rolled on for a full 5 hours, and the sitting had to be extended.

Campbell’s life as an alcoholic in the past and suffering a complete  mental breakdown are well documented, so we won’t dwell on them. But when you look at the personality traits and failings of Campbell and Blair, it’s hard not be surprised how they were so easily  corrupted into egomaniac’s and megalomaniac’s.

It’s very telling that Campbell admits Blair supported him and helped him through his depression. It’s very clear Campbell would do anything for Blair.

A very telling quote was when  he said that the lowest point was during the “nightmare” of the Hutton inquiry into the reasons why Britain went to war in Iraq. The worst day, he said, “was when Dr David Kelly, the government adviser, committed suicide.”

He added:

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“I did feel if the inquiry had gone against us that it would have been really bad. If it had gone against us, it was not just me who was out of a job, it was Tony.”

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Again, you cannot make this stuff up. Only concerned for their jobs!

I would like to think Campbell won’t be out of reach of justice when Blair’s Judgement day comes.

13 years at the very heart of Government, Brown is up to his neck in shit, the same as Blair.

Of course Brown’s attendance was stage managed and carefully planned. He strode through the front entrance to the Inquiry, confident. Whereas Blair had sneaked in the back entrance like a coward. Of course Blair will hide behind the fact ‘the police advised him for security reasons’ etc. to do this.
Brown even smiled at the audience inside. Some people’s arrogance is stunning. This man didn’t just write the cheques for the war. This is all the mainstream media are reporting on. Did he give enough money for ‘our boys’? etc.
Don’t get me wrong I have every sympathy for our brave boys and girls who really do the most extraordinary things when asked upon by their nation, even risk their lives in illegal wars, and they must have adequate protection and support.
It turns out Brown has been lying about his full financial support for the armed forces anyway and will recalled to the inquiry, but that’s another story.
To reiterate it is extremely serious if the Government didn’t supply enough money for the armed forces on the ground, although we have to consider the powers that be within the army may have spent the money unwisely, targetted the wrong areas, anything. This needs to be examined under a microscope to protect our troops in the future.
The main bone of contention is how this man (Gordon Brown) and the others surrounding him in the cabinet pushed for this war in the first place and allowed it, and how he is in charge now, still pushing the war.
What I want to focus on is a few main points.
How can one of the most senior politicians in the land at the time and the longest standing friend and foe of the then Prime Minster Tony Blair not have the upmost knowledge of what was going on? Of course he knew more than almost everyone else at the time, yet there is no pressure on him from the people that should be exerting pressure. He’s still advocating what was started in Iraq for God’s sake.

Brown was asked at the beginning of the session, inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot asked Mr Brown if he thought the decision to take military action in Iraq was right.

“I think that this is the gravest decision of all, to make a decision to go to war.

“I believe we made the right decision for the right reasons, because the international community had for years asked Saddam Hussein to abide by international law and the international obligations that he’d accepted.

Unbelievably Brown is still defending the decision to go to war and saying we got it right! This stuff defies belief. Will they wake up when they are being escorted to their cells at The Hague? Even then you have to see their arrogance will blind them to that facty, even then.

To cover Brown’s lies about funding though. brown told Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry that the budget for British troops had “risen above the rate of inflation every year for the last decade.” Mr Brown later repeated the claim in the Commons.
However 2 days later on 17th March 2010 in the House of Commons, Brown conceded that the claim was not accurate and that he would be writing to the inquiry to correct the statement. “I do accept that, in one or two years, defence expenditure did not rise in real terms,” he said.

Mr Brown blamed “operational fluctuations” for the individual falls in real-terms spending.

Mr Brown had fiercely defended the claim at last week’s PMQs.

“I said to the inquiry very clearly first of all that the expenditure of the Ministry of Defence has been rising in real terms,” he told David Cameron. “The defence budget… is rising every year.”

Liam Fox, the shadow Defence Secretary, said :

Mr Brown’s admission represented “a humiliating climbdown” from a week ago. “His attempt to rewrite history has failed and his fantasy figures have been exposed,” he said.

Clare Short speaking to journalists after the Chilcott Inquiry

Of course all three politicians names above voiced their opinions loudly about the nightmare we were about to create with the U.S in Iraq, as did millions of us also. It was perfectly obvious to laymen even, how this would all end up, tragically, as there at least hundreds of thousands of innocents dead as a result.

Clare Short of course famously resigned in 2003 a few months after the Iraq War broke out. As much as I have always liked Clare, i felt she shouldn’t have waited those couple of months as I feel it lost it’s true impact. I don’t want to be harsh on her as I know she tried to stay for a bit as she realised the obsessed Blair would not leave this idea of invasion alone and was like a dog with a bone. She waned to be a key player in rebuilding Iraq and to try and steer some sense into it. It was not to be.
Blair has of course had a history all his life of loving to bend and break the law. Power mad and obessed with greed and the desire to please, dazzled by the bright lights of the Whitehouse, Blair saw his chance to make a name for himself, forever. He succeeded. And stained our country forever with the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. The loss of life and suffering is too big to comprehend. Try. You can’t.

