OT More Downing St stuff surfacing
 

Lies on top of lies for BushCo

For George W. Bush and Tony Blair, continuing attention -- which is
slowly increasing in mainstream U.S. news media -- to the secret
British-government document and to others like it (they've now all been
dubbed, collectively, "the Downing Street Memos" (AP/Guardian)), has
become a festering annoyance.

Michael Smith, a defense correspondent for Britain's sober daily, The
Times, broke the stories about the first Downing Street Memo and, when
it was later revealed, a related briefing paper for Blair. Both showed
that the prime minister and his top advisers knew that going to war
with Iraq without United Nations approval would be illegal, and that
intelligence would have to be "fixed" (see first Downing Street Memo)
to prop up their war-making policy.

Now, in his latest news report in The Times, Smith has reported that
"leaked ... legal advice" to the Foreign Office (Britain's counterpart
to the U.S. State Department) indicated that American and British
bombing raids over southern Iraq, which began in May 2002, almost a
year before the full-scale, U.S.-led attack, were illegal. (Times)

At that time, Smith says, U.S. Air Force and Royal Air Force jets
"began 'spikes of activity' designed to goad Saddam Hussein into
retaliating and giving the allies a pretext for war." The Pentagon
named the bombing campaign the "Blue Plan."

"The Foreign Office advice shows military action to pressurize
[Saddam's] regime was 'not consistent with' U.N. law, despite American
claims that it was," Smith wrote in The Times. The leaked legal advice
"made it clear [that] allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol
the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks
by Saddam's forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations ..." but that
neither the U.S. nor Britain was authorized by the U.N. "to use
military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime."