A "secret and personal" letter from Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, to Tony Blair reveals damning doubts at the heart of government about Blair's plans for Iraq a year before war started.

The letter, a copy of which is published for the first time today, warned the prime minister that the case for military action in Iraq was of dubious legality and would be no guarantee of a better future for Iraq even if Saddam Hussein were removed.

It was sent 10 days before Blair met George Bush, then the US president, in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. The document clearly implies that Blair was already planning for military action even though he continued to insist to the British public for almost another year that no decision had been made.

The letter will be a key piece of evidence at the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war when it questions Straw this week.

The document begins in a way that now appears eerily prophetic: "The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few ... there is at present no majority inside the PLP [parliamentary Labour party] for any military action against Iraq."

Straw said Iraq posed no greater threat to the UK than it had done previously. The letter said there was "no credible evidence" linking Iraq to Al-Qaeda and that the "threat from Iraq has not worsened as a result of 11 September".

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6991087.ece

Two former government lawyers are set to blow the Chilcot Inquiry wide open tomorrow. In the week that Tony Blair and his good friend Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General, are due to appear before the panel to explain why Britain went to war against Iraq in March 2003 - Goldsmith on Thursday, Blair on Friday - the two lawyers could help Chilcot put Britain's former prime minister on the spot.

Quite simply, the two lawyers, who for different reasons have never publicly told their stories, will say that they always advised that war against Iraq was illegal without a second UN resolution and that Blair went ahead anyway because he was determined to help George Bush remove Saddam Hussein.

The two lawyers are Sir Michael Wood, who was the senior Foreign Office lawyer at the time, and his deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst. They are both fascinating witnesses - for quite different reasons.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/58789,news-comment,news-politics,iraq-war-was-illegal-and-we-said-so-lawyers-will-claim-at-the-chilcot-inquiry?DCMP=NLC-daily

no sign of our rattus ......

Two former law officers at the Foreign Office lit a fuse under the Iraq Inquiry yesterday, and the powder trail leads directly to Tony Blair, who appears on Friday. His day in court before Sir John Chilcot's panel and the world's media is not likely to be comfortable given the charges implicit in the testimony of Sir Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst.

Sir Michael, the senior Foreign Office lawyer in the run-up to the Iraq war, stated that he told Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that there was no case in international law for a war to change the regime in Baghdad. He also said that there was no case on the grounds of self-defence - one of the prime reasons that the UN authorises a member nation to fight - as there was no imminent threat of attack by Saddam's forces on the UK or its vital interests.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst, Sir Michael's colleague who worked specifically on the Iraq crisis, was asked if the Foreign Office legal team had difficulty because their boss, Jack Straw, was a trained lawyer. "But he's not an international lawyer", she told the Chilcot Inquiry in what is possibly the most devastating witness appearance to date.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst resigned the night British forces invaded Iraq because she thought the war was illegal. She said she believed "our troops were entitled to be able to operate without the controversy of questions over the legality about what they're doing".

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/58900,news-comment,news-politics,chilcot-inquiry-lawyers-expose-illegality-of-iraq-war?DCMP=NLC-daily