"In a case of yet another leaked memo in Britain, one of the United Kingdom's top international lawyers quotes minutes from a January 31, 2003 meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush in an updated version of his book, "Lawless World", where it appears the two men made the decision to go to war regardless of what the United Nations decided about passing a second resolution that would have allowed the start of the war."
Report: Bush, Blair decided to go to war months before UN meetings
Bush also allegedly considered painting US plane in UN colors as way to lure Iraq into war.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com"
"Once the US Congress had given President Bush authority to use force, the legality of the war under international law became almost a non-issue. The view from inside the Bush Administration was reflected in the attitude of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State, who dismissed any suggestion that international law could constrain the actions of the US or that domestic constitutional requirements alone were not sufficient to confer legitimacy on the use of force. Any other approach, he wrote, 'will result, over time, in the atrophying of our ability to act independently'. Bush's own view was even blunter. The day after 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld outlined the limits which international law placed on a military response. 'I don't care what the international lawyer says,' Bush retorted, 'we are going to kick some ass.'Disbelief having been suspended in the US after 9/11, this attitude set the country's mood and went more or less unchallenged. As the troops prepared to cross into Iraq, sensible people like Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and President of the American Society of International Law, could write in the New York Times that a war would be 'illegal but legitimate' (a claim which, to her credit, she rescinded a year later, concluding that the 'invasion was both illegal and illegitimate' ). It was sufficient for the President to declare that Saddam Hussein had to be removed because he was a bad man with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). (After the war, in an interview in December 2003, Bush said that it made no difference whether Saddam Hussein had WMD or the intention of acquiring them.) " - Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules
Philippe Sands
"I think no one would be surprised at the idea that the use of spy-planes to review what is going on would be considered. What is surprising is the idea that they would be used painted in the colours of the United Nations in order to provoke an attack which could then be used to justify material breach. Now that plainly looks as if it is deception, and it raises some fundamental questions of legality, both in terms of domestic law and international law."
" George Bush considered provoking a war with Saddam Hussein's regime by flying a United States spyplane over Iraq bearing UN colours, enticing the Iraqis to take a shot at it, according to a leaked memo of a meeting between the US President and Tony Blair" - Bush 'plotted to lure Saddam into war with fake UN plane'
See: Another Memo Gets Underreported in the American Mainstream Media
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