Clare Short attended the Chilcott Inquiry/Iraq Inquiry at the beginning of February, this year, 2010. She was questioned by the panel members for 3 hours. At the end of the inquiry she received a welcome applause from the gallery for her candidness and openness about what really happened.
There was a lot of ground covered, but some of the key facts Clare Short mentioned are mentioned below in short quotes:

Mr Blair “and his mates” decided war was necessary, and “everything was done on a wing and a prayer”.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had been “leaned on” to change his advice before the invasion.

The Cabinet was “misled” into thinking the war with Iraq was legal.

The attorney general provisionally advised Mr Blair in January that year that it would be unlawful to invade Iraq without a further United Nations Security Council resolution.

She had been “shocked” that the attorney general’s advice was so late but was “jeered at” to be quiet by other ministers when she asked why.

“I think for the attorney general to come and say there’s unequivocal legal authority to go war was misleading.”

“I think he misled the cabinet. He certainly misled me, but people let it through.”

After the failure to secure a second UN resolution, the government had put out “untrue” claims that France had vetoed it.

Referring to late 2002 she added: “We asked for a briefing… This just didn’t come and didn’t come… it became clear there was some sort of block on communications.”

Here’s what they have to say:

“About the Inquiry

The Prime Minister announced on 15 June 2009 that an Inquiry would be conducted to identify lessons that can be learned from the Iraq conflict. The Iraq Inquiry was officially launched on 30 July 2009. At the launch the Chair of the Inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, set out the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference:

“Our terms of reference are very broad, but the essential points, as set out by the Prime Minister and agreed by the House of Commons, are that this is an Inquiry by a committee of Privy Counsellors. It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath. We will therefore be considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.”

The Inquiry committee members are:

Sir John Chilcot (Chairman),

Sir Lawrence Freedman:

Sir Martin Gilbert:

Sir Roderic Lyne:

Baroness Usha Prashar:

The Inquiry will take evidence over a number of months, with as many hearings as possible held in public. Hearings will begin in the autumn and continue into the New Year. A report of the Inquiry’s findings will be published at the end of this process, but as the Inquiry has such a complex task ahead of it the report is unlikely to be ready for publication before summer 2010. The Inquiry committee intends to include in the report all but the most sensitive information essential to our national security. The report will then be debated in Parliament.”

Of course members of the Chilcot Enquiry are hand selected by current Prime Minister Gordon Brown who is complicit in many/most of Blair’s former activities one would have to guess. I doubt much credibility can be given to the panel, and it has already been stated no prosecutions will come of this, it is just for greater exposure.

The secret memo to which we refer warned Blair in no uncertain terms that the planned war was illegal, and is most certainly a smoking gun. We now must demand to see it.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote the letter to Mr Blair in July 2002 , warning Blair that deposing Saddam Hussein was a blatant breach of international law.

It was intended to make Mr Blair call off the invasion, but he ignored it. Instead, a panicking Mr Blair issued instructions to gag Lord Goldsmith, banned him from attending Cabinet meetings and ordered a cover-up to stop the public finding out.

He even concealed the bombshell information from his own Cabinet, fearing it would spark an anti-war revolt. The only people he told were a handful of cronies who were sworn to secrecy.

Lord Goldsmith was so furious at his treatment he threatened to resign – and lost three stone as Mr Blair and his cronies bullied him into backing down.

Sources close to the peer say he was ‘more or less pinned to the wall’ in a Downing Street showdown with two of Mr Blair’s most loyal aides, Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan.

The revelations follow a series of testimonies by key figures at the Chilcot Inquiry who have questioned Mr Blair’s judgment and honesty, and the legality of the war.

Lord Goldsmith gave qualified legal backing to the conflict days before the war broke out in March 2003 in a brief, carefully drafted statement. As The Mail on Sunday disclosed three years ago, even that was a distortion as Lord Goldsmith had told Mr Blair a week earlier he could be breaking international law.

But today’s revelations show that Lord Goldsmith told Mr Blair at the outset, and in writing, that military action against Iraq was totally illegal.
Lord Goldsmith leaves No10 in March 2003 after talks with Blair

Pressured: Lord Goldsmith leaves No10 in March 2003 after talks with Blair

The disclosures deal a massive blow to Mr Blair’s hopes of proving he acted in good faith when he and George Bush declared war on Iraq. And they are likely to fuel further calls for Mr Blair to be charged with war crimes.

Lord Goldsmith’s ’smoking gun’ letter came six days after a Cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, at which Ministers were secretly told that the US and UK were set on ‘regime change’ in Iraq.

The peer, who attended the meeting, was horrified. On July 29, he wrote to Mr Blair on a single side of A4 headed notepaper from his office.

