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Ministers insisted that British secret agents would only be allowed to pass intelligence to the CIA to help it capture Osama bin Laden if the agency promised he would not be tortured, it has emerged. MI6 believed it was close to finding the al-Qaida leader in Afghanistan in 1998, and again the next year. The plan was for MI6 to hand the CIA vital information about Bin Laden. Ministers including Robin Cook, the then foreign secretary, gave their approval on condition that the CIA gave assurances he would be treated humanely. The plot is revealed in a 75-page report by...

Key points • Criticism of Blair comes from old friend of Robin cook • John McCririck, the racing pundit, slams PM's decision • Robin Cook to have funeral service in St. Giles Key quote "Margaret Thatcher can bring herself to attend Ted Heath's service, then surely Mr Blair ought, at least publicly, to show respect and gratitude to Robin." - John McCririck Story in full TONY Blair came under increasing pressure last night to reverse his decision to remain on holiday rather than return home for Robin Cook's funeral, with one close friend of the former foreign secretary describing the...

Robin Cook LONDON (AP) -- Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who quit Prime Minister Tony Blair's Cabinet in 2003 to protest the Iraq war, died Saturday after collapsing on a Scottish mountain while walking with his wife. He was 59. Scotland's Northern Constabulary said Cook collapsed on Ben Stack mountain in the Scottish Highlands. He was taken by coast guard helicopter to a hospital in Inverness, where he was pronounced dead. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, filling in for a vacationing Blair, said Cook was "the greatest parliamentarian of his generation." "He also made an enormous contribution to British...

Robin Cook 'taken seriously ill' Former Cabinet minister Robin Cook is seriously ill after he collapsed while out hill walking, reports say. It is believed that he was taken ill near the summit of Ben Stack mountain, near an area known as Laxford Bridge in north-western Scotland. He was flown by helicopter to Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, and is understood to have received 40 minutes of resuscitation en route. Mr Cook quit as Commons leader in March 2003, in protest over the war in Iraq. Mr Cook was said to be with a companion at the time he was taken...

Tony Blair has been urged to quit as prime minister early into his third term, days after Labour's election win. Despite securing an historic third victory, the government's Commons majority was slashed from 161 to 67. Several Labour MPs have described Mr Blair as a "liability", among them ex-Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. However, senior party figures including David Blunkett and Peter Hain have rallied in support of Mr Blair, urging MPs to "get behind" their leader. Downing Street has said there is "no change" from Mr Blair's statement last year that he would serve a full third term. Some MPs...

From leaky roofs to secret agents: how the files