Iraq Insider Book Censored by the UK Foreign Office
Jack Straw, the [UK] foreign secretary, is blocking passages from a fly-on-the-wall account by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s former ambassador to the UN, on the run-up to the war in Iraq. Downing Street disowned any involvement in the censoring of the book yesterday after reports in the Observer and the Mail on Sunday that Tony Blair had wanted to block publication. No 10 put the responsibility on the Foreign Office and Whitehall procedures to vet civil servants’ memoirs for the removal of parts of the book, The Cost of War. Sir Jeremy, who was also Mr Blair’s special envoy to Iraq for a year, has been known to be a critic of the politicians’ handling of the war. The Observer said yesterday that some of the removed passages were highly critical of the US. In one, Sir Jeremy calls America’s decision to go to war “politically illegitimate” and says that negotiations in the United Nations “never rose above the level of awkward diversion for the US administration”.
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