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

Revealed: Attorney General changed his advice on legality of Iraq war

Lord Goldsmith believed that a 'further UN resolution was needed'. Blair
under increasing pressure to publish full legal case for Iraq war

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, changed his advice in the run-up to
war in Iraq to declare that the conflict was legal, The Independent on
Sunday has learnt.

Lord Goldsmith's full opinion on the legality of the war has never been made
public. The desire to keep it secret is believed to be the main reason why
the Official Secrets Act prosecution of Katharine Gun, a 29-year-old former
employee of GCHQ, the Government's monitoring centre, was abandoned at the
Old Bailey last week.

The case could have revealed that in November 2002 the Attorney General
believed Britain required specific authorisation for war from the UN
Security Council, but that he later changed his stance.

Ms Gun admitted leaking an email from the National Security Agency, the US
equivalent of GCHQ, which called for British help in spying on diplomats at
the United Nations in January last year. At the time, the US and Britain
were seeking a Security Council resolution, later abandoned, specifically
authorising the use of force against Iraq.

Although Ms Gun acknowledged she had broken the Official Secrets Act, her
lawyers were preparing to argue that she had acted to prevent British
casualties in an illegal war, and to demand that the Attorney General's full
opinion be made public. An "advance notice of defence statement" filed in
court highlighted differences in the Government over the legality of
committing British troops without a UN resolution.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office, resigned
on the eve of war in protest at Lord Goldsmith's opinion that the resolution
was unnecessary. "Some agreed with the legal advice of the Attorney
General," she said later. "I did not."

But the IoS has learnt from sources connected to the Gun case that in
November 2002, when the Security Council passed resolution 1441, threatening
"serious consequences" if Iraq did not "comply with its disarmament
obligations", Lord Goldsmith agreed with the Foreign Office view that a
further resolution would be needed to make war legal. As the possibility of
war without such a resolution loomed, Britain's military chiefs of staff
argued that they needed a clearer legal basis on which to proceed.

Between November and the end of January 2003, the IoS was told, the Attorney
General's staff produced a paper dealing with the issues raised by the
military chiefs, but it fell short of the legal authorisation the chiefs of
staff wanted. "The military said they needed something harder if they were
to commit troops," a legal source said. Lord Goldsmith's advice argued that
a UN resolution from 13 years ago remained in force.

Clare Short, the former International Development Secretary whose UN spying
claims caused a sensation last week, said even the Cabinet had not been
allowed to see the full advice, but it is believed that Ms Gun's defence
team was aware of its contents. Lord Goldsmith later said the decision to
drop the case had been taken before the document was filed.

The Government continued to insist yesterday that it would not publish the
Attorney General's full advice. But further court cases are pending in which
lawyers are expected to mount a similar defence to Ms Gun's, and prosecution
may be hampered if the advice remains secret.

Fourteen Greenpeace supporters face trial for a demonstration at a
Southampton military base in February 2003, and five peace activists are
charged with criminal damage at RAF Fairford. In all cases, the defence is
expected to argue that, like Ms Gun, they were acting out of "necessity", to
prevent an illegal war.

* A Labour peer today raised questions about the way in which the Attorney
General came up with the advice he gave on the legality of war following
reports it changed in the run-up to the conflict.

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC said the "vast majority" of lawyers thought the
conflict without a second UN resolution would be unlawful.

She said in a GMTV interview: "The vast majority of lawyers were of one
view.

"It was interesting that out of probably only two lawyers who would have
argued for the legality of going to war, one of those was the person to whom
the Attorney General turned."

She added: "I think the lesson from this is that actually law matters.
Before you make those commitments to your friend or ally you have to talk
about law because it is not some side issue. It is the way we have tried to
civilise the world and we must not forget that."

