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GREENPEACE.ORG.UK STATEMENT ON IRAQ WHISTLE-BLOWER CASE:
Whistle-blower case has 'huge implications' for Greenpeace protesters

Whistleblower

For the first time, The Observer can reveal the truth behind Katharine Gun's
alarming revelations of spying at the UN which have plunged the Government
into crisis

It was a routine start to what should have been another day for Katharine
Gun. Clicking through her e-mails after arriving at the government's
top-secret GCHQ eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, the Mandarin translator
thought she would spend that Friday ploughing through screeds of often banal
intercepts thousands of words long.

What happened next was to change the 29-year-old's life. Opening one email,
Gun stiffened as she saw the contents. She could not believe what she was
reading. Trying not to panic, Gun looked round the office. None of her
colleagues had seen her. She took off her headset and walked casually as
possible to the ladies' lavatory, where she locked the door and sat in
silence, trying to take it all in.

'I was trying not to reveal my emotions to my colleagues as I read it,' Gun
told The Observer in an exclusive interview this weekend. 'My heart was
beating very fast.'

What she had just read was an email from Frank Koza, head of regional
targets at the US National Security Agency, asking for British help in an
intelligence 'surge' at the United Nations - an intensification of spying
operations to give the United States 'the edge' in forthcoming negotiations.
Koza said the US was conducting an operation to discover the voting
intentions of Security Council members in the crucial resolution to
authorise war in Iraq.

When she returned to her desk, Gun knew she had a big decision to make. 'It
was so controversial, in my opinion, that it seemed like something that
could maybe prevent the war,' she said.

She told no one about what she had seen and spent the weekend at her home in
Cheltenham wrestling with her conscience. As her legal team would later
argue, Gun believed the email was so shocking that, if made public, it could
potentially force the six nations targeted in the operation - Chile,
Pakistan, Guinea, Angola, Cameroon and Bulgaria - to pull the plug on a
second resolution to authorise war. Like many other people at the time,
including the Foreign Office legal advisers and possibly even the Attorney
General himself, Gun believed that any intervention without UN backing would
be illegal under international law.

The Observer has discovered that the memo was circulated widely in GCHQ to
help clarify what was expected of analysts working on the operation. But it
was not just sent to those directly involved in the espionage at the UN.

Gun was sent the email in the course of her work and her name is on the list
of original recipients. GCHQ was aware that staff were worried that they
were being asked to carry out illegal activities. So great was their concern
that they sent a memo to all staff reassuring them that 'the United Kingdom
would not commit troops to military action in Iraq without a second UN
resolution if to do so would be contrary to international law'.

Over that weekend, Gun spoke to no one about her dilemma. Instead, alone,
she took a decision which she believed would save the lives of innocent
Iraqis and British and American service personnel. Returning to work on
Monday, she printed out the Koza email and took it home. At this stage, she
could still have pulled back from the brink and no one would have been any
wiser, but she decided to follow her conscience and pass the email on to a
friend who was in contact with journalists.

Three weeks later, news of the UN spying operation was splashed on the front
page of this newspaper, triggering, over the course of a year, events that
have plunged Tony Blair into a fresh crisis over Iraq.

The Kofi connection

Adolfo Aguilar Zinser followed the British diplomat down the maze of
corridors deep inside the UN's headquarters in New York. They passed through
secured door after secured door, each one only able to be opened by security
staff on the inside. They slammed shut behind them. Finally, they were
inside a hermetically-sealed room far from the spring sunshine outside. It
was at last safe to talk about Iraq.

For Zinser, Mexico's ambassador to the UN during the frantic diplomacy that
failed to prevent the invasion of Iraq, it was impossible to be paranoid.
Impossible, simply because you knew the other side were out to get you.
Britain's spying operation had been obvious to him since last March when the
US and Britain frantically tried to persuade six wavering members of the
Security Council to back a second resolution bringing Saddam Hussein to
task.

