Maine Owl

Former UK ambassador to US cites anthrax as key Iraq causus belli

Just about no one here has noticed that the UK is having a major inquiry into the causes and conduct of the Iraq war.

Sir Christopher Meyer, who was British ambassador to the United States in 2003 told of how pre-invasion planning included "convergence" of former President Bush and former Prime Minister Blair. According to a story in the Independent, Meyer

suggested that Mr Blair may have agreed to back military action during a secretive meeting with President Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. "There was a large chunk of that time when no adviser was there," he said. "To this day I am not entirely clear what degree of convergence was, if you like, signed in blood at the Crawford ranch."

Meyer also cited alleged involvement of Iraq in the fall 2001 anthrax mailings to US senators and others as a factor, important to "an extent not appreciated by him at the time."

Today, Glenn Greenwald jumps on this statement by Meyer, concluding:

Greenwald: Here we have one of the most consequential political events of the last decade at least -- a lethal biological terrorist attack aimed at key U.S. Senators and media figures, which even the FBI claims originated from a U.S. military lab. The then-British Ambassador to the U.S. is now testifying what has long been clear: that this episode played a huge role in enabling the attack on Iraq. Even our leading mainstream, establishment-serving media outlets -- and countless bio-weapons experts -- believe that we do not have real answers about who perpetrated this attack and how. And there is little apparent interest in investigating in order to find out. Evidently, this is just another one of those things that we'll relegate to "the irrelevant past," and therefore deem it unworthy of attention from our future-gazing, always-distracted minds.

To add to Greenwald, and as I have pointed out before, my sites for several years have distributed a key work explaining a significant piece of the anthrax puzzle: United States exports of biological materials to Iraq: Compromising the credibility of international law by Geoffrey Holland (pdf format, 463kb download).

The origin of the 2001 anthrax probably was domestic, as was the real anthrax actually sent to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. No wonder there is a see-no-evil attitude towards unearthing these details in the U.S.

Sir John Chilcot says there will be no "whitewash" in the current full-blown inquiry into Britain's involvement in Iraq.

Iraq war inquiry will be no whitewash, Chilcot says
BBC | Monday, 23 November 2009

The man in charge of the inquiry examining events surrounding the Iraq war has said his committee will not produce a report that is a "whitewash"...

... Sir John acknowledged that, for many people, the overriding questions would be whether Britain was right to go to war and whether the conflict had been legal.

This, of course, begs the question of whether or not the earlier Hutton inquiry had been a whitewash, specifically about the "45-minute" claim in the so-called "Dodgy Dossier." I wrote about this HERE.

THIS sampling of UK internal documents already exposes a fair bit of the rotten underbelly.

And how about one more begged question: When is a similar inquiry going to happen in the US? The provocative but truncated Senate Intelligence Committee "Phase II" report (pdf) issued in July 2008 would be a fine starting point.