By Raymond Whitaker and Robert Verkaik
The Independent newspaper
London, United Kingdom
29 February 2004

---

The whistleblower, the loose cannon and the case for war

A week that began with extraordinary and embarrassing revelations about
British spying at the UN in the run-up to the Iraq war has ended with the
far more damaging suspicion that the Government is attempting to withhold
evidence that may reveal there was no legal justification for the invasion
in the first place. A special report by Foreign Editor Raymond Whitaker and
Political Editor Andy McSmith

Katharine Gun and Clare Short have never met. One is 29, the daughter of
Christian missionaries still living in Taiwan, with no strong political
attachments. The other is twice her age, a lifelong Labour activist who
spent six years in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for International
Development.

Yet together they have not only blown a huge hole in the Official Secrets
Act, but they have also plunged Tony Blair back into a nightmare. Just when
the Prime Minister thought that he might be succeeding in his efforts to put
the Iraq war behind him and refocus the political debate on domestic issues
such as the revival of a "Thatcherite" Conservative Party threatening huge
public spending cuts, all the unanswered questions about the war have
resurfaced.

When did Mr Blair agree to join President George Bush's crusade to oust
Saddam Hussein? Was Britain's participation in the war legal? And is it
possible to justify the tactics employed in the run-up to the war, from the
use of intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction to
claims that friends and allies were spied upon?

Mr Blair has been here before, of course. Only a month ago Lord Hutton's
report appeared to exonerate the Government entirely of the charge of
"sexing up" its September 2002 dossier on Iraqi WMD, only for the report to
be seen as so one-sided that it actually hurt the Government. That was
followed by further uncomfortable revelations about the notorious claim that
Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, the
issue over which No 10 and the BBC fought themselves to a standstill.

Yet by the beginning of last week it must have seemed to the Prime Minister
that Iraq was at last receding, not so much into the background, but to the
point where it was possible to discuss other questions without it seeming
like an attempted diversion. His staff were delighted when they got through
the usual Monday morning lobby briefing without a single question on Iraq,
possibly for the first time in more than a year.

Mr Blair would have known that the legal authorities were about to drop
their case against Ms Gun, charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act by
leaking an email from the National Security Agency in the US, which asked
Britain to help to spy on other countries' diplomats at the United Nations.
He was aware that on Thursday morning, when he was due to hold his monthly
televised press conference at Downing Street, the papers would be full of
the collapse of the Gun case at the Old Bailey the previous day.

But he would have his answers ready, and the prospect of a few difficult
questions was a lot better than a drawn-out hearing during which Ms Gun's
lawyers, with maximum publicity, would question the Government's entire
legal basis for the war. The plan was to get the matter out of the way as
swiftly as possible and move on to a more palatable topic, a new aid
initiative for Africa. The Prime Minister had not bargained, however, on Ms
Short.

Mr Blair, not surprisingly, did not have his ear to the radio when Clare
Short made her live appearance on the Today programme, just after 8.10am on
Thursday, but staff in the Downing Street press office did. Within minutes,
the Prime Minister's director of communications, David Hill, was on the
line, delivering the bad news.

Ms Short was invited on to the Today programme to discuss the decision not
to prosecute Ms Gun. In the middle of an answer about the events of early
2003, she mentioned almost casually: "The UK in this time was also spying on
Kofi Annan's office, and getting reports from him about what was going on."

The sentence hung in the air for a moment until her interviewer, John
Humphrys, returned to the subject, suggesting that spying on the UN was an
odd thing to do. "These things are done, and in the case of Kofi's office it
has been done for some time," she replied.

Asked whether she believed that Britain was involved in this spying, she
replied: "Well, I know. I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan's
conversations. In fact, I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to
war thinking: 'Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will
see what he and I are saying'." She was asked, again, whether British spies
had been carrying out operations in the UN on people like Mr Annan. "Yes,
absolutely," she said, adding: "I read some of the transcripts of the
accounts of his conversations."

