When trying to decide what exactly the document Lord Goldsmith produced and put before the House of Commons before the vote on the War in Iraq actually was, it would seem sensible to consult it’s author directly. Not surprisingly, when the Daily Telegraph interviewed him earlier this week, they did, and received the following response:

I never said it was a summary.

Except, if we flip back to November 2003 in Hansard, then he was, erm, saying it was a summary:

This statement was a summary of my view of the legal position

So he did say it was a summary, whether he likes it or not.

To provide you with a summary of my own: When the full document was secret, his document was a summary; Once the full text was released and everyone could compare, it suddenly wasn’t a summary. Funny, that.

We know that the Blair government likes massaging the facts a little, but here he’s on record as directly contradicting himself. He’s absolutely doubtlessly proven as lying. Yet, far from resigning, he hasn’t even been sent out into the frenzied world of the media to apologise, or even clarify his comments. And all of this from a government which promised to be ‘whiter than white’.

If we were observing a developing nation with a government that was lying about the process of deciding about launching an internationally condemned war, not only would we have a few nasty things to say about said government, but there would be those in our government who would want military action taken against it. And yet when it’s people in their own government doing it, they don’t seem to mind quite as much. Talk about double-standards.

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