High crimes and misdemeanours

[cal04]

All the evidence shows that the Prime Minister misled Parliament and the people on the eve of the Iraq war. Now, as Peter Oborne reveals, a group of MPs are determined to impeach him
Peter Oborne

Tony Blair was not merely wrong about Iraqi WMD in retrospect. Thanks to Butler, it is now possible to show that his statements clashed with the state of knowledge within the intelligence community at the time. It is possible to demonstrate that the Prime Minister was guilty of at best a culpably negligent failure to acquaint himself with the true state of affairs, at worse mendacity and bad faith. Tony Blair at no stage gave the British people the chance to make up their minds ahead of the war, because the relevant evidence was manipulated and in some cases suppressed.

The greatest deception of all relates to the way that Tony Blair presented intelligence material. On 24 September 2002, while presenting his Iraq dossier to the Commons, he told MPs, ‘I am aware, of course, that people are going to have to take elements of this on the good faith of the intelligence services. But this is what they are telling me, the British Prime Minister, and my senior colleagues. The intelligence picture they paint is ...extensive, detailed and authoritative.’ In fact, as the Butler inquiry demonstrated with great clarity, the Prime Minister was in a position to know that this statement was false: over four fifths of the intelligence about Iraqi deception and concealment came from just two sources, both of which have since been recognised as dodgy. Furthermore, the Prime Minister was aware of this shameful paucity of material. As Butler records, ‘the Chief of SIS had a meeting with the Prime Minister on 12 September to brief him on SIS operations in respect of Iraq. At the meeting he briefed the Prime Minister on each of the SIS’s main sources.’ As Butler himself remarked, in a rare moment of criticism: ‘We were struck by the relative thinness of the intelligence base supporting the greater firmness of the JIC’s judgments on Iraqi production and possession of chemical and biological weapons.’


http://www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec365.html

[NMDemDist2]

1. Wonder if Blair getting "impeached" will wake up our electorate

Or if folks will even be able to connect the dots?

sigh

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. Pardon my ignorance

but from the title of your post, I assumed it was talking about impeachment. Isn't that just an American process? I always thought that if a British PM screwed up, Parliament got rid of him via a vote of no confidence. Then if he'd done something criminal, the courts took care of him. Is this so?

[cal04]

3. The process actually did come from Britain

There is no doubt that when the Americans turned their attention to fashioning procedures for impeachment that they had the history of Great Britain in mind.
While they were willing to borrow from Britain the notion that the lower house ought to "prefer the impeachment" while the upper house would "decide upon it", there was little else from British experience that made its way into the provisions in the Constitution. The reason was, as Jefferson noted, that "history shows that in England impeachment has been an engine more of passion than of justice.
The one other exception, as will be seen below, was the adoption of the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" in setting a standard for impeachable offences.Unlike impeachment in Britain, the Americans restricted the reach of the power to "civil officers" thus excluding private citizens; made clear it would not be a criminal process but a political one that did not demand a trial by jury or permit a presidential pardon; emphasized that impeachment was no bar to further prosecutions in the ordinary courts for criminal actions; and established that punishment would extend no further than removal from office and disqualification from holding office again. By the time of the Federal Convention it was clear that American thinking about impeachment had shifted "from the orbit of English precedent to a native republican course." The provisions that finally were adopted "reflected indigenous experience and revolutionary tenets instead of English tradition."(15) Impeachment was rendered, to borrow a phrase from James Madison, "a Republican remedy for the diseases most incident to Republican Government."(16)




from the article

It is true that in Britain we think of impeachment as part of the American, rather than the British, constitution. But the United States inherited the practice from this country, where for many centuries it was used as the ultimate response to attempts to subvert the structure of government or undermine the integrity of office. Far from being archaic, impeachment remains soundly based in British law. William Holdsworth, whose work is still used to train British lawyers, concluded his analysis of impeachment with an urgent call for its revival, stating that it ‘does embody the sound principle that ministers and officials should be made criminally liable for corruption, gross negligence, or other malfeasances in the conduct of the affairs of the nation. And this principle requires to be emphasised at a time when the development of the system of party government pledges the party to defend the policy of its leaders, however mistaken it may be, and however incompetently it may have been carried out; at a time when party leaders are apt to look indulgently on the most disastrous mistakes because they hope that the same indulgence will be extended to them when they take office; at a time when the principle of the security of the tenure of higher permanent officials is held to be more important than the need to punish their negligences and ignorances. If ministers were sometimes made criminally responsible for gross negligence or rashness, ill-considered activities might be discouraged, real statesmanship might be encouraged and party violence might be moderated.’

Holdsworth could not have described more lucidly the case for impeaching Tony Blair over the Iraq war.