We do not know what the Prime Minister's immediate reaction was, but it is
very likely that he or one of his staff will have immediately picked up the
telephone to ring John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence
Committee, and Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6. We know that when the
45-minute claim was attacked in the famous broadcast by Andrew Gilligan on
the Today programme last May, Mr Blair's first reaction was to clear his
lines with the intelligence chiefs.

It is probable that what he heard from the intelligence chiefs this time was
not altogether helpful to the Prime Minister. He had to go and face
searching questions in front of the cameras in a couple of hours. They
almost certainly told him that they did not want him to make any public
comment on the activities of intelligence agencies, whether British or
American, because of the precedent it would set.

Those who watched the Prime Minister's public performance noticed how
confident and clear he was in handling questions about the collapse of Ms
Gun's trial - and how awkward he looked when discussing Ms Short. He could
not say whether his former colleague's claims were true or false, falling
back on the convoluted statement: "I'm not going to comment on the work that
our security services do, [but] don't take that as an indication that the
allegations that were made by Clare Short are true. Simply understand, I am
not going to comment on the operations of our security services."

Then, having denounced Ms Short for being "totally irresponsible", he was
wrongfooted by a question from the Daily Express: "Have you only just woken
up to the nature of Clare Short, and what does it say about your own
judgement that you could allow someone like that in the Cabinet?"

The furore over Ms Short's allegations, which went round the world, had
scarcely anything to do with the issue in Ms Gun's trial, and arguably
distracted attention from it. This might have been a help to Mr Blair, but
for one fact. Both the leak for which Ms Gun was charged, and the spying
claims of Ms Short, concerned a period the Prime Minister would prefer to
forget: the fraught weeks in late 2002 and early 2003 as we headed for war
with Iraq.

By mid-October 2002, President Bush had an open mandate from both houses of
Congress to go to war with Iraq. The attacks on New York and Washington were
only just over a year in the past, and the White House had used the time in
between to convince the American public that Saddam Hussein was somehow
linked to them. With mid-term elections due the following month, few
Democrats wished to seem unpatriotic by voting against the President,
something which is now coming to haunt Senator John Kerry, the Democratic
front-runner in this year's Presidential race.

The threat of force from the US was in the background as the UN Security
Council passed Resolution 1441 on 8 November, warning of "serious
consequences" if Iraq did not take a "final opportunity to comply with its
disarmament obligations". As far as Washington was concerned, that would
mean war. In London, however, things were different.

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, was advising, as was the Foreign
Office, that another UN Security Council resolution would be required for
war to be legal. Tony Blair said of Resolution 1441: "In the event of Saddam
refusing to co-operate or being in breach, there will be a further UN
discussion." It seemed clear that Britain would have trouble going to war
unless the Security Council specifically mandated the use of force.

By the start of 2003, however, the pressure from Washington to go to war was
mounting by the day. It was all Mr Blair could do to persuade a sceptical
Bush administration to seek a second UN resolution. From the American point
of view it was always understood that the whole UN effort was a favour to
George Bush's closest ally.

Lord Goldsmith, meanwhile, was confronted by the concerns of Britain's
military chiefs of staff, who were arguing that they needed a clear legal
basis for committing British troops to a new kind of pre-emptive war, in
which it was far from clear that Britain itself was under imminent threat.
The only other grounds for war permitted by the UN Charter is an explicit
authorisation of force by the Security Council.

It is understood that Lord Goldsmith and his staff produced a paper
addressing this question, but the military chiefs said its careful balance
of arguments did not meet their need for legal clarity. With a new UN
resolution looking hard to achieve, it was about this time that the Attorney
General began searching through earlier resolutions for a justification for
war.

But the all-out diplomatic effort in New York continued, and on 31 January
Ms Gun, a translator of Chinese at GCHQ, the government's communications
monitoring organisation in Cheltenham, came across an email from Frank Koza,
a senior official of the National Security Agency, GCHQ's (much bigger)
equivalent in the US. It sought British help in spying on the UN delegations
of six nations which were temporary members of the Security Council. Their
votes were seen as potentially making the difference between success or
failure for a second resolution.