After one evening meeting when the six countries had met in private to
attempt to thrash out an agreement, Zinser received a phone call from an
American diplomat informing him that the US would veto their proposals. It
was clear someone had been listening in. 'I wasn't surprised,' he told The
Observer. 'But I was annoyed.'

Now the sheer scale of that spying operation is coming to light. In recent
weeks, Mexico and Chile have both complained to Britain that they were being
spied upon. But we now know the spying operation went beyond just gathering
information on the waverering nations, which we now know included Mexico,
but also on top UN officials. As Kofi Annan sat in his spacious office on
the 38th floor of the UN building, his phone conversations were being
secretly recorded. Transcripts were being fed back to London and, almost
certainly, Washington. At the time there was an almost permanent queue of
ambassadors and ministers outside Annan's door. His phones were almost
permanently engaged. If they had known they were being spied on inside his
office, few would have bothered to show up or call.

It was an astonishing breach of protocol. Annan is seen as a vital bastion
of impartiality. His ability to keep private conversations secret is key to
his work. 'Everything he tries to do can be undermined if the people he is
speaking to don't have confidence that what they say to him will be kept
confidential,' said Fred Eckhart, Annan's spokesman.

But last March that was far from the case. The reason for the surveillance
was simple: Britain and Blair were playing for huge stakes. Thousands of UK
troops were preparing to invade Iraq, but Blair desperately needed a second
UN resolution on Iraq to approve the attack. Without it, his political
career could end up in tatters as he took a reluctant nation - and Labour
Party - on to the battlefield.

During the week up to 16 March, negotiations were at a fever pitch. The UN
witnessed unprecedented drama, focused on the six wavering nations of the
Security Council. There were surreal scenes. UN corridors and lobbies would
be packed with TV crews and journalists milling about in search of the
latest tit-bits of information leaking out of the private diplomatic
meetings. It threw a spotlight on a curious cast of characters, especially
Guinean ambassador Mamady Traore,who wore the flowing yellow tafetta robes
of Guinean national dress and a white hat as he stalked the building.
Countries used to being ignored suddenly found themselves at the centre of
attention. At one stage a bizarre rumour spooked the UN that Guinea was
going to vote against the US on the advice of the presidential witch doctor.

Amid all the meetings it was obvious that diplomats knew they were being
spied on. 'We were all aware it was happening in our offices and outside in
the UN premises,' Zinser said. The spying psychosis also meant many
diplomats were uncomfortable talking in rooms with windows because of
sophisticated surveillance equipment that can record conversations from the
vibrations of the glass. 'Those are the kind of things we talked about at
the time,' said Zinser.

The spying operation kept the US and Britain one step ahead in the game of
diplomacy. It allowed them to second-guess their opponents moves and - as in
the case of the planned agreement by the six waverers - not waste time with
surprise initiatives. The operation went hand in hand with more traditional
diplomacy in the guise of incentives. In the previous weeks, extra aid had
been promised to Guinea and Angola, while trade incentives were dangled in
front of Chile and Mexico.

But, in the end, neither the spy nor the diplomat could help Britain and
America win their doomed fight at the UN. In the final frantic week of
negotiations, it gradually became clear that the wavering nations - far from
being bought off - were determined not to support a resolution. By Thursday
morning, 13 March, after a desperately unsuccessful final bout of talks,
British UN ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock was taking a phone call from
Blair. The Prime Minister asked Greenstock how many votes were secure.
'Four,' he replied, meaning the US, Britain, Spain and Bulgaria. None of the
waverers had come over. 'Crumbs,' said Blair. The spies had failed. A week
later, Britain was at war.

Enter the professor

If the United Nations was fevered, then in Westminster, political tensions
over the war had made the atmosphere near-hysterical. The air around
Whitehall was full of chat about ministerial resignations and a full-blooded
revolt appeared on the cards. In front of an intensely agitated House of
Commons on 12 March, Blair rose at Prime Ministers' Questions and attempted
to placate his angry backbenchers. He declared: 'We would not do anything
that would not have a proper legal basis to it'.

