It’s a bad idea to fetishize intelligence, or to think that vegetarianism is going to make you a genius, but I found this list of famous vegetarian geniuses interesting:

1. Sir Isaac Newton
2. Leonardo Da Vinci
3. Srinivasa Ramanujan
4. Nikola Tesla
5. Thomas Edison
6. Albert Einstein
7. Edward Witten
8. Brian Greene
9. Alan Calverd

Elephant Journal: The World’s Greatest Geniuses are Vegetarians!

See also: Vegetarianism all the rage in MMA

And, because it’s bound to come up, here’s the Wikipedia entry on Hitler’s vegetarianism. Some question whether he was really a strict vegetarian, despite contemporaneous accounts.

Please don't think that the fact I'm a vegetarian myself has anything to do with my reblogging this from Technoccult...

Justice department to accuse FBI of invoking crises to obtain details of more than 2,000 calls, Washington Post reports

• Chris McGreal in Washington
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 January 2010 20.06 GMT
• Article history

The US justice department is preparing a report which concludes that the FBI repeatedly broke the law by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist to obtain more than 2,000 telephone call records over four years from 2002, including those of journalists on US newspapers, according to emails obtained by the Washington Post.

The bureau also issued authorisations for the seizure of records after the fact, in order to justify unwarranted seizures.

The Washington Post said the emails show how counter-terrorism ­officials inside FBI headquarters breached regulations designed to protect civil liberties.

The FBI's general counsel, Valerie Caproni, told the Washington Post that the agency violated privacy laws by inventing non-existent terrorist threats to justify collecting the phone records. "We should have stopped those requests from being made that way," she said.

Caproni said that FBI's issuing of authorisations after the fact was a "good-hearted but not well thought-out" move to give the phone companies legal cover for handing over the records.

After the 9/11 attacks, the USA patriot act greatly expanded the government's ability to monitor American citizens, including increased access to their phone calls with the approval of lower-level officials than previously allowed. But the authorisation had to be tied to an open terrorism investigation.

The Washington Post said two FBI officers had raised concerns. Special agent Bassem Youssef observed that the necessary authorisations were not being sought before phone records were seized and were sometimes only given later in response to complaints from phone companies. Another official, Patrice Kopistansky of the FBI's legal office, noticed a similar problem. She also raised concerns when she was unable to get investigators to provide her with an open terrorism case to justify issuing relevant authorisation.

The Washington Post reported that Kopistansky and Youssef discussed the worsening "backlog" of cases without the necessary authorisations, or where false claims were made about terrorism emergencies. "I also understand some of these are being done as emergencies when they aren't necessarily emergencies," Kopistansky wrote to Youssef in April 2005.

The FBI subsequently issued a blanket authorisation covering all past searches, although its legality was questioned.

The Washington Post said journalists on the newspaper and the New York Times were among those whose phone records were illegally searched. The FBI later apologised to editors of both papers.

This is why the FBI needs such a big budget -- browsing the Web for a guy who looks like Osama Bin Laden, but older, doesn't come cheap, folks.

In a statement Saturday, the agency would say only that it was aware of similarities between their age-progressed image "and that of an existing photograph of a Spanish public official [Gaspar Llamazares]."

"The forensic artist was unable to find suitable features among the reference photographs and obtained those features, in part, from a photograph he found on the Internet," the FBI said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Spanish lawmaker used in updated bin Laden photo

'WMD in a year' allegation halved original timescale after compilers told to compare contents with Bush speech

• Chris Ames and Richard Norton-Taylor
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 10 January 2010 22.57 GMT
• Article history

New evidence reveals the extent to which those drafting the Iraqi arms dossier colluded with the US on Alastair Campbell's instructions. Photograph: Graham Turner

 

Fresh evidence has emerged that Tony Blair's discredited Iraqi arms dossier was "sexed up" on the instructions of Alastair Campbell, his communications chief, to fit with claims from the US administration that were known to be false.

The pre-invasion dossier's worst-case estimate of how long it would take Iraq to acquire a nuclear weapon was shortened in response to a George Bush speech.

As Campbell prepares to appear before the Iraq inquiry on Tuesday, new evidence reveals the extent to which – on his instructions – those drafting the notorious dossier colluded with the US administration to make exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

In a keynote speech to the UN on 12 September 2002, Bush claimed: "Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year." This contradicted the first draft of the British dossier, drawn up two days earlier, which stated that it would take "at least two years" for Iraq to get the bomb.

