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Blair faced war crimes charges last June in Belgium (AFP )
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LONDON,
March 2 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - A British anti-Iraq
war group said Tuesday, March 2, it wants the International Criminal
Court (ICC) in The Hague to consider whether Prime Minister Tony Blair
officials should be tried for war crimes amid a political furor that
the British attorney general was forced to rewrite his legal advice
before the Iraq invasion.
Submitting
a petition to the court, the Legal Action Against War said it was also
asking the court to look into similar alleged offences by Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon and Attorney
General Lord Goldsmith, British daily The Guardian reported.
It
said "a principal charge" against the four men was
"intentionally launching an attack knowing that it will cause
incidental loss of life or injury to civilians".
The
group said "a principal charge" was "intentionally
launching an attack knowing that it will cause incidental loss of life
or injury to civilians".
At
a press conference in London, the anti-war group hit out at "the
genocidal blockade and inhuman attacks on Iraq", the British
daily said.
The
petition came just two days after a coalition of anti-war groups said
it intended to take legal action for "mass murder" against
Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush before the ICC.
"What
has happened is the mass murder of 20,000 or so Iraqis," Agence
France-Presse (AFP) quoted as saying Chris Coverdale, a spokesman for
the Stop the War coalition.
"The
war with Iraq was illegal but, furthermore, crimes were
committed," Coverdale said. "Therefore you want to ensure
that people who have committed the crimes answer for them in
court."
The
movement brought
an estimated one million people to demonstrate against the war in
London a year ago and up to 200,000 braved
massive security to protest at a visit by Bush to London in
November 2003.
Wartime
Bush and Blair faced similar war
crimes charges last June after law suits were filed
against them in Belgium under the universal competence law.
Archbishop
and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu said last month that Blair
and Bush should have the guts to say sorry for waging an "immoral
war" on Iraq.
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British officials say Goldsmith's advice was "prevaricating"
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The
International Criminal Court is an independent international
organisation and was established on 17 July 1998 by the Rome Statue of
the ICC. Eighteen judges are permanent members of the Court and are
elected by a secret ballot.
Advice
Rewritten
The
war crimes campaign came as it also emerged that Goldsmith was forced
hastily to redraft his legal advice to Blair to give an
"unequivocal" assurance to the armed forces that the
conflict would be legal, The Observer reported on Saturday,
February 29.
The
daily revealed that Britain's Army chiefs refused to go to war in Iraq
amid fears that they could be tried in the future for engaging in an
illegal war.
"Goldsmith
wrote to Blair at the end of January [2003] voicing concerns that the
war might be illegal without a second resolution from the United
Nations," the paper said.
Senior
British officials told The Observer that Goldsmith was
"sitting on the fence" and that his initial advice was
"prevaricating".
The
paper said Chief of Staff Michael Boyce only gave his troops the
go-ahead after seeing Goldsmith's final legal advice.
The
bombshell's source is unpublished legal documents in the case of
whistleblower Katharine Gun, the intelligence officer, who was accused
of breaching the Official Secrets Act by leaking an e-mail about a
U.S. request that Britain help bug
United Nations delegations before the Iraq war.
Goldsmith
surprisingly dropped on February 25 charges against her in what was
seen as a bid to prevent these details from being revealed in open
court.
Commenting
on the revelations, Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs
spokesman, said: "I have no doubt whatever that if Parliament had
been told these things, the Government would not have achieved its
majority and been unable to go to war."
"Public
opinion, already deeply divided, would have swung overwhelmingly
against the Government," he added.
The
revelations will also increase pressure for the Butler inquiry to
study the Gun case.
Blair
bowed to mounting pressures both from his Labor Party and the
opposition and announced a
cross-party inquiry into the quality of British
intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons, which have not been found
so far.
Congress-pressured
Bush ordered
in February a bipartisan commission to probe apparent flaws in
intelligence used to invade Iraq.
