..“no, you can’t know, why the cabinet decided to invade Iraq…“
Ein Super-Artikel..“Nur für Eingeweihte“..
schreibt der ECONOMIST bitter-ironisch, der Rest braucht das ja nicht zu wissen, warum…der Einmarsch in den Irak…damals…
Britain
Freedom of information
For their eyes only
Feb 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition
No, you can’t know why the cabinet decided to invade Iraq
BloombergEVER since Britain joined the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, those opposed to the war have explored all avenues to discover just how the decision to do so was reached. One of those avenues has now been blocked. On February 24th the government vetoed rulings by official freedom-of-information watchdogs that it should release the minutes of two cabinet meetings just before the invasion.
It is the first time since the Freedom of Information Act came into force in 2005 that the government has invoked a clause allowing it to refuse to comply with a ruling of the Information Tribunal. Even Labour MPs had slunk from the House of Commons by the time the decision was announced. No appeal against the veto is possible, although there is a slim chance that a judicial review may be sought.
Campaigners had hoped to learn more about cabinet deliberations on the lawfulness of invading Iraq without UN authorisation. At around the time of the two crucial meetings, the attorney-general provided two separate legal opinions, ten days apart. The first expressed reservations; the second was more gung-ho. How much did ministers know about Lord Goldsmith’s initial caveats? How free were they to question the basis for his opinions?
The controversial case began in 2007, when a member of the public, turned down by the Cabinet Office when he asked for minutes of the meetings, applied to the information commissioner to require their release. The commissioner, Richard Thomas, agreed that the public interest in knowing what legal advice had been placed before cabinet outweighed the government’s concerns about undermining the confidentiality of cabinet deliberations. The government appealed to the Information Tribunal, and lost. Short of complying, that left ministers with two options: appealing to the High Court to overturn the tribunal’s ruling, or vetoing it. They chose the more certain one.
The cabinet, said the justice secretary, Jack Straw, had also based its decision on a calculation of the public interest. Although the minutes of cabinet meetings do not identify individuals, they are by convention kept private for fear that ministers might otherwise censor themselves, or that minuted decision-making might give way to informal discussions elsewhere. Publishing records of cabinet proceedings risked damaging British democracy itself, he said, and that risk was more serious than any posed by non-disclosure. As it happens, Mr Straw was foreign secretary at the time of the Iraq invasion.
It is unlikely in any event that the minutes would reveal much that is not already in the public domain. Since 2003 no fewer than four of the ministers who sat in cabinet then have spoken or written of the meetings. This, said the tribunal, was evidence of a dwindling respect for the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility, to which confidentiality is said by the government to be so crucial. It also suggests that, in refusing to publish the minutes, a more serious concern for the government than the possible inhibition of free and frank debate in cabinet was the probable confirmation that on this occasion, at any rate, there wasn’t any.
The government invoked a clause in the Freedom of Information Act to veto the ruling by the Information Tribunal that it should comply with the information commissioner’s earlier decision. Jack Straw announced the veto in a statement to the House of Commons (re-published in the Guardian).