The Cabinet Office has disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act that those who drafted the dossier were immediately asked to compare British claims against the US president's speech. The next day the dossier's timescale was halved to claim Iraq could get the bomb in a year.

A Foreign Office official who helped draft the dossier, Tim Dowse, told the Chilcot inquiry that disputed claims that Iraq had acquired special aluminium tubes for a nuclear programme were included because the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, had publicly referred to them.

Both changes to the weapons dossier were part of a detailed process of comparing the British claims with US statements and those in a forthcoming CIA dossier. The comparisons were made on the express instructions of Campbell. He told the joint intelligence committee (JIC) chairman, John Scarlett, in a memo on 9 September 2002, that the British dossier should be "one that complements rather than conflicts with" US claims.

Documents that the information commissioner ordered to be released last year show that the drafters of the UK dossier compared its claims closely with the CIA dossier and raised possible contradictions over estimates of Iraq's capabilities.

The commissioner also accidentally released a secret list of documents that he allowed the government to withhold on national security grounds. These included an email dated 13 September 2002 "covering a copy of a Bush speech to compare with UK dossier claims". The Cabinet Office has confirmed the speech was the one Bush gave to the UN the day before.

A new draft of the British weapons dossier virtually eliminated the difference between the US and UK positions. When Blair presented the dossier to parliament 11 days later, he said that Iraq might get the bomb in "a year or two".

The JIC, which prepares formal intelligence assessments, considered the scenario so unlikely that it did not estimate how long it might take.

New evidence has also emerged of Scarlett's extensive US consultation on the dossier. On the same day as the Bush speech, Scarlett met political and intelligence officials in Washington to discuss the dossier, according to a previously classified US state department memo.

The government has sought to conceal evidence of Scarlett's consultations with the US over the dossier. One email sent to Campbell was disclosed to the Hutton inquiry with a sentence blacked out. It was later disclosed that the sentence was: "Clearly John will be speaking to US."

WASHINGTON (AP) The suicide bomber who killed eight people inside a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian doctor recruited by Jordanian intelligence, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a foreign government official confirmed Monday.

The bombing killed seven CIA employees_ four officers and three contracted security guards_ and a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, according to a second former U.S. intelligence official. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.

The former senior intelligence official and the foreign official said the bomber was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year old doctor from Zarqa, Jordan. NBC News was the first to first report the bomber's identity and that he was a double-agent.

He was arrested more than a year ago by Jordanian intelligence and was thought to have been persuaded to support U.S. and Jordanian efforts against al-Qaida, according to the NBC report. He was invited to Camp Chapman, a tightly secured CIA forward base in Khost province on the fractious Afghan-Pakistan frontier, because he was offering urgent information to track down Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man.

Hajj Yacoub, a self-proclaimed spokesman for the Taliban in Pakistan, identified the bomber on Muslim militant Web sites as Hammam Khalil Mohammed, also known as Abu-Dujana al-Khurasani. There was no independent confirmation of Yacoub's statement.

Al-Balawi was not searched for bombs when he got onto Camp Chapman, according to both former officials and a current intelligence official.

He detonated the explosive shortly after his debriefing began, according to one of the former intelligence officials. In addition to the eight dead, there were at least six wounded, according to the CIA.

The former senior intelligence official said one of the big unanswered questions is why so many people were present for the debriefing – the interview of the source – when the explosive was detonated.

A half-dozen former CIA officers told The Associated Press that in most cases, only one or two agency officers would typically meet with a possible informant along with an interpreter. Such small meetings would normally be used to limit the danger and the possible exposure of the identities of both officers and informants.

An online jihadist magazine in September 2009 posted an interview with al-Balawi, according to SITE Monitoring Service, a terrorist watch group that reads and translates messages on extremist forums.

SITE said Monday that al-Balawi used his pseudonym – identified as Khorsani – in the postings, describing how he rose through the ranks of online jihadist forums. He said he went to Afghanistan to fight, and he exhorted others to do violence.

"No words are more eloquent than those proven by acts, so that if that Muslim survives, he will be one who proves his words with acts. If he dies in the Cause of Allah, he will grant his words glory that will be permanent marks on the path to guide to jihad, with permission from Allah," al-Balawi wrote, according to SITE's translation.

A Jordanian government official, who was not authorized to speak to the press, said the Jordanian government has no connection to the bomber. The official said the Jordanian government had not verified whether the bomber was Jordanian.

The Taliban's Yacoub said the Jordanian intelligence officer, bin Zaid, was helping the CIA recruit agents to spy on al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Bin Zaid allegedly recruited the suicide bomber.

