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Iran, Bush, Obama and legal matters

Given all the campaigning rhetoric and talk by Obama and his camp during the election campaign last year, one would have concluded that Obama, if elected, would not follow the Bush Administration's legal gyrations and positions on a variety of critical topics.

Now in the White House, all too sadly Obama is following in the footsteps of Bush, as McClatchy reports in "In stark legal turnaround, Obama now resembles Bush";

"President Barack Obama is morphing into George W. Bush, as administration attorneys repeatedly adopt the executive-authority and national-security rationales that their Republican predecessors preferred.

In courtroom battles and freedom-of-information fights from Washington, D.C., to California, Obama's legal arguments repeatedly mirror Bush's: White House turf is to be protected, secrets must be retained and dire warnings are wielded as weapons.

"It's putting up a veritable wall around the White House, and it's so at odds with Obama's campaign commitment to more open government," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog group."

Meanwhile, The Observer reports in "Confidential Memo Reveals US Plan to Provoke an Invasion of Iraq" on the "smoking gun" in relation to a Memo the newspaper has seen which implicates Bush and Blair in determining to invade Iran knowing that there were no WMD's:

"A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought out" to give a public presentation on Saddam's WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was "solidly with the president".

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