Yet The Observer can reveal that even at this late stage, with war just over
a week away, the legal basis of committing soldiers to Iraq was still
uncertain. The key question was that without a second UN resolution would
Ministers and military commanders be breaking international law by ordering
the troops into battle.

If the answer was yes, then Ministers, generals and even soldiers could face
the possibility of being prosecuted for war crimes. Britain could also face
multi-million pound claims from international businesses who might claim
financial loss caused by any illegal invasion. It is no understatement to
say that the issue of legality was one of the momentous decisions of law for
a generation.

The man on whose shoulders this historic question rested was Peter
Goldsmith, the 53-year old millionaire barrister Blair chose to be his
Attorney-General in 2001. As the Government's chief in-house lawyer,
Goldsmith's duty was to advise Ministers on the legality of their actions.

Yet what did Goldsmith know about international law? Before he was
appointed, this bespectacled QC was one of the select club of barristers
earning a £1m-a-year the lucrative field of banking and commercial law. Few
apart from his close acquaintances even knew that he had Labour Party
sympathies and it was only when he emerged as a party donor in the general
election year of 1997, that his political interests surfaced. He was made a
peer two years later and welcomed into the inner sanctum of Blair's
administration.

There was no doubt that this son of a solicitor from Liverpool who was
educated at Cambridge was one of the brainiest corporate lawyers of his
generation. But he had earned his formidable legal reputation and his
fortune dissecting complex financial matters not United Nation resolutions.

Now his legal brain would be turned to making a judgment that would seal the
fate of thousands of lives and Blair's political legacy. For Goldsmith, the
stakes could not have been any higher. Rumours were circulating that the
Labour peer was on the brink of resigning because he believed it was
necessary for Blair to obtain a second UN resolution. His private political
secretary, the Labour MP Michael Foster, was about to tender his resignation
over this issue.

Yet even more troubling for Goldsmith was the legal advice from a formidable
legal team working within the bowels of the Foreign Office. Deputy legal
adviser Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a government lawyer for 29 years and an expert
on international law, had no doubts about the need for a second UN
resolution: 'I did not agree that the use of force against Iraq was legal,'
she has told friends.

Wilmshurst was not alone in that view - it was shared by the entire legal
team of the Foreign office. Yet this highly-respected lawyer, who is now
head of the International Law Programme at the Royal Institute of
International Affairs, was alone in what she chose to do next. So outraged
at what she believed was the inevitable decision to go to war despite her
legal advice, she quit.

According to highly-placed Whitehall sources, the Foreign Office legal team
was aware that Goldsmith's original advice was not as certain as the final
version presented to Cabinet. It is alleged to have been much more of a
'sitting on the fence' opinion. He was 'prevaricating' said the source.
Rumours circulating through both the legal world and Westminster at the time
was that Goldmsith's original advice was 'unhelpful'.

The Observer has now learnt that only days before military action was due to
begin, the Attorney-General's original advice was not deemed strong enough
for senior figures in the armed forces. Sir Michael Boyce, the Chief of
Defence Staff, is understood to have warned Blair that some of his senior
military chiefs had serious doubts about the legality of the war and were
unhappy about sending in troops on Goldsmith's original advice. For Blair
this was a crisis of monumental proportions. Britain already had its troops
in Kuwait prepared for battle and had given George Bush a promise that
British troops would join US soldiers in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The exact details of what happened next is not known. But one key figure
that emerged is Professor Christopher Greenwood, a leading international
lawyer at the London School of Economics and a barrister at Essex Court
Chambers. He has already made his views public that he did not believe a
second UN resolution was necessary and the right to use force against Saddam
derived from UN Security Resolution 678, the resolution that first
authorised force to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1990.