Jordan's state news agency Petra identified bin Zaid as an army officer on a humanitarian mission in Afghanistan. It said he was killed Wednesday evening "as a martyr while performing the sacred duty of the Jordanian forces in Afghanistan." It did not provide other details.

The Jordanian military released a brief statement acknowledging bin Zaid had been killed in Afghanistan, but it did not mention he was working with Jordanian intelligence or cooperating with the CIA.

Bin Zaid's family declined to comment.

Bin Zaid is known to be a relative of Jordan's King Abdullah II. He held the title of sharif, or nobleman, which was bestowed upon him by the Jordanian monarch.

King Abdullah and other members of the royal family received Bin Zaid's body, which was repatriated Saturday in a private ceremony. His wake was held in the Royal Palace.

The death of bin Zaid underscored the close relationship between the Jordanian intelligence service and the CIA in the U.S. global war on terrorism.

Jordan is known to have acted as a proxy jailer for the CIA in 2004, when Jordanian intelligence officers interrogated several al-Qaida militants who were flew in on rendition flights from Guantanamo Bay.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch and several other watchdogs rebuked Jordan for what they described then as systematic torture of the detainees. Jordan denied the link to the CIA and the abuse allegations.

A key U.S. ally in the Mideast, Jordan also contributed valuable intelligence data to the United States, which helped track down the former al-Qaida in Iraq leader, Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2006. Al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in June that year.

Tue Dec 22, 10:54 am ET

VILNIUS (Reuters) – The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran a secret prison in Lithuania where al Qaeda suspects may have been held, a parliamentary probe in the Baltic state found on Tuesday.

The head of Lithuania's domestic intelligence agency has already resigned as speculation about secret jails has intensified.

U.S. broadcaster ABC News reported in August that Lithuania was the third European country, after Poland and Romania, believed to host secret CIA jails

Some CIA staff are reported to have said the use of overseas detention centres was designed to circumvent U.S. law.

Arvydas Anusauskas, the head of parliament's national security and defense committee, said the investigation found Lithuanian intelligence opened two detention centres in cooperation with the CIA.

"There were facilities, there were possibilities, there were (CIA) planes, though we can't know what was on board ... Therefore such a possibility exists," he said, when asked whether any CIA detainees were held in Lithuania.

Top officials were not informed about the jails, and there was no political approval, he said.

Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius said it was "a matter of great concern" that such infrastructure existed and that it could be possible to detain suspected terrorists without government control.

In a statement, he said he expected good relations with the United States to continue, but that a strategic partnership could not be an excuse for "Soviet methods, ignoring civilian control of the special services and in breach of existing laws."

ABC News said a secret CIA prison operated near Vilnius airport from early 2004 to late 2005 and that CIA planes flew into Lithuania with top level al Qaeda suspects.

Anusauskas told a news conference that CIA flights entered Lithuania but were not inspected, and it had not been possible to determine who had been on board.

The investigation was the second into the secret jail allegations, demanded by President Dalia Grybauskaite after an earlier probe found no evidence.

"It (the investigation) only proves suspicions she had for some time that there were premises designed for detention and there were flights which could have been used for transporting prisoners," said the president's spokesman, Linas Balsys.

"The president has no doubts that bilateral Lithuania-U.S. relationship cannot be overshadowed by these conclusions."

Last week, Grybauskaite said she had ordered the recall of Lithuania's ambassador to Georgia, Mecys Llaurinkus, who led the state security department from June 1998 until April 2004.

The investigation found that five planes linked to the CIA landed in Lithuania in 2003-2006, and that domestic intelligence officials prevented customs and border guards inspecting them.

The U.S. Embassy in Vilnius declined to comment, saying it was U.S. policy not to comment on intelligence matters.

(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Iraq Inquiry bombshell: Secret letter to reveal new Blair war lies

By Simon Walters, Mail on Sunday Political Editor
Last updated at 1:48 AM on 29th November 2009

An explosive secret letter that exposes how Tony Blair lied over the legality of the Iraq War can be revealed.

The Chilcot Inquiry into the war will interrogate the former Prime Minister over the devastating 'smoking gun' memo, which warned him in the starkest terms the war was illegal.

The Mail on Sunday can disclose that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote the letter to Mr Blair in July 2002 - a full eight months before the war - telling him that deposing Saddam Hussein was a blatant breach of international law.

It was intended to make Mr Blair call off the invasion, but he ignored it. Instead, a panicking Mr Blair issued instructions to gag Lord Goldsmith, banned him from attending Cabinet meetings and ordered a cover-up to stop the public finding out.