Whether Britain complied with the request or not is unknown, but the email
found its way to a Sunday newspaper after Ms Gun showed it to a friend with
journalistic contacts. Once it was published, she immediately confessed her
part and acknowledged having breached the Official Secrets Act. Why the
Government dropped its case against her, therefore, can be explained only by
looking at her planned defence, which was that the war was illegal. The only
way this could have been countered was by making public Lord Goldsmith's
final opinion, the one on which Britain went to war.

Last week Lord Goldsmith said he had decided to drop the case before Ms
Gun's lawyers presented a document outlining their strategy. But Barry
Hugill, spokesman for Liberty, the civil rights organisation backing Ms Gun,
said it had been "obvious for months that it would become a trial of the
legality of the war".

According to Ms Short, not even the Cabinet was allowed to see the Attorney
General's legal opinion. On 17 March last year, with less than 72 hours
before the bombs began falling on Baghdad, she says a document consisting of
two sheets of paper was displayed, but not circulated. When she tried to
initiate a discussion on it, she was cut off.

At this point Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a member of the Foreign Office's legal
team for nearly 30 years, abruptly resigned as deputy legal adviser. With
war imminent, her departure attracted little attention at the time, but it
now seems clear that she at least had seen the Attorney General's full
opinion, and found it unacceptable. Last week, as speculation mounted, she
spelled it out, saying: "I left my job because I did not agree that the use
of force against Iraq was lawful."

All that the rest of us know, from Lord Goldsmith's brief summary, is that
he is relying on a 12-year-old Security Council resolution which authorised
the use of force to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. How he justifies
such a seemingly thin argument remains a secret, one guarded by the claim
that there is no precedent for publishing legal opinions drawn up for the
Government.

But other cases are pending, including those of 14 Greenpeace supporters who
occupied tanks at a Southampton military base in February last year, and
five peace activists charged with criminal damage at RAF Fairford. Their
lawyers are expected to demand the full opinion as well.

The only legal step Downing Street is contemplating in the wake of the
Katharine Gun fiasco is a review of the Official Secrets Act, which would
appear to be all the more urgent following Clare Short's trampling of the
same law. But a spokesman shed little light, describing the review as "the
normal process that you go through after the outcome of a case", and said
that it would be carried out "by the normal people in the normal way". One
possibility is that government lawyers will try to write into the act a
precise definition of the concept of "necessity" which cropped up during the
case of the former MI5 agent David Shayler, who was jailed for selling
information to a Sunday newspaper.

When Mr Shayler appealed to the House of Lords, Lord Woolf raised the
possibility that a defendant might be acquitted of a breach of the Act if he
could show that he had revealed secrets in order to avert a threat to human
life, before dismissing this possibility in Mr Shayler's case.

Ms Gun's lawyers intended to argue that she was seeking to save lives by
exposing skulduggery at the UN which could lead to war, and the Attorney
General decided that the prosecution could not answer that claim. This might
be seen, absurdly, to give immunity to anyone who wants to leak secrets in
the run-up to a war.

In some ways the uproar over spying at the UN, though highly embarrassing
for the Government, is easier to deal with by stonewalling: nobody seriously
expects any government to confirm that it is eavesdropping on its supposed
friends and allies, even though everyone knows it goes on.

Even anti-war MPs on the left wing of the Labour Party, who refused to join
in the condemnation of Clare Short, were saying yesterday that whether or
not British agents spied on Kofi Annan was not the political issue of the
moment. "All of this is a massive distraction," said Alan Simpson, chairman
of the left-wing Campaign Group. "I don't think we should be surprised at
bugging operations. When you talked to UN officials, they presumed they were
being bugged.

"The issue is not about Clare's loyalty or disloyalty. It's about this
assumed, untrammelled right of the Bush administration to go to war. The
obsession was not about whether Saddam posed a threat to the West, but about
whether the UN posed a threat to America's determination to have a war."

