[NYTr] How Britain became party to a crime that may have killed a million people

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Monbiot seems to think a written Constitution would have prevented
Blair's war crimes. But unless the UK population or Parliament insisted
he follow a Constitution, the outcome would have been the same as in
the US, where Constitutional requirements to declare war legally have
not been observed for 60+ years. - NYTransfer]


The Guardian - Jan 1, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2233793,00.html

How Britain became party to a crime that may have killed a million
people

Not having a written constitution allowed Blair and his advisers to go
to war without reference to parliament or the public 

By George Monbiot

If you doubt Britain needs a written constitution, listen to the
strangely unbalanced discussion broadcast by the BBC last Friday. The
Today programme asked Lord Guthrie, formerly chief of the defence
staff, and Sir Kevin Tebbit, until recently the senior civil servant at
the Ministry of Defence, if parliament should decide whether or not the
country goes to war. The discussion was a terrifying exposure of the
privileges of unaccountable power. It explained as well as anything I
have heard how Britain became party to a crime that may have killed a
million people.

Guthrie argued that parliamentary approval would mean intelligence had
to be shared with MPs; that the other side could not be taken by
surprise ("do you want to warn the enemy you are going to do it?"), and
that commanders should have "a choice about when to attack and when not
to attack". Tebbit maintained that "no prime minister would be able to
deploy forces without being able to command a parliamentary majority.
In that sense, the executive is already accountable to parliament".
Once the prime minister has his majority, in other words, MPs become
redundant.

Let me dwell for a moment on what Guthrie said, for he appears to
advocate that we retain the right to commit war crimes. States in
dispute with each other, the UN charter says, must first seek to solve
their differences by "peaceful means" (article 33). If these fail, they
should refer the matter to the security council (article 37), which
decides what measures should be taken (article 39). Taking the enemy by
surprise is a useful tactic in battle, and encounters can be won only
if commanders are able to make decisions quickly. But either Guthrie
does not understand the difference between a battle and a war - which
is unlikely in view of his 44 years of service - or he does not
understand the most basic point in international law. Launching a
surprise war is forbidden by the charter.

It has become fashionable to scoff at these rules and to dismiss those
who support them as pedants and prigs, but they are all that stand
between us and the greatest crimes in history. The International
Military Tribunal at Nuremberg ruled that "to initiate a war of
aggression ... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme
international crime". The tribunal's charter placed "planning,
preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression" at the top of
the list of war crimes.

If Britain's most prominent retired general does not understand this,
it can only be because he has never been forced to understand it. In
September 2002, he argued in the Lords that "the time is approaching
when we may have to join the US in operations against Iraq ... Strike
soon, and the threat will be less and easier to handle. If the UN route
fails, I support the second option." No one in the chamber warned him
that he was proposing the supreme international crime. In another Lords
debate, Guthrie argued that it was "unthinkable for British servicemen
and women to be sent to the International Criminal Court", regardless
of what they might have done. He demanded a guarantee from the
government that this would not be allowed to happen, and proposed that
the British forces should be allowed to opt out of the European
convention on human rights. The grey heads murmured their agreement.

Perhaps it is unfair to single out the noble and gallant lord. The
British establishment's exceptionalism is almost universal. According
to the government, both the Commons public administration committee and
the Lords constitution committee recognise that decision-making should
"provide sufficient flexibility for deployments which need to be made
without prior parliamentary approval for reasons of urgency or
necessary operational secrecy". You cannot keep an operation secret
from parliament unless you are also keeping it secret from the UN.

Tebbit appears to have a general aversion to disclosure. In 2003, the
Guardian obtained letters showing he had prevented the fraud squad at
the MoD from investigating allegations of corruption against the arms
manufacturer BAE, that he tipped off the BAE chairman about the
contents of a confidential letter the Serious Fraud Office had sent
him, and that he failed to tell his minister about the SFO's warnings.
In October 2003, under cross-examination during the Hutton inquiry into
the death of the government scientist David Kelly, he revealed the
decision to name Kelly was made in a "meeting chaired by the prime
minister". That could have been the end of Tony Blair, but a week later
Tebbit sent Lord Hutton a written retraction of his evidence. No one
bothered to tell parliament or the press; the retraction was made
public only when the Hutton report was published, three months later.
Blair knew all along, and the secret gave him a crushing advantage.

The discussion also reveals that Guthrie and Tebbit appear to have
learned nothing from the disaster in Iraq. They are not alone. Just
before he stepped down last year, Blair wrote an article for the
Economist headlined "What I've Learned". He had discovered, he claimed,
that his critics were both wrong and dangerous and that his decisions,
based on "freedom, democracy, responsibility to others, but also
justice and fairness", were difficult but invariably right. He called
his article "a very short synopsis of what I have learned". I could
think of an even shorter one.

We have yet to hear one word of regret or remorse from any of the main
architects - Blair, Brown, Straw, Hoon, Campbell and their principal
advisers - of Britain's participation in the supreme international
crime. The press and parliament appear to have heeded Blair's plea that
we all "move on" from Iraq. The British establishment has a unique
capacity to move on, and then to repeat its mistakes. What other former
empire knows so little of its own atrocities?

When people call our unwritten constitution a "gentleman's agreement",
they reveal more than they intend. It allows the unelected gentlemen
who advise the prime minister to act without reference to the proles.
Britain went to war in Iraq because the public and parliament were not
allowed to know when the decision was made, what the intelligence
reports said, and what the attorney general wrote about the its
legality. Had the truth not been suppressed, Britain could never have
attacked Iraq.

Real constitutional reform requires much more than the timid proposals
in the green paper on the governance of Britain, which are likely to
appear in a bill in a few weeks' time. Yes, parliament should be
allowed to vote on whether to go to war, yes the royal prerogative
should be rolled back. But the prime minister, his diplomats, civil
servants and generals would still decide which wars parliament needs to
know about, which crimes could be secretly committed in our name. Real
constitutional reform means not only handing power to parliament but
also confronting the power of the hard, unaccountable people who act as
if it is their birthright.