BLAIR TOLD: SURRENDER FOR TRIAL OVER IRAQ
Leading war crimes lawyer says former premier should surrender himself to justice over Iraq
TONY Blair should put himself in the dock over Iraq, a leading war crimes lawyer said yesterday. Sir Geoffrey Nice QC said the former PM should “voluntarily submit” to a court to “assess whether what he did was lawful or criminal” when he took Britain to war. Nice, who led the war crimes prosecution of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, said: “Tony Blair has lost immense credit since leaving office on account of this and on account of other ways in which he has conducted himself. Nothing would do him greater credit now than voluntarily to submit… to being tried.”
The senior lawyer made his call in a BBC radio interview as Sir John Chilcot used the first anniversary of his report on the Iraq War to say Blair was not “straight with the nation” before the 2003 invasion.
The chairman of the public inquiry into the conflict said the former PM had been “emotionally truthful” – but relied on “belief” rather than “fact”.
He said in a BBC interview: “Any prime minister taking a country into war has got to be straight with the nation and carry it, so far as possible, with him or her. I don’t believe that was the case in the Iraq instance.”
Released last year after seven years of investigation, the Chilcot Report found Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein posed “no imminent threat” at the time of the invasion and the war was fought on the basis of “flawed” intelligence.
Giving evidence to the inquiry, Blair denied he took the country to war alongside then US president George W Bush on the basis of a “lie” over Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – a long-standing critic of the war – said he agreed with Chilcot that Blair was not straight with the country in the run-up to the conflict.
But Blair’s office accused the BBC of putting words in Chilcot’s mouth.
They insisted the full interview showed that the former Whitehall mandarin did not think that Blair had “departed from the truth”.