He even concealed the bombshell information from his own Cabinet, fearing it would spark an anti-war revolt. The only people he told were a handful of cronies who were sworn to secrecy.

Lord Goldsmith was so furious at his treatment he threatened to resign - and lost three stone as Mr Blair and his cronies bullied him into backing down.

Sources close to the peer say he was 'more or less pinned to the wall' in a Downing Street showdown with two of Mr Blair's most loyal aides, Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan.

The revelations follow a series of testimonies by key figures at the Chilcot Inquiry who have questioned Mr Blair's judgment and honesty, and the legality of the war.

The Mail on Sunday has learned that the inquiry has been given Lord Goldsmith's explosive letter, and that Mr Blair and the peer are likely to be interrogated about it when they give evidence in the New Year.

Lord Goldsmith gave qualified legal backing to the conflict days before the war broke out in March 2003 in a brief, carefully drafted statement. As The Mail on Sunday disclosed three years ago, even that was a distortion as Lord Goldsmith had told Mr Blair a week earlier he could be breaking international law.

But today's revelations show that Lord Goldsmith told Mr Blair at the outset, and in writing, that military action against Iraq was totally illegal.

Pressured: Lord Goldsmith leaves No10 in March 2003 after talks with Blair

The disclosures deal a massive blow to Mr Blair's hopes of proving he acted in good faith when he and George Bush declared war on Iraq. And they are likely to fuel further calls for Mr Blair to be charged with war crimes.

Lord Goldsmith's 'smoking gun' letter came six days after a Cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, at which Ministers were secretly told that the US and UK were set on 'regime change' in Iraq.

The peer, who attended the meeting, was horrified. On July 29, he wrote to Mr Blair on a single side of A4 headed notepaper from his office.

Friends say it was no easy thing for him to do. He was a close friend of Mr Blair, who gave him his peerage and Cabinet post. The typed letter was addressed by hand, 'Dear Tony', and signed by hand, 'Yours, Peter'.

In it, Lord Goldsmith set out in uncompromising terms why he believed war was illegal. He pointed out that:

• War could not be justified purely on the grounds of 'regime change'.
• Although United Nations rules permitted 'military intervention on the basis of self-defence', they did not apply in this case because Britain was not under threat from Iraq.
• While the UN allowed 'humanitarian intervention' in certain instances, that too was not relevant to Iraq.
• It would be very hard to rely on earlier UN resolutions in the Nineties approving the use of force against Saddam.

Lord Goldsmith ended his letter by saying 'the situation might change' - although in legal terms, it never did.

The letter caused pandemonium in Downing Street. Mr Blair was furious. No10 told Lord Goldsmith he should never have put his views on paper, and he was not to do so again unless told to by Mr Blair.

The reason was simple: if it became public, Lord Goldsmith's letter could make it impossible for Mr Blair to fulfil his secret pledge to back Mr Bush in any circumstances. More importantly, it could never be expunged from the record as copies were stored in No10 and in the Attorney General's office.

Although Lord Goldsmith had Cabinet status, he attended meetings only when asked. After his letter, he barely attended another meeting until the eve of the war. Mr Blair kept him out to reduce the chance of him blurting out his views to other Ministers.

When Mr Blair is quizzed by the Chilcot Inquiry, he will be asked why he never admitted he was told from the start that the war was illegal.

Equally ominously for Mr Blair, a defiant Lord Goldsmith is ready to defend the letter when he appears before the inquiry. Friends of the peer, widely derided for his role in the Iraq War, believe it will vindicate him.

A source close to Lord Goldsmith said: 'He assumed, perhaps naively, that Blair wanted a proper legal assessment. No10 went berserk because they knew that once he had put it in writing, it could not be unsaid.

'They liked to do things with no note-takers, and often no officials, present. That way, there was no record. Everything could be denied.

Heavy-handed: Baroness Morgan and Lord Falconer are said to have 'more or less pinned Lord Goldsmith to the wall and told him what Blair wanted'

'Goldsmith threatened to resign at least once. He lost three stone in that period. He is an honourable man and it was a terribly stressful experience.'

Lord Goldsmith's wife Joy, a prominent figure in New Labour dining circles, played a crucial role in talking him out of quitting.

'Joy was always very ambitious on Peter's behalf and did not want to see him throw it all away,' said a source.

Lord Goldsmith's letter contradicts Mr Blair's repeated statements, before, during and after the war on its legality.

