LONDON - A British government legal adviser resigned on the eve of the US-led invasion of Iraq because she believed such action would be unlawful and amount to a "crime of aggression," the BBC reported Thursday.
The BBC News website said the Foreign Office's former deputy legal adviser Elizabeth Wilmhurst made the claim in her resignation letter dated March 18, 2003, part of which was obtained by the broadcaster under the new Freedom of Information Act.
However, private television Channel 4, without giving a source, said a missing part of the letter also shows how Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith had considered the war illegal before changing his mind at the last minute.
Wilmshurst wrote in her resignation letter that military action in Iraq, which began with an air strike March 19 and then the invasion a day later, was "an unlawful use of force" which "amounts to the crime of aggression," the BBC website said.
"Nor can I agree with such action in circumstances which are so detrimental to the international order and the rule of law," she was quoted as saying.
The Foreign Office said the missing part of the letter was covered by exemptions relating to the professional privilege applying to a law officer in the formulation of government policy.
However, Channel 4 News said the missing piece refers to legal advice Lord Goldsmith gave to the government.
Channel 4 quotes Wilmshurst as indicating that the attorney general changed his mind at the last minute, giving approval for the war after having previously opposed it.
A spokesperson for the attorney general told the BBC that he had made it "very clear" that the view set out in his parliamentary answer of March 17, 2003 was his "own genuinely held independent view, that military action in Iraq was lawful."
However, Dominic Grieve, the main opposition Conservative party's legal expert, urged the government to "come clean" about the full legal advice it received from Lord Goldsmith in the runup to the invasion.
It is "quite clear the attorney general changed his mind," Grieve told BBC radio.
"Initially the war was illegal without a further UN resolution. Then he seems to have taken an equivocal view where he said it might be legal but he was concerned there was a legal challenge," Grieve said.
"Then finally he appears to have told the cabinet immediately before the war (on March 17) he was quite satisfied that the legal basis was established," he said.
What is troublesome, he said, is that the changes occurred while Prime Minister Tony Blair himself was making his own "selective" case for war, in part over claims Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction.
03/24/2005 15:16 GMT