Blair keeps dirty Iraq secrets in the dark

Thanks to Louise who just found this item on Tony Blair and Iraq at the Observer.

Tony Blair urged Gordon Brown to hold the independent inquiry into the Iraq war in secret because he feared that he would be subjected to a "show trial" if it were opened to the public, the Observer can reveal. ...

... six weeks before the war, at a meeting in Washington, the two leaders were forced to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second UN resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair that the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, painted in UN colours, over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes, he would put Iraq in breach of UN resolutions and legitimise military action.

None of which Blair wants made public. What was that about exporting our home brand of democracy to poor deprived nations?

This is positive as revelations go. Perhaps with a public "trial" Blair will have to spend some of his ill-gotten gains from interested parties — such as JP Morgan bank, Israel, Kuwait, and the US lecture circuit — on a legal defence and lots of PR.

The widespread revulsion over MPs expenses will be as nothing compared to the personal and institutionalised corruption exposed with an open inquiry. Which is why, of course, Blair, who has thus far gotten off light, must be in a bit of a sweat. I wonder what posterity will make of the state of his underpants right now.

Gary Younge on Labour's road to corruption. "If you keep resorting to the lesser of two evils, you just end up with evil."