We must read The London Times to hear the truth:
THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.
The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war. By the end of August the raids had become a full air offensive.
The details follow the leak to The Sunday Times of minutes of a key meeting in July 2002 at which Blair and his war cabinet discussed how to make “regime change” in Iraq legal. . .The briefing paper prepared for the July meeting — the same document that revealed the prime minister’s agreement during a summit with President George W Bush in April 2002 to back military action to bring about regime change — laid out the American war plans.
They opted on August 5 for a “hybrid plan” in which a continuous air offensive and special forces operations would begin while the main ground force built up in Kuwait ready for a full-scale invasion.
The Ministry of Defence figures, provided in response to a question from Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, show that despite the lack of an Iraqi reaction, the air war began anyway in September with a 100-plane raid.
The systematic targeting of Iraqi air defences appears to contradict Foreign Office legal guidance appended to the leaked briefing paper which said that the allied aircraft were only “entitled to use force in self-defence where such a use of force is a necessary and proportionate response to actual or imminent attack from Iraqi ground systems”.
Although our media don't have the courage to comment, Representative Conyers has a call to action on Daily KOS:
This morning I read the new revelations, again the London Times, that British and U.S. aircraft had substantially stepped up their bombing activity in the summer of 2002 in an effort to "goad Saddam into War." If true, we would seem to have the "smoking bullet" to the "smoking gun" of the Downing Street Memo.Do you think there's any chance Rumsfeld will respond? Of course not, and do you think the media will ask him or Chimpy about it? Not a chance. The concept of the free press and democracy in the U.S. are no more.
I have prepared a letter to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld detailing these new charges and asking for his response ...
Conyers is asking people to write to President Bush.
