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Man Of Straw blocks Iraq papers release
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
"Justice Secretary Jack Straw has vetoed the publication of minutes of key Cabinet meetings held in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003. He said he would use a clause in the Freedom of Information Act to block the release of details of meetings in which the war's legality was discussed. Releasing the papers would do 'serious damage' to Cabinet government, he said, and outweighed public interest needs. The Information Tribunal ruled last month that they should be published." More details here.
Quite astonishing, really. This is the second time in as many months that this government has tried to break the law for its own purposes. Last month, Harriet Hagperson - she who wants to lead the Labour Party in opposition, ha ha! - tried to mount a bid to cover up MPs expenses after the courts had ordered that the details be released. Now we have an information tribunal ordering that minutes should be released, Jack Man Of Straw decides he doesn't like it so he's going to block them being disclosed.
Yet again, the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" line which this Darien Government trots out doesn't seem to apply to themselves. What are these bastards hiding from us? Why are the likes of Jack Straw so desperate to make sure they're either very old or very dead before these papers have to be released in 2033? [Cabinet papers are released after 30 years, in case you're wondering where I got that date from] How many more lies did they really tell us?
The impending mass riots and street protests can't come soon enough!
Quite astonishing, really. This is the second time in as many months that this government has tried to break the law for its own purposes. Last month, Harriet Hagperson - she who wants to lead the Labour Party in opposition, ha ha! - tried to mount a bid to cover up MPs expenses after the courts had ordered that the details be released. Now we have an information tribunal ordering that minutes should be released, Jack Man Of Straw decides he doesn't like it so he's going to block them being disclosed.
Yet again, the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" line which this Darien Government trots out doesn't seem to apply to themselves. What are these bastards hiding from us? Why are the likes of Jack Straw so desperate to make sure they're either very old or very dead before these papers have to be released in 2033? [Cabinet papers are released after 30 years, in case you're wondering where I got that date from] How many more lies did they really tell us?
The impending mass riots and street protests can't come soon enough!
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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Im not Miss Debate 2009 so im not very experienced and im new to this whole forum. And yet that statement is so very true. Im sure the rights and wrongs and the 'we were right to go to war' and the 'we shouldn't have gone to war' debates have happened so I wont go on about that.
However, that statement rings true in my mind. If the government has nothing to hide then why are they hiding information? Again.:banghead:
Bastards.
The Tories were not 'complicit', in the sense they did not know that the threat of WMD etc were untrue. If by voting for the war means the Tories are 'complicit', then I am complicit too because I was certain Tony Blair wouldn't be lying and that he MUST have had access to information which would substantiate his claims. It soon became clear, however, that I had been lied to and I will never forgive this government for the innocent blood they have placed on my hands by proxy.
Unfortunately, I too believed that the Prime Minister was telling the truth. I was uneasy about the conflict in the first place, but I supported it - I simply could not believe the idea that a PM would openly lie to get us into a war. How foolish I was to trust a charlatan and chancer like Blair - a man who should now be spending his days in a rough jail fearing for his own life, not being paid a million pounds for his "work" in the Middle East. So far as I can tell, all he's done since leaving Downing Street is fly round the world giving crap speeches whilst being paid shitloads of money by banks who haven't a fucking clue what they're doing.
Incidentally, has anyone noticed the blatant conflict of interest in this? Quentin Letts today wrote in the Mail today that "Mr Straw, at the time [of the Iraq war], was Foreign Secretary. A man with a sharper sense of conflicts of interest might have said 'sorry, lads, I'm too closely wrapped up in this case - let someone else decide'.". Even those of you that hate the Mail newspapers would have to agree he's got a valid point...
albiet not a very funny one...
Strictly speaking it was damage to Cabinet Government, which is a totally different thing
To me it sounds as 'we can't release this information, because it might show we behaved inappropriately and thus damage us'. If that the case that is completely unacceptable.
At that point some of those who supported the war said it did not matter because there were other good reasons to oust Saddam. But in my mind it had become very clear and evident before the war started that there were no WMDs left in Iraq and that the US and Britain were acting quite illegally and lying blatantly to the world about it.
Also, there's a certain amount of self-preservation behind this. Gordon Brown was said to harbour serious doubts about the Iraq war. Nobody knows whether this is true, because he refuses to tell us. If it's revealed that he had massive doubts about the legality/sensibility of going to war in Iraq but didn't do anything about it, it would look extremely bad for him. And when the Tories are 15 to 20 points ahead of Labour in the polls, it would make the situation even worse for him.
Oh, and let's not forget Jack Straw's role in all this. His constituency of Blackburn has a large Muslim population - and they weren't terribly friendly about the Iraq war, were they? He won't want to give them yet another reason to put him on the dole at the next general election.
Damage the cabinet would be as you say
However cabinet government is a description of UK's top layer of government. A principle of this system is that inside you can say what you like, but outside everyone takes collective responsibility for decisions reached or resigned. If you showed papers which basically show the disagreements you weaken collective responsibility. Which is why they're not released for 30 (?) years.
Now you can argue that either it wouldn't make any difference, the damage would be minor or that cabinet govt is outdated. But that's a different argument from saying he said he blocked it because it would damage the cabinet (even if that may be the real reason)
Sounds more like 'We must all hang together, gentlemen, else we shall most assuredly hang separately'.
How many lies were we told ...more so the Yanks?
The same shite repeated over and over and over and fucking over till it was seared in the public psyche ....?
A whole new thread listing the lies could run to many pages.
Heres one of my favourites ...printed in papers and magazines ...shown on news progs and discussed in serious debates ...over and over but ...the attention span of Joe public is short. Very short as Joe ...the plumber ...has to work provide etc ...and now has to deal with a financial collapse of the economy.
Let me remind you of just one lie ....
0ops wrong picture ...
How about this one ....
Respected film maker and politician ...talks about the none existent caves and none existent people they will be hunting in them ...less than two minutes in ....http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1263677258215075609
This I don't have a problem with; to some extent it protects the ability of those present to debate and disagree openly without the pressures of external political ramifications.
What I don't think is that it is an excuse to withold the details en bloc; a degree of anonymisation could surely take place, and that would be enough to give an idea of the context of deliberations that took place without exposing individual parties.
Quiet well given the last time the English tried to kill each other was in the seventeenth century, the Scots the eighteenth (and that was mainly involving the French and us paddies) and the Irish... well it's working out well for most of the UK anyway