His argument was that as Saddam was thought to have weapons of mass
destruction he had not disarmed according to terms of the ceasefire agreed
with Iraq more than a decade ago. Greenwood believed that because the
unanimous UN resolution 1441 passed in November 2002 declared Iraq in
'material breach' of its ceasefire obligations, the original resolution 678
was revived, permitting US and Britain to use any 'necessary means'. This
was a highly controversial view, rejected by many leading international
lawyers who insisted that any use of force required a new resolution.

Greenwood confirmed to The Observer that he did advise the Government along
these lines, but refused to say when. 'Like all barristers, I have a duty of
confidentiality to my client,' he said.

Yet it now appears that Greenwood's advice played a key role. On Monday 17
March, Blair called an emergency Cabinet meeting. Robin Cook, the former
Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, had just announced his
resignation. With the doors to the Downing Street garden opened to cool the
heated atmosphere, Goldsmith took the seat of Cook and circulated two sides
of A4 spelling out the the legal authority for going to war with Iraq. No
discussion was allowed. Former Cabinet Minister Clare Short tried to ask why
the legal advice had emerged so late and whether there was any doubt, but
she was not allowed to speak. Goldsmith's final legal advice closely
followed Greenwood's and it was clear the the military chiefs were now
happy. 'Shock and Awe' was less than two days away.

Breaking the story

When the story finally broke in The Observer on 2 March, Gun had almost
given up hope of ever seeing details of the UN spying operation made public.
What she did not know is that journalists on this newspaper had received the
Koza memo three weeks earlier and spent that time verifying its contents.

This paper was passed the Koza email by Yvonne Ridley, a former Observer,
Sunday Times and Sunday Express journalist, who was was just beginning to
rebuild her life in Britain after being captured by the Taliban in
Afghanistan just months before. After one of the talks that she was giving
around the country about her experiences, she was approached by someone who
said she could provide her with evidence that the US was attempting to fix
the vote in the United Nations. She agreed to use her contacts to get the
story out.

Feeling that her own position was desperately exposed, and knowing that she
was liable to prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, Ridley called The
Observer 's Martin Bright, one of her former colleagues, who agreed to meet
her at a café close to her home in Soho, central London in early February.

It was clear to this newspaper from the outset that if the contents of the
memo were true, then the news of the operation could be potentially
devastating to Britain's credibility at the UN and undermine the case for
war. Although, at this stage, there was no evidence that GCHQ had acceded to
the American request, it was evidence, at the very least, that someone
within the intelligence services was deeply unhappy with the attempts to
compromise the deliberations of the Security Council.

The language of the memo suggested that it was genuine, but all original
information about the sender and the recipients has been stripped from top
of the email to protect the source of the leak. But clues remained: Ridley's
source had written Frank Koza's name on the back of the printed-out email,
his job title (head of regional targets) and various details about the
classification of the document (the highest possible level of secrecy).

All calls to the National Security Agency drew the stock answer that
intelligence matters were never discussed and the identity of the head of
regional targets could not be divulged. GCHQ was also, understandably
silent.

Intelligence sources who were shown the email confirmed the language was
consistent with that used by the NSA, but that was still not enough to go
on. At one point there were even attempts by the British intelligence
services to suggest that the document might be a sophisticated Russian
forgery.

In one last attempt to get confirmation from the NSA, The Observer called
the switchboard of the American spy centre in Baltimore, Maryland and asked
to be put through to Koza's office. Astonishingly, the telephonist did not
ask who was calling and simply put us through to the head of regional
targets. An assistant answered, confirming that this was indeed Koza's
office we asked if he was prepared to talk to The Observer about spying at
the UN. At this point we were told we had the wrong number and that there
was no one of that name at this office. But it was crucial proof of the
man's existence.

Further inquiries with sources close to the intelligence services revealed
that the existence of the email was common knowledge within the spy
community and that there was some surprise it had not come to light
previously. We knew from the outset that at least one other newspaper had
been shown the document and it would only be a matter of time before the
story broke.

