We Are Many Page #3

And that day was put at 15th of February.

So we started thinking together

what to do, what to do.

We had a very strong European network.

At the end of the European Social Forum,

we had a massive assembly

in a disused railway station.

There were thousands and thousands

of people packed into this meeting.

We made the announcement

to say we have to make February 15th

into the biggest day of global protest

there has ever been.

I now hand over to my final speaker

on European coordination,

Raffaella.

To all citizens of Europe,

we call on the movement

and the citizens of Europe

to start from now

organizing European anti-war demonstrations

in every capital on February 15.

We can stop this war.

And the response was just overwhelming.

It was absolutely tremendous.

You need a moment

in which somebody says "Yes, we can,"

and so you start.

And after that, we knew that this day

was going to be something special,

something the world had never seen before.

The Stop The War Coalition

has been meeting in London

to make plans for a demonstration

against war with Iraq.

The London demonstration is due

to take place on February 15th

to coincide with marches

in several other European capitals.

Somebody said,

I don't even remember now who it was,

that they had heard that folks in Europe

were planning

for a day of international

demonstrations on February 15th

against the war, and we said,

"Oh, OK, let's do that."

The notion that we could pull this off

on a global level...

Oh, my God, this was huge.

This was an enormous challenge.

The notion that we were

part of something global

was terrifying and thrilling

all at the same time.

And Saddam Hussein must understand

that if he does not disarm

for the sake of peace,

we, along with others,

will go disarm Saddam Hussein.

This is a matter of weeks, not months.

It was only much later

that I came across

the single most devastating document,

which is the legal memorandum

written by Lord Goldsmith,

in which Lord Goldsmith

tells the British Prime Minister,

"You cannot use force without

a further Security Council resolution."

If you go down the document,

at paragraph four,

you've got Lord Goldsmith

telling the Prime Minister,

"I remain of the view

that the correct legal interpretation

of Resolution 1441

is that it does not authorize

the use of military force

without a further determination

by the Security Council."

And just to the left of that,

a little scribble.

"I just don't understand this."

Who wrote that? Tony Blair wrote that.

And then the document was filed away.

The timing of the document

is very significant.

It was written and signed off

on 30th January.

The next day, 31st January,

the British Prime Minister met the

American President in the White House,

and I've seen the internal

British note of the meeting

prepared by Sir David Manning.

And that note makes very clear,

beyond any possible dispute, two things.

First, by 31st January,

President Bush had decided

that the war on Iraq would begin in March

with or without a further

Security Council resolution.

And second point,

Tony Blair told Bush at that meeting

he was with him, whatever happened.

I do remember the steady drumbeat to war.

There was one sane voice in that crowd,

and I remember talking to my dad

on the phone from Saudi Arabia

and saying, you know,

Colin Powell is the only one

that's gonna be able to stop this.

It was the moment the world has waited for.

America's best case against Iraq,

made by its top diplomat.

When the Secretary finished

his dress rehearsal,

the night before the presentation

to the Security Council,

he looked at his watch. It was a little long.

He looked at me,

and he turned to Mr. Tenet,

the Director of the CIA,

and he said, "George, you stand by everything

that I just said, right?"

And Mr. Tenet said, "I'm telling you,

what you just gave is solid."

And he's telling the Secretary of State

it's a slam dunk.

Saddam Hussein has weapons

of mass destruction.

I mean, that's not the exact language

George used with the Secretary,

but it was like that.

And then the Secretary looked at him

and got this smile on his face, and he said,

"Well, George, you're gonna

be with me tomorrow."

"You're gonna be in camera."

That sort of surprised Mr. Tenet

cos generally you don't put

the Director of the CIA on television.

But you look at that film, and you will see

that George Tenet is right

over the Secretary's shoulder.

Saddam Hussein and his regime

have made no effort,

no effort to disarm as required

by the international community.

We have diagrammed what our sources reported

about these mobile facilities.

Colin Powell made his extraordinary

speech to the UN,

in which there were sort of ice cream vans

which we were told were

biological weapons things.

They looked, actually, quite

like ice cream vans to me.

They may well have been ice cream vans.

What you're about to hear is a conversation

that my government monitored.

"We have this modified vehicle."

"What do we say if one of them sees it?"

His delivery was superb.

He really should have won

an Academy Award for that performance.

"I have one." "Which?"

"From where?" "From the workshop."

"I'll come to see you in the morning."

"I'm worried you all have something left."

When I sat there in the Security Council

opposite Colin Powell

and I heard these things,

I kept a straight face, a poker face.

But I was skeptical.

And unless we act,

we are confronting

an even more frightening future.

He did not know that we were

perpetrating a hoax,

but that is in effect what we were doing.

I mean, we were telling the Security Council,

people in the international community

and Americans,

we were telling them all that Saddam

Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

He did not. He did not.

I don't really want to criticize him,

but it was a debacle, really,

for him and for the world.

At that point, I lost a lot of hope

about our ability to prevent the Iraq war.

When you sign your life on the line

for your country

and swear to defend it,

the only thing that you really ask for

in return

is that it be for a good reason,

and I didn't feel it was for a good reason.

Yeah, I was in charge of it,

and when I finished it and thought about it,

I felt miserable because I thought

we had just put a whole array

of circumstantial evidence up

that could be interpreted

in any number of different ways.

And we were probably going to go to war,

and it sort of bothered me.

And now I feel like it was the lowest point,

as I've said before,

in my professional and personal life.

I wish I had resigned.

On this February day,

as this nation stands at the brink of battle,

this chamber is, for the most part,

ominously...

ominously...

dreadfully silent.

You can hear a pin drop. Listen.

You can hear a pin drop.

The battle lines are being

drawn in the Gulf and at home,

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