Friends say it was no easy thing for him to do. He was a close friend of Mr Blair, who gave him his peerage and Cabinet post. The typed letter was addressed by hand, ‘Dear Tony’, and signed by hand, ‘Yours, Peter’.

In it, Lord Goldsmith set out in uncompromising terms why he believed war was illegal. He pointed out that:

* War could not be justified purely on the grounds of ‘regime change’.
* Although United Nations rules permitted ‘military intervention on the basis of self-defence’, they did not apply in this case because Britain was not under threat from Iraq.
* While the UN allowed ‘humanitarian intervention’ in certain instances, that too was not relevant to Iraq.
* It would be very hard to rely on earlier UN resolutions in the Nineties approving the use of force against Saddam.

Lord Goldsmith ended his letter by saying ‘the situation might change’ – although in legal terms, it never did.

The letter caused pandemonium in Downing Street. Mr Blair was furious. No10 told Lord Goldsmith he should never have put his views on paper, and he was not to do so again unless told to by Mr Blair.

The reason was simple: if it became public, Lord Goldsmith’s letter could make it impossible for Mr Blair to fulfil his secret pledge to back Mr Bush in any circumstances. More importantly, it could never be expunged from the record as copies were stored in No10 and in the Attorney General’s office.

Although Lord Goldsmith had Cabinet status, he attended meetings only when asked. After his letter, he barely attended another meeting until the eve of the war. Mr Blair kept him out to reduce the chance of him blurting out his views to other Ministers.

When Mr Blair is quizzed by the Chilcot Inquiry, he will be asked why he never admitted he was told from the start that the war was illegal.

Equally ominously for Mr Blair, a defiant Lord Goldsmith is ready to defend the letter when he appears before the inquiry. Friends of the peer, widely derided for his role in the Iraq War, believe it will vindicate him.

A source close to Lord Goldsmith said: ‘He assumed, perhaps naively, that Blair wanted a proper legal assessment. No10 went berserk because they knew that once he had put it in writing, it could not be unsaid.

‘They liked to do things with no note-takers, and often no officials, present. That way, there was no record. Everything could be denied.

‘Goldsmith threatened to resign at least once. He lost three stone in that period. He is an honourable man and it was a terribly stressful experience.’

Lord Goldsmith’s wife Joy, a prominent figure in New Labour dining circles, played a crucial role in talking him out of quitting.

‘Joy was always very ambitious on Peter’s behalf and did not want to see him throw it all away,’ said a source.

Lord Goldsmith’s letter contradicts Mr Blair’s repeated statements, before, during and after the war on its legality.

In April 2005, the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman repeatedly asked him if he had seen confidential Foreign Office advice that the war would be illegal without specific UN support.

Mr Blair said: ‘No. I had the Attorney General’s advice to guide me.’ At best, it was dissembling. At worst, it was a blatant lie.

Mr Blair knew all along that Lord Goldsmith had told him the war was illegal, and that when the peer finally gave it his cautious backing, he did so only under extreme duress.

The Mail on Sunday has also obtained new evidence about the way Lord Goldsmith was bullied into backing the war at the 11th hour.

He was summoned to a No10 meeting with Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and Baroness Sally Morgan, Mr Blair’s senior Labour ‘fixer’ in Downing Street. No officials were present.

A source said: ‘Falconer and Morgan performed a pincer movement on Goldsmith. They more or less pinned him up against the wall and told him to do what Blair wanted.’

After the meeting, Lord Goldsmith issued his brief statement stating the war was lawful.

Lord Falconer said in response to the latest revelations: ‘This version of events is totally false. The meeting was Lord Goldsmith’s suggestion and he told us what his view was.’

Baroness Morgan has also denied trying to pressure Lord Goldsmith.

The legal row came to a head days before the war, when the UN refused to approve military action. Stranded, Mr Blair had to win Lord Goldsmith’s legal backing, not least because British military chiefs refused to send troops into action without it.

On March 17, three days before the conflict started, Lord Goldsmith said the war was legal on the basis of previous UN resolutions threatening action against Saddam – even though in his secret letter of July 2002, he had ruled out this argument.

A spokesman for Lord Goldsmith said: ‘This letter is probably in the bundle that has been supplied to the inquiry by the Attorney General’s department. It is presumed they will want to discuss it with him. If so, Lord Goldsmith is content to do so.

‘His focus is on the legality of the war, its morality is for others.’

A spokesman for the Chilcot Inquiry said: ‘We are content we have obtained all the relevant documents.’

A spokesman for Mr Blair refused to say why the former Prime Minister had not disclosed Lord Goldsmith’s July 2002 letter.

‘The Attorney General set out the legal basis for action in Iraq in March 2003,’ he said. ‘Beyond that, we are not getting into a running commentary before Mr Blair appears in front of the Chilcot committee.’

Leading international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands said: ‘The Chilcot Inquiry must make Lord Goldsmith’s note of 29 July, 2002, publicly available to restore public confidence in the Government.’