The decision to publish was, strictly speaking, in serious breach of the
Official Secrets Act in itself. But this was the brink of war and at the
time, even the Prime Minister was indicating that Britain would not go to
war without a second resolution. This public-interest argument for
publishing evidence of the bugging was clear.

When The Observer story appeared, the report reverberated around the rest of
the world, particularly in South America. It became front-page news in Chile
and was deeply embarrassing for Ricardo Lagos, the left-wing President and
close political ally of Blair. The words 'US dirty tricks' have a particular
resonance in a country still nursing wounds from the the American-backed
dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The revelation of the spying made any
Chilean backing of the war deeply problematic. In the United States, the
right-wing Internet scandal sheet, the Drudge Report, suggested that the
memo was a fake and invited readers to send 'flame' email messages to The
Observer.

Finally proof, as if it were needed, came with the arrest of a young woman
at GCHQ, just days after the first Observer story. Tough security interviews
of every recipient of the email - literally dozens of people - began on
Monday 3 March and continued into the Tuesday when Gun was called in to see
her vetting officer. Initially she denied any knowledge of the leak, but the
next day she went in to see her line manager and confessed to disclosing the
document. Her bosses called in Special Branch and she was arrested and held
in a police cell overnight.

By the time she came out of police custody, she realised that her attempt to
stop the war had failed: 'It seemed pretty evident that war was the ultimate
goal. There was pretty much nothing anyone could do to prevent it
happening.'

Short steps in

To the commuters grabbing a morning caffeine fix on the way into the office,
they must have seemed an incongruous couple. But Lord Falconer, the rotund
Constitutional Affairs Secretary, and Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell are
probably the two most loyal Blairites in the Cabinet. The sight of them
emerging grim-faced from the Westminster branch of Starbucks coffeshop on
Thursday morning was the first sign of serious trouble. There was certainly
plenty for them to discuss.

Less than an hour earlier, breakfast tables across London had reverberated
to the startling sound of a first for British national broadcasting: the
sound of the Official Secrets Act being broken live on air. Researchers from
Today had called the former Cabinet Minister Clare Short the night before,
after spotting a short piece tucked away in the previous day's Independent
newspaper in which she suggested that when she had tried to discuss
Goldsmith's legal advice in Cabinet she had been silenced, adding that
'there had clearly been some shenanigans going on'. Would she like to expand
on what she meant?

The programme was hoping for a scoop on the legality of the war. Instead, to
the audible shock of her interviewer, John Humphries, Short veered off on
far wilder tangent, confiding that the office of UN Secretary-General Kofi
Annan had been bugged by British spies in the run-up to the war and that she
had read transcripts of his private conversations. She had even, she went
on, worried at times when she was talking to Annan that her own conversation
was being reported back to Government.

It could not have been a graver charge for Downing Street: an illegal spying
operation on a friendly international diplomat, apparently conducted in a
desperate attempt to circumvent the UN's deliberations in the run-up to the
war. Worse, it was impossible to tackle without breaking the Whitehall
convention that prime ministers do not discuss intelligence operations.

'Tony's in a position where he cannot actually comment directly on what the
security service does or doesn't do, but we want to be in a position to say
that what Clare's saying is absolute nonsense,' said one Downing Street aide
despairingly. 'It's a difficult one to work out.'

If it could not have anticipated Short's bombshell, Downing Street was,
however, far from unprepared for trouble over the Gun case. Behind the
scenes there had been frantic negotiations over the case, stretching back to
the beginning of the month and culminating on Tuesday, when Goldsmith had
held a secret meeting with the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, at which it is
understood he confirmed it would be dropped.

And officials had already noticed that Wednesday's Whitehall 'grid' of
announcements was suspiciously crowded: sweeping new powers against
terrorism to be unveiled by David Blunkett, a speech on the future of the
BBC by Tessa Jowell, pronouncements from the health secretary John Reid on
fertility treatment for childless couples. Was someone hoping to crowd the
Gun story off the front pages?

