Blair Challenges Memo On Iraq Occupation Illegality

Asked about the memo, Blair insisted at his monthly televised press conference at Downing Street that the government had acted legally throughout.

"It is completely wrong to say that at any point of time, the attorney general has said that the government was acting unlawfully. We would never act unlawfully in relation to this," he argued.

"In any event, to be absolutely blunt, all these things have been overtaken by the U.N. resolution.

"I think the passage of the U.N. resolution allows the international community to come back together again, it gives added hope to people in Iraq, it allows us to put behind us some of the divisions of the past and get on with the business of reconstructing Iraq for the Iraqi people," Blair said.

The Security Council voted 14-0 Thursday to immediately lift the 13-year-old U.N. sanctions clamped on Iraq in the wake of its invasion of Kuwait and put its economy under the broad control of the U.S.-led occupying forces.

Lord Goldsmith asserted to Blair that everything the U.S.-led Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid has attempted to do, from the efforts to form an interim Iraqi administration to the control of the supply and sale of oil and the award of reconstruction contracts to U.S. firms, may be   and void in the absence of a new U.N. resolution, the New Statesman magazine reported Thursday.

Six days into the Iraq war, when the talk was of a long, hard campaign, Blair turned to his top legal adviser and friend, Lord Goldsmith.

But the news Goldsmith brought the war cabinet on the morning of 26 March, however, was not what Blair wanted to hear.

Goldsmith decided to put his thoughts into a memorandum addressed to Blair and circulated to a small number of key Whitehall departments.

The document, which was kept secret but a copy of which was obtained by the New Statesman weekly magazine.

"I am writing to confirm the advice I gave at the meeting this morning concerning the need for U.N. Security Council authorisation for the coalition or the international community to establish an interim Iraqi administration to reform and restructure Iraq and its administration," wrote Goldsmith in his legal warning which was published in full by the magazine.