Experts say that electronic eavesdropping is an accepted, if rarely
acknowledged, part of life at the UN and one of the reasons why the US was
so willing to allow the body to establish its headquarters in New York in
April 1945 - a move that gave America a head start in its spying efforts.

Indeed, in the aftermath of Ms Short's allegations diplomats said it was
almost a matter of pride to be spied on. Spain's ambassador to the UN,
Inocencio Arias, told The Washington Post: "In my opinion everybody spies on
everybody, and when there's a crisis, big countries spy a lot. I would not
be surprised if this Secretary-General and other Secretary-Generals have
been listened to by a handful of big powers, and not only the ones you are
thinking."

No wire-tapping is allowed on UN premises. Three treaties are supposed to
ensure the protection of the UN from spying, and yet experts say that among
diplomats it is a given that spying takes place. Under an agreement by the
so-called Spoke countries - the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand -
spying on US territory is carried out by America's National Security Agency
and then shared.

Jim Atkinson is an expert in electronic surveillance and is regularly
contracted by countries and private companies to sweep buildings for bugs
and provide protection against electronic eavesdropping. He told an
astonishing story about spying at the UN. Travelling between jobs in New
York in his mobile laboratory - one of a number of vehicles fitted with
detectors and anti-bug equipment - he recently made several passes of the UN
headquarters. The equipment in his vehicle was deliberately left on. "The
equipment immediately started logging on to bugs that had the frequencies of
[bugging equipment routinely used by] various countries," he said. "I can
even pick out specific bugs in specific offices."

Mr Atkinson declined to identify the countries whose equipment he detected
that day, but he said: "Britain and America do this stuff all the time. They
have scores of people who do this ... they do it to everybody. Everybody
does it to them. Everybody in the diplomatic community does not trust
anybody else." He claimed that in addition to Britain and America, he
expected that Iraq would have bugged Mr Annan's office, and that Saudi
Arabia and Israel would also have been electronically eavesdropping.

The Prime Minister's phrase of the moment is that he wants to "move on",
which means that he would like the public to forget the Iraq war and pay
attention to political questions such as the sharply focused differences
between Labour and the Conservatives.

Yet thanks to three women - Katharine Gun, Clare Short and Elizabeth
Wilmshurst - Mr Blair has spent another week on the back foot. Comment from
around the world on the former minister's sensational revelations emphasised
that the Prime Minister still suffers lingering damage to his reputation
from the Iraq war. Whether he can answer the questions which remain from
that conflict, and dispel the clouds of mistrust that remain, is likely to
determine how his premiership is judged.

Tony Blair: Trapped in the Iraq storm

The Prime Minister's phrase of the moment is that he wants to "move on",
which means he would like the public to forget the Iraq war. At the start of
the week, Mr Blair really thought he was getting somewhere. Interest in Iraq
seemed to be fading at last. The decision not to prosecute Katharine Gun
took away the possibility of a long, highly publicised trial. He had an
announcement about aid to Africa at the ready for his monthly Downing Street
press conference on Thursday, and on Friday he would be delivering a speech
on domestic politics to the Scottish Labour Party conference. Then Clare
Short's sensational revelations ruined his week, leaving his advisers
wondering if he will everrid himself of this feisty Labour rebel, or repair
the damage the Iraq war has done to his reputation.

Lord Goldsmith: Little-known lawyer thrust into the front line after 9/11

It is possible to serve for years as Attorney General without making the
news. Even the average lawyer would struggle to recall who occupied the post
as recently as five years ago. The answer is that it was held for the first
two years of the Blair government by the veteran MP John Morris, and for the
next two years by Gareth Williams before he became Leader of the House of
Lords.

