Chris ([info]randomchris) wrote,
@ 2004-02-26 12:48:00
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Current mood: enraged

This is dynamite.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3489254.stm

"Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has said the decision to drop the trial of GCHQ whistle-blower Katharine Gun was taken for legal, not political reasons.
Mrs Gun was accused of leaking US spies' request for UK help to bug UN delegates ahead of the Iraq invasion.

Lord Goldsmith said they could prove the Official Secrets Act was breached.

But lawyers did not believe it possible to disprove Mrs Gun's defence of "necessity" - that she felt a duty to act to prevent an unlawful war. "

(bold tags added by me)

This isn't just someone deciding to drop a case. They could have dropped the case because official secrets might come out in court, and that would have been quite believable and understandable. (I was actually hoping they were going to go ahead with this and expose the intelligence that had led them to believe war was a necessity). Oh no. Instead, we have a case being dropped because it was impossible to prove that Mrs Gun was not exposing an illegal war.

Therefore, lawyers working for the Government don't think that it's possible to prove the legality of the Iraq war in court.

Let me repeat that. Lawyers working for the Government don't think that it's possible to prove the legality of the Iraq war in court.

I'm aware this is not the same thing as the war being illegal, technically speaking. But if the government of this country has led us into a war that they can't even prove is legal, WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY STILL IN CHARGE FOR?


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[info]ixwin
2004-02-26 05:06 am UTC (link)
Hmmm. Are they actually saying they don't think they could prove the war was legal; or just that they don't think they can disprove that, given the (probably incomplete) information Katharine Gun had access to, she would have had grounds for thinking the war was illegal.

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[info]randomchris
2004-02-26 05:56 am UTC (link)
That could be it. But then they'd have to reveal which information she'd had access to, and also the information she'd not had access to that somehow made the apparently-illegal bits of it legal. I doubt it. If she saw something that was illegal in itself, it's very hard to think of a way that that could be justified by something she hadn't seen.

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[info]mirabehn
2004-02-26 06:09 am UTC (link)
I think your icon says it all... :)

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[info]nickys
2004-02-26 06:14 am UTC (link)
> WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY STILL IN CHARGE FOR?

Erm... because our alleged "democracy" is nearly as phoney as the one across the Atlantic (in which Not-President-Dubya successfully sued to stop the counting of votes on the grounds that it would have prejudiced his chances of becoming President if it had been shown that his opponent got more votes).

current music: The Who "Won't Get Fooled Again"

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[info]smhwpf
2004-02-26 03:43 pm UTC (link)
It may be simply that they would just have found the trial too embarrasing, and the whole thing of Goldsmith's opinion raked over the coals and dissected in court and media, even if, as probable, it couldn't be proven either way. As for whether the war was legal, well, as Seneca said, Inter arma enim silent leges. (Which I only know because it was the title of a DS9 episode.) In the field of international affairs, governments do what they can, and law doesn't come into it. Which is pretty much what Thucydides said 2,800 years ago, and it's not changed since. The war was immoral, murderous, reckless, anything else - but illegal? Governments make the law, and on something as central to "national security" as the decision to go to war, courts do not challenge them.

Still, it was excellent that Katharine Gun got off. Another big piece of embarrasment to the bastards. (And she is very cute. Especially in that picture on the front page of the Guardian leaving the court, with her hair blowing in the wind... naughty Sam, be serious. Anyway, she's married.)

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