By 4.30 that afternoon, when the prosecution officially announced the case
was being dropped, televisions across Whitehall were tuned to mob scenes
outside the court as Katharine Gun, clutching a small cone of
cellophane-wrapped roses and looking dazed, emerged to her freedom. The
Daily Mail 's front page rolled off the presses that night bearing the
headline, over a picture of a beaming Gun: 'What war secrets are you still
hiding, Prime Minister?'.

But even at that stage, Downing Street was hoping the row could be blown
away by a strong enough performance from the Prime Minister at his monthly
press conference the next day - designed to showcase a new initiative on
Africa, and a crackdown on anti-social behaviour.

After Short's intervention, all that changed. Goldsmith was deployed that
morning to make a statement to Parliament on why the Gun case had been
dropped - a calculated risk, since it exposed him not only to uncomfortable
questions about precisely why, and when, he had decided the war was legal
but to possible questions about Kofi Annan.

And the file the Prime Minister leaves discreetly on his podium in the
briefing room at the Foreign Press Association was hastily updated to cover
such niceties as the Vienna Convention - which forbids spying on diplomatic
missions. Cracking a nervous smile as he began the conference at midday,
Blair pleaded to be allowed to say a little about Africa before the
questions started, but it was a forlorn hope. There was only one topic for
questioning: had he broken international law by authorising the bugging of
the UN? And would Short be prosecuted for leaking official secrets?

Blair's coldly contemptuous description of Short as 'deeply irresponsible'
was a clear invitation to journalists to focus on the personal bitterness
between the two, not the potentially more damaging and persistent questions
about the legality of the war - as was the hasty announcement, rushed out
three hours later at the regular Downing Street afternoon briefing, that
reform of the Official Secrets Act was now being officially considered.

But his white-lipped anger when asked about the damage to the security
services was real. It is not so much that Short had jeopardised operations
in the field: it is not news to UN personnel that their office was, as one
self-professed former intelligence officer said in a letter to the Today
programme yesterday, 'the most bugged place on the planet'.

But what she has put under severe strain is the exchange of intelligence
between the US and the UK on which the joint war against terrorism depends.

Any secret service is only as secure as its partners: and twice within the
space of a year - through Gun and now through Short - the British Government
has been left looking like it cannot keep America's secrets. If even a war
Cabinet cannot guarantee discretion, can Downing Street continue to expect
the White House to swap the most sensitive information?

No wonder that, asked if she should continue to serve as an MP, Blair paused
and said deliberately that he would have to 'reflect' on her future.

If he had hoped that would shut her up, it had the opposite effect. Sitting
in her Commons office with her researchers planning her next move, Short was
already being bombarded with demands for television interviews. She decided
to come out fighting. By the time the Home Secretary, David Blunkett - one
of her fiercest critics - was taking the stage in a trendy bar just off
Oxford Street that night to crack some near-the-knuckle jokes at the leaving
do for his former special adviser Nick Pearce, Short was on Channel Four
accusing the Prime Minister of being 'pompous' and defending the 'journey of
her conscience'.

Yet the bugging allegations - sensational as they were - are in danger of
becoming a red herring. For the debate is circling back to something far
more dangerous for Blair: the still unresolved question of how his
Attorney-General came to decide that the invasion of Iraq was legal under
international law, and Short's original claims of unknown 'shenanigans'. And
there is little chance of it fading.

Three days after next month's Budget - on which Labour could normally rely
to force the spotlight back on to domestic, not troublesome foreign,
events - comes the anniversary of the Iraq invasion, prompting fresh debate
over whether it was justified and fears of an upsurge in attacks against
allied soldiers posted in Iraq.

In May, the first of two major US Congressional inquiries into
intelligence - in this case into why the intelligence services failed to
predict and prevent the 11 September attack itself - is due to report. And
June marks 'Super Thursday', the first serious test of Blair's mid-term
blues as Britain goes to the polls in local, European and London mayoral
elections.

