No Sex Please, We're British

SmokingGunTwo
DowningStreetVille


Remember Andrew Gilligan?

How about David Kelly?

To refresh your memory, here's the short version, courtesy of Why-War.com:

September 24, 2002 - The British Government releases a dossier (the "September Dossier") in which it claims that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of the order being given.

February 3, 2003 - The British government release a dossier entitled Iraq - its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation . The dossier is later found to have included whole sections from unattributed sources including the postgraduate thesis of a former Californian student Ibrahim al-Marashi. The dossier is subsequently dubbed the "Dodgy Dossier".

May 22 - Andrew Gilligan, a BBC journalist, and David Kelly meet for lunch in the Victorian Charing Cross Hotel, between Strand and the Thames Embankment in London.

May 29 - Andrew Gilligan claims that a senior MoD official told him that the dossier in September was "sexed up" by the government with the insertion of the 45-minute claim. Subsequently, a row ensues over just who the source was.

June 1 - The Mail on Sunday publish an article by Andrew Gilligan in which he elaborates on his report and specifically names the Downing Street press secretary Alastair Campbell as the person responsible for the insertion of the 45-minute claim into the September Dossier......

July 8 - David Kelly admits to his seniors at the MoD that he had met Gilligan to discuss the dossier, but denies mentioning any involvement by Campbell. Later that day the government issue a statement saying that a Ministry of Defence official has come forward and admitted meeting Andrew Gilligan on May 22.

July 9 - In a private letter to the BBC, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon names Kelly as the official who had spoken to Gilligan.....

July 17 - Andrew Gilligan appears before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and is accused by the committee's chairman Donald Anderson of "changing his story" and being an "unsatisfactory witness". Meanwhile Kelly's family contact police after he fails to return from a walk. Before he had left his house, Kelly had sent an e-mail to a journalist on the New York Times, warning of "many dark actors playing games".

July 18 - Kelly's body is found a few miles from his home. The government announces an independent judicial inquiry into the events leading up to the death, to be chaired by Lord Hutton.

Now, there's no need to go into the 'eye of the needle' terms of reference that led to the inevitably ridiculous conclusions of the Hutton Inquiry.

Because everything has changed now.

First, note the date of the release of the Sexless September Dossier at the top of the timeline.

And then realize the date of the original Downing St Memo, in which the highest levels of the British Government were informed that the Bush Administration was 'fixing' the intelligence around the policy to facilitate the invasion of Iraq, was July 2002.

In other words, in the Summer of 2002 was the time to start making stuff up.

Stuff like 45 minute deployments of Weapons of Mass Destruction which later were apparently hidden under Mr. Bush's oval office furniture.

But now it looks like things were even more non-coital than all that.

To whit: Downing Street, the Sequel, in which the British government is informed, again in July 2002, that what they and their compadres from across the pond were setting out to do was actually illegal.

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

So.

Never Mind The 'I' Word.

Because, with evidence like that......Here Come the Sexless Pistols.

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