Blair's Pre-War Talks With Bush 'Secret' by US Orders

US Blocks Britain’s Release of Iraq War Report

Blair's Pre-War Talks With Bush 'Secret' by US Orders

by Jason Ditz, 

The British government has invested a lot of effort into a four-year-long inquiry into the Iraq War headed by Sir John Chilcot, but the report never seems to come out. Diplomatic sources are now saying that this is because of explicit US orders, and that the report, if released at all, may end up heavily redacted at the Obama Administration’s insistence.

A major portion of the inquiry centered on then-Prime Minister Tony Blair lying Britain into war, and therefore focuses on the pre-war plotting by Blair and then-US President George W. Bush.

That’s apparently the rub, with the US government insisting all of those conversations, and even just Tony Blair’s part, are adjacent to a US president and therefore the property of the US government, which has decided everything is classified.

The argument is that neither Chilcot nor anyone else in the British government has the authority to decide which of the documents can be published, so instead they’re just letting the Obama Administration dictate terms, and that means everything is secret.

According to reports from the inquiry, Blair and Bush began plotting the Iraq War just weeks after Bush’s inauguration in 2001, and at the time the British government decided it was “illegal,” though they eventually launched the war anyhow in 2003.

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/11/13/us-blocks-britains-release-of-iraq-war-report/