Peter Goldsmith, who took over the post after the 2001 election, is an
experienced lawyer but a virtual unknown in the political world. Yet since
his appointment, he has been involved in one political controversy after
another, most of them arising from the 11 September attacks. He has
negotiated on behalf of Britons detained in Guantanamo Bay; warned David
Blunkett that lowering the standard of proof required to convict suspected
terrorists could be a breach of the law; and - most controversially - was
asked for a judgement on the legality of the Iraq war. Why the full text of
that judgement has to be kept secret is now a hot political issue. Similar
judgments have been made public, although there was a famous case in 1986
when the then Trade and Industry Secretary, Leon Brittan, had to resign
after ordering the leak of an Attorney General's letter.

Clare Short: Former minister who fell out with her colleagues

Clare Short was never a politician to hold back or speak softly. She is also
impulsive, and has made enemies where her friends ought to be, on the left
wing of the Labour Party. They have not entirely forgiven her for staying in
the Cabinet during the Iraq war, only to resign afterwards. Those with
longer memories recall her part in expelling or disciplining members of the
left in the 1990s.

Having entered the Commons at the same time as Tony Blair, in 1983, Ms Short
served for years on the National Executive Committee, the body that may yet
bring her to book for her outspokenness. She held the post of International
Development Secretary for six years, and was generally thought to have run
her department well. Now she has aroused the anger of the party leadership
like no other former minister.

Andy McSmith

Katharine Gun: Translator who had to follow her conscience

A fluent Mandarin speaker and daughter of an English literature professor,
Katharine Gun was a low-level translator for GCHQ, the government's
top-secret eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

But last March, she leaked the now infamous memo from a very senior US
intelligence official at the National Security Agency, asking for British
help to bug delegates of six countries at the United Nations.

Sacked from GCHQ in June 2003, she has always admitted disclosing the email,
written by the NSA's Defence Chief of Staff (Regional Targets), Frank Koza.
But she has insisted she had "only ever followed her conscience" to prevent
an "illegal war against Iraq". Ms Gun, aged 29 and married to a Turk, learnt
Mandarin as she grew up in Taiwan where her father, Paul Harwood, teaches at
Tunghai University.

After moving to Eastbourne, East Sussex, to study for her A-levels, Ms Gun
went on to read modern Chinese with Japanese at Durham University where she
was described as a capable, "lively" student who would always speak out if
she had something to say.

Professor Harwood and Ms Gun's mother, Jan Harwood, have declared that they
were "deeply proud" of their daughter's decision to breach the Official
Secrets Act.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst: FO specialist believed that the war was illegal

The former deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Secretary, who resigned over
the legality of the Iraq war last year, Elizabeth Wilmshurst is seen as one
of Britain's leading experts on international criminal and diplomatic law.

While little known outside diplomatic and legal circles, Ms Wilmshurst spent
29 years in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office legal department before
becoming deputy head of legal affairs in 1997.

Ms Wilmshurst is now head of the international law programme at the Royal
Institute of International Affairs in London and a visiting professor at
University College London. In 1998 she was made a Companion of St Michael
and St George, one of the highest honours for diplomats.

She had resigned her post in March last year because she believed the Iraq
war was illegal - a view many Foreign Office experts are said to share.

Before resigning, Ms Wilmshurst had led the UK delegation to set up the
International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, served as legal counsellor
to the UK's mission to the UN, and given evidence for the Foreign Office to
the House of Commons International Development Committee on the legality of
sanctions. She played a controversial role in the setting-up of the ICC,
when, as a Foreign Office negotiator, she supported a US attempt to block
the court from prosecuting US citizens. Despite this, she is now an adviser
to the ICC.

There was speculation that Ms Wilmshurst might have appeared as a witness
for Katharine Gun, the former GCHQ translator whose trial for leaking an
email concerning a UK-US spying operation collapsed last week.

Ironically, Ms Wilmshurst was due to have co-chaired with Clare Short a
conference on the US-UK occupation of Iraq at the British Institute of
International and Comparative Law last Thursday - the day Ms Short revealed
Britain's bugging of the UN.

---
Severin Carrell
The Independent newspaper
London, United Kingdom
29 February 2004



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