Exclusive: I Can Reveal the Legal Advice on Drone
Strikes, and How the Establishment Works
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=170790#170790
by craig on September 9, 2015 2:17 pm in Uncategorized
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/09/exclusive-i-can-reveal-the-legal-advice-on-drone-strikes-and-how-the-establishment-works/
This may be the most important article I ever
post, because it reveals perfectly how the
Establishment works and how the Red Tories and
Blue Tories contrive to give a false impression
of democracy. It is information I can only give
you because of my experience as an insider.
It is a definitive proof of the validity of the
Chomskian propaganda model. It needs a fair bit
of detail to do this, but please try and read
through it because it really is very, very
important. After you have finished, if you agree
with me about the significance, please repost,
(you are free to copy), retweet, add to news
aggregators (Reddit etc) and do anything you can
to get other people to pay attention.
The government based its decision to execute by
drone two British men in Syria on “Legal Opinion”
from the Attorney-General for England and Wales,
Jeremy Wright, a politician, MP and Cabinet
Minister. But Wright’s legal knowledge comes from
an undistinguished first degree from Exeter and a
short career as a criminal defence barrister in
Birmingham. His knowledge of public international law is virtually nil.
I pause briefly to note that there is no pretence
of consulting the Scottish legal system. The only
legal opinion is from the Attorney General for
England and Wales who is also Honorary Advocate General for Northern Ireland.
So Jeremy Wright’s role is as a cypher. He
performs a charade. The government employs in the
FCO a dozen of the most distinguished public
international lawyers in the world. When the
Attorney-General’s office needs an Opinion on
public international law, they ask the FCO to provide it for him to sign.
The only known occasion when this did not happen
was the Iraq War. Then the FCO Legal Advisers –
unanimously – advised the Attorney-General, Lord
Goldsmith, that to invade Iraq was illegal. Jack
Straw asked the Attorney General to dismiss the
FCO chief Legal Adviser, Sir Michael Wood
(Goldsmith refused). Blair sent Goldsmith to
Washington where the Opinion was written for him
to sign by George Bush’s lawyers. [I know this
sounds incredible, but it is absolutely true].
Sir Michael Wood’s deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned in protest.
In consequence Blair and Straw decided that,
again for the first time ever, the FCO’s chief
legal adviser had to be appointed not from within
the FCO legal advisers, who had all declared the
war on Iraq to be illegal, but from outside. They
had to find a distinguished public international
lawyer who was prepared to argue that the war on
Iraq was legal. That was a very small field.
Blair and Straw thus turned to Benjamin
Netanyahu’s favourite lawyer, Daniel Bethlehem.
Daniel Bethlehem had represented Israel before
the Mitchell Inquiry into violence against the
people of Gaza, arguing that it was all
legitimate self-defence. He had also supplied the
Government of Israel with a Legal Opinion that
the vast Wall they were building in illegally
occupied land, surrounding and isolating all the
major Palestinian communities and turning them
into large prisons, was also legal. Daniel
Bethlehem is an extreme Zionist militarist of the
most aggressive kind, and close to Mark Regev,
Israel’s new Ambassador to the UK.
Daniel Bethlehem had developed, in his work for
Israel, an extremist doctrine of the right of
States to use pre-emptive self-defence – a
doctrine which would not be accepted by the vast
majority of public international lawyers. He
clinched his appointment by Blair as the FCO
chief legal adviser by presenting a memorandum to
the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in
2004 outlining this doctrine, and thus de facto
defending the attack on Iraq and the Bush/Blair doctrine.
A key sentence of Daniel Bethlehem’s memorandum is this
“It must be right that states are able to act in
self-defence in circumstances where there is
evidence of further imminent attacks by terrorist
groups, even if there is no specific evidence of
where such an attack will take place or of the precise nature of the attack.”
There is a fundamental flaw in this argument. How
can you be certain that an attack in “imminent”,
if you are not certain where or what it is? Even
if we can wildly imagine a scenario where the
government know of an “imminent” attack, but not
where or what it is, how could killing someone in
Syria stop the attack in the UK? If a team were
active, armed and in course of operation in the
UK – which is needed for “imminent” – how would
killing an individual in Syria prevent them from
going through with it? It simply does not add up as a practical scenario.
Interestingly, Daniel Bethlehem does not pretend
this is accepted international law, but specifically states that
“The concept of what constitutes an “imminent”
armed attack will develop to meet new circumstances and new threats”
Bethlehem is attempting to develop the concept of
“imminent” beyond any natural interpretation of the word “imminent”.
Daniel Bethlehem left the FCO in 2011. But he had
firmly set the British government doctrine on
this issue, while all FCO legal advisers know not
to follow it gets you sacked. I can guarantee you
that Wright’s Legal Opinion states precisely the
same argument that David Bethlehem stated in his
2004 memorandum. Knowing how these things work, I
am prepared to wager every penny I own that much of the language is identical.
It was New Labour, the Red Tories, who appointed
Daniel Bethlehem, and they appointed him
precisely in order to establish this doctrine. It
is therefore a stunning illustration of how the
system works, that the only response of the
official “opposition” to these extrajudicial
executions is to demand to see the Legal Opinion,
when it comes from the man they themselves
appointed. The Red Tories appointed him precisely
because they knew what Legal Opinion would be
given on this specific subject. They can read it in Hansard.
So it is all a charade.
Jeremy Wright pretends to give a Legal Opinion,
actually from FCO legal advisers based on the
“Bethlehem Doctrine”. The Labour Party pretends,
very unconvincingly, to be an opposition. The
Guardian, apparently the leading “opposition”
intellectual paper, publishes articles by its
staff neo-con propagandists Joshua Rozenberg
(married to Melanie Phillips) and Rafael Behr
strongly supporting the government’s new powers
of extrajudicial execution. In summer 2012 Joshua
Rozenberg presented a programme on BBC Radio 4
entitled “Secret courts, drones and international
law” which consisted mostly of a fawning
interview with … Daniel Bethlehem. The BBC and
Sky News give us wall to wall justification of the killings.
So the state, with its neo-con “opposition” and
media closely in step with its neo-con
government, seamlessly adopts a new power to kill
its own subjects based on secret intelligence and
secret legal advice, and a very weird definition
of “imminent” that even its author admits to be
outside current legal understanding.
That is how the state works. I do hope you find that helpful.
This article has been updated to reflect the fact
the Daniel Bethlehem is now retired from the FCO.
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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