Pressure on over Iraq war advice
 |  Blair faces further controversy about the legality of the Iraq war. |
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 Controversy in Britain over advice about legality of Iraq war. ITN's Gary Gibbons reports (March 24)
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LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair's government remained under pressure Friday following media reports of a "cover-up" after a document emerged which suggested that Britain's top law officer changed his mind about the legality of the Iraq war shortly before its outbreak.
Opposition politicians demanded the publication of the "entire paper trail" of Attorney General Lord Goldsmith's advice to ministers on the war against Iraq.
British media reports said the documents showed Goldsmith had changed his mind. At first, the reports said, Goldsmith advised that the invasion could be deemed illegal without a further United Nations resolution. But later he said that it could be justified under existing U.N. resolutions.
The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, joined by Labour ex-Cabinet minister Robin Cook, said a full understanding of how the change of heart came about was now needed.
Under a front-page headline Friday "Publish or be damned," the Independent newspaper said "a brutal prospect" faced the Blair government.
"It is that unless and until it publishes the full documentation behind the legal advice to go to war in Iraq, the impression will grow that it took the country into an illegal war, throwing is troops into battle at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of civilians on the basis of a false prospectus and fluctuating advice from a senior law officer."
"It's a quandary entirely of Tony Blair's own making." the paper said.
On Thursday the same paper carried a headline reading: "The smoking gun?" "Was the attorney general leant on to change his mind," said an inside headline.
The Times newspaper said that the "crisis had deepened" over the affair and said pressure may now increase on Blair to publish the March 7 letter, now considered the "full" legal opinion.
The Blair government has denied politically pressuring the attorney general.
The latest controversy was sparked after the Foreign Office on Wednesday published the resignation letter of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who was the department's deputy legal adviser until shortly before the war.
In her March 18 2003 letter, made public under the Freedom of Information Act, Wilmshurst made clear she believed that the war would be illegal in the absence of a fresh U.N. resolution.
In it, she wrote of the looming U.S.-led invasion which Britain backed that "an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression." But the Foreign Office omitted two crucial sentences from the version it published.
Channel 4 News said it had obtained the missing material, and reported that the civil servant wrote: "My views accord with the advice that has been given consistently in this office, before and after the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolution 1441, and with what the attorney general gave us to understand was his view prior to his letter of 7th of March. The view expressed in that letter has of course changed again into what is now the official line."
Paper trail
Conservative spokesman Dominic Grieve told the House of Commons: "It would be far better if the entire paper trail were to be published to reassure the public the attorney general was neither leant on to change his views for party political reasons, nor deceived by the prime minister on the facts on which war might be justified."
In a statement to MPs, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw rejected claims of a "cover-up." He said the government stuck by its refusal to publish the legal advice given by Goldsmith.
Straw told MPs Thursday it was "entirely proper" that the letter was published with two paragraphs omitted. The paragraphs were covered by exemptions from the Freedom of information Act that all parties had agreed, he said.
On March 17, 2003, Goldsmith issued a parliamentary answer setting out the legal case for the war. But there have been claims that 10 days earlier, on March 7, he presented Blair with a legal opinion in which he argued that a case could be made for war without a second resolution, but also warned that military action could be challenged in the courts.
The government blacked-out the key section "not in the public interest, but in the government interest," Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats -- who opposed the war -- told The Associated Press.
'Shocking'
Former International Development Secretary Clare Short, a bitter critic of the war, told the UK's Press Association: "I think the government had to try and cover it up because it is so devastating.
"The bit that was blacked-out shows that the attorney general changed his mind twice in a matter of days before he gave advice to the Cabinet when he just said unequivocally, 'My view is that there is legal authority for war', and kept from the Cabinet any suggestion that he had had doubts about it.
"I didn't think there was anything left that would shock me, but to have that in black and white and to know that is what he did, is really shocking."
A spokesman for the attorney general told PA: "More of the same questions about process have been raised.
"What matters is that as recently as 1 March this year, the attorney made very clear to the House of Lords that the view set out in his parliamentary answer of 17 March 2003 was his own genuinely held independent view, that military action in Iraq was lawful."
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