In April 2005, the BBC's Jeremy Paxman repeatedly asked him if he had seen confidential Foreign Office advice that the war would be illegal without specific UN support.

Mr Blair said: 'No. I had the Attorney General's advice to guide me.' At best, it was dissembling. At worst, it was a blatant lie.

Mr Blair knew all along that Lord Goldsmith had told him the war was illegal, and that when the peer finally gave it his cautious backing, he did so only under extreme duress.

The Mail on Sunday has also obtained new evidence about the way Lord Goldsmith was bullied into backing the war at the 11th hour.

He was summoned to a No10 meeting with Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and Baroness Sally Morgan, Mr Blair's senior Labour 'fixer' in Downing Street. No officials were present.

A source said: 'Falconer and Morgan performed a pincer movement on Goldsmith. They more or less pinned him up against the wall and told him to do what Blair wanted.'

After the meeting, Lord Goldsmith issued his brief statement stating the war was lawful.

Lord Falconer said in response to the latest revelations: 'This version of events is totally false. The meeting was Lord Goldsmith's suggestion and he told us what his view was.'

Baroness Morgan has also denied trying to pressure Lord Goldsmith.

The legal row came to a head days before the war, when the UN refused to approve military action. Stranded, Mr Blair had to win Lord Goldsmith's legal backing, not least because British military chiefs refused to send troops into action without it.

On March 17, three days before the conflict started, Lord Goldsmith said the war was legal on the basis of previous UN resolutions threatening action against Saddam - even though in his secret letter of July 2002, he had ruled out this argument.

A spokesman for Lord Goldsmith said: 'This letter is probably in the bundle that has been supplied to the inquiry by the Attorney General's department. It is presumed they will want to discuss it with him. If so, Lord Goldsmith is content to do so.

'His focus is on the legality of the war, its morality is for others.'

A spokesman for the Chilcot Inquiry said: 'We are content we have obtained all the relevant documents.'

A spokesman for Mr Blair refused to say why the former Prime Minister had not disclosed Lord Goldsmith's July 2002 letter.

'The Attorney General set out the legal basis for action in Iraq in March 2003,' he said. 'Beyond that, we are not getting into a running commentary before Mr Blair appears in front of the Chilcot committee.'

Leading international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands said: 'The Chilcot Inquiry must make Lord Goldsmith's note of 29 July, 2002, publicly available to restore public confidence in the Government.'

 

Diary of deceit ... and how the Attorney General lost three stone

2002

April 6: Blair meets Bush at Crawford, Texas. They secretly agree 'regime change' war against Iraq.

July 23: Blair tells secret Cabinet meeting of war plan. Goldsmith is asked to check legal position.

July 24: Blair tells MPs: 'We have not got to the stage of military action...or point of decision.'

JULY 19, 2002: Lord Goldsmith photographed ten days before he tells Blair war is illegal

MARCH 20, 2003: Haggard Goldsmith arrives for War Cabinet on day Iraq is invaded

July 29: Goldsmith secretly writes to Blair to tell him war is illegal.

July 30: No10 rebukes Goldsmith. He is excluded from most War Cabinet meetings.

November 8: UN urges Saddam to disarm, but stops short of backing war.

2003

March 7: Despite duress from No10, Goldsmith tells Blair war could be unlawful.

March 13: Goldsmith is allegedly 'pinned against wall' by Blair cronies Charlie Falconer and Sally Morgan.

March 17: UN rules out backing war.

March 17: Goldsmith U-turn. In carefully worded brief 'summary', he says war is lawful.

March 20: War begins.

2005

April 21: Jeremy Paxman asks Blair if he saw Foreign Office advice saying war was illegal. Blair says: 'No. I had Lord Goldsmith's advice to guide me.'

April 24: Mail on Sunday reveals Goldsmith told Blair two weeks before war that it could be illegal.

2009

November 24: Chilcot Iraq War Inquiry begins.

Today: Mail on Sunday reveals Goldsmith's 'smoking gun' letter to Blair in July 2002.

 

Blair 'knew WMD claim was false'

By DAVID ROSE

By the time Tony Blair led Britain to attack Iraq, he had stopped believing his own lurid claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, according to an unpublished interview with the late Robin Cook, the former Leader of the Commons who resigned from the Cabinet just before the invasion in March 2003.

In the interview, which Cook gave me in 2004, the year before his death, he described Blair's actions as 'a scandalous manipulation of the British constitution', adding that if the then Prime Minister had revealed his doubts, they would have rendered the war illegal.