A month later, Downing Street is braced for the findings of the Butler
inquiry, hastily established to examine intelligence failings in the run-up
to the war on Iraq. The risk is now of the inquiry running on into summer -
raising the disastrous prospect for Labour of it reporting just before their
party conference in September, allowing that to be dominated by more
soul-searching over the absence of weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, the parallel inquiry promised by George Bush into American
intelligence gathering on Iraq will continue throughout the autumn. The
danger for Downing Street now is the sheer unpredictability of events
unfolding on two sides of the Atlantic. An unexpected bombshell dropped by
an obscure official in Washington can be transformed within hours into an
explosive question to a Minister caught unawares in London.

'What happens in Washington and in London will continue to bounce off each
other in ways neither can control over the next year,' says Lord Wallace of
Saltaire, the Liberal Democrat peer and a leading expert on Anglo-American
relations. 'Blair may want to say "Let's move on", yet it may be that we
simply cannot.'

Downing Street's main hope now is that the public will simply become too
bored with Iraq to keep following every twist and turn of the debate - while
Labour activists will become too frightened, as the election looms closer,
to risk damaging him by pursuing the argument. 'We have got a big set of
elections coming up and have to hope that focuses minds,' said one party
figure.

Meanwhile, at the heart of it all, is 'the blonde who dropped a bombshell on
Blair', as one newspaper described Gun. Looking back on the affair
yesterday, she said the British government has only itself to blame.

'They wanted [to get get a second UN resolution] to maintain as much
international credibility as possible. We did go ahead without a UN
resolution and therefore they lost a lot of credibility.'

She may have failed to stop the war, but Gun's combination of fierce
principle and naivety has this weekend plunged the Prime Minister into
perhaps his deepest crisis yet.

Martin Bright, Gaby Hinsliff, Antony Barnett, Paul Harris in New York, Joe
Tuckman in Mexico City and Ed Vulliamy
Sunday February 29, 2004
The Observer





Tony Blair faces further embarrassment in less than a fortnight, when
fourteen Greenpeace volunteers appear in court on charges relating to an
anti-war protest. Their case has taken on great significance since the
Crown
Prosection Service (CPS) claimed the case against Katherine Gun was
dropped
because they could not "disprove the defence of necessity" -- that is to
say, they could not counter the defence that her actions were justified to
save lives.

The so-called Marchwood Fourteen occupied tanks at the Southampton
military
port in February last year. Throughout their case the defendants - all
Greenpeace volunteers - have argued that their actions were necessary to
prevent loss of life. With the CPS now saying they could not have
disproved
such a defence in the Gun case, Greenpeace lawyers wonder how the CPS will
proceed against the fourteen.

In a further development Greenpeace has today written to the CPS asking it
for the Attorney-General's full advice to government on the legality of
the
war. Lawyers for the group claim access to the full advice is vital if the
defendants are to be allowed a proper defence. Greenpeace has given the
CPS
24 hours to produce the full advice, otherwise the group will renew its
request for the advice in court on the first day of the trial, set for
March
9th.

Greenpeace legal adviser Kate Harrison said, "The protesters thought the
war
was illegal. We think it is essential for a fair trial that they see the
full Attorney General's legal advice and the basis on which it was made."

"Since the Katharine Gun trial it would appear that the Attorney General
probably thought at the time of the protest that the war would be unlawful
and that the Foreign Office and other advisors thought so too."

The case against the fourteen will be held at Southampton Magistrate's
court
from March 9th.

Further information
Greenpeace opposed the war in Iraq and campaigned actively to prevent it.
We
joined the Stop the War coalition and made submissions to the Foreign
Affairs Select Committee on the illegality of the war, see
http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk...0219to0222.pdf

For more information contact the Greenpeace press office
on 020 7865 8255 or 07801 212967 or 07801 212968
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/Multime...eport/6206.pdf