Cook, who was in almost daily contact with Blair in the months before his resignation, said that in September 2002, when the Government published its infamous dossier claiming Saddam had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons and could deploy WMDs within 45 minutes, Blair did believe these claims were true. But he added:

'By February or March, he knew it was wrong. As far as I know, at no point after the end of 2002 did he ever repeat those claims.'

Tony Blair secures MPs' support for war on March 18, 2003, as Clare Short looks on. But according to Robin Cook, the PM already knew WMD claims were untrue

On March 18, Blair had to face the Commons to ask it to vote for war but he knew, Cook added, 'that if he now publicly withdrew the dossier's claims, his position would be lost'.

Therefore Blair kept silent and so secured the war resolution, though 139 Labour MPs voted against him.

Cook added that if Blair had revealed his doubts, this would also have made it impossible for Lord Goldsmith to issue the fateful legal advice that Britain's Service chiefs had been demanding: that war would be lawful.

'What I've never seen satisfactorily defended by the Government is whether that opinion still stands up if the premise on which it was based - the claims in the dossier - turn out to be false,' Cook said.

'Tony didn't focus on WMDs only for political reasons, but for legal reasons. He knew he was not going to get the Attorney General on side on any basis other than that Saddam had illegal weapons and could not be disarmed by any means other than war.'

Cook's is not the only bombshell that remains unpublished. Last week, Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, told the Chilcot Inquiry that though Blair kept insisting almost to the end that 'nothing was decided' on Iraq, his decision to support the invasion actually went back to April 2002, when he visited President Bush's Texas ranch.

However, both Meyer and other British and American officials told me in 2004 that Blair made up his mind even before April and that even then, Blair was saying in private that Britain would join the attack as long as Bush got UN backing. That meant proving Saddam had active WMDs, as the UN would not authorise an attack on any other basis.

Revelations: Sir Christopher Meyer and the late Robin Cook

Meyer told me: 'Some time during the first quarter of 2002, Blair had become resigned to war.'

Having committed himself to war, Blair believed he had to get military action approved by the UN to make the invasion legal, and to get the support of his own party back home. But leading figures close to Bush were deeply hostile to this idea, and would have much preferred to attack unilaterally.

Perhaps the most shocking disclosures concerned Blair's propensity to bend the truth. For example, on July 26, 2002, Clare Short, then International Development Secretary, asked Blair whether war was looming.

His response was that she should go on holiday untroubled, because 'nothing had been decided, and would not be over the summer'.

In fact, at that very moment, his adviser Sir David Manning was engaged in feverish diplomacy in Washington - because although Blair thought Bush had promised to go to the UN, he seemed to be changing his mind. Manning even had a personal audience with Bush.

A few days later, Bush and Blair spoke by telephone. A senior White House official who read the transcript told me: 'The way it read was that, come what may, they were going to take out the regime. I remember reading it and thinking, "OK, now I know what we're going to be doing for the next year."'

Later, both leaders would state repeatedly that they had not decided to go to war. But the official said: 'War was avoidable only if Saddam ceased to be president of Iraq. It was a done deal.'

Yet the hawkish neo-conservatives at the Pentagon were still fighting hard to avoid the UN route, which would require a narrowing of focus on to WMDs. The crunch came at a summit at Camp David on September 7, 2002, when, most unusually, not only Bush but the neo-con vice president Dick Cheney met Blair. Cheney's role, Meyer said, was solely to try to persuade Bush not to go to the UN.

In desperation, Blair, according to another White House official, told Bush and Cheney that he could be ousted at the Labour conference later that month if Bush ignored the UN. Afterwards, the official said, he and his colleagues pored over the party's constitution, discovering that it was most unlikely that this threat would materialise.

But by then it was too late: a week after the summit, Bush spoke at the UN General Assembly, and announced America would be seeking what became Resolution 1442 - the resolution that, in Lord Goldsmith's eyes, allowed British soldiers to kill Iraqis without being prosecuted for murder.

But not all who once saw Blair as a friend have forgiven him. 'Blair was absolutely the reason why we went to the UN, because it was believed that his political fortunes absolutely demanded it,' said David Wurmser, formerly Cheney's chief Middle East adviser. 'It really was a political concession to Blair - and also a disastrous misjudgment.'

 

No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund

By TAMAR LEWIN

“My impression is that parents really believe these videos are good for their children, or at the very least, not really bad for them,” Ms. Rideout said. “To me, the most important thing is reminding parents that getting down on the floor to play with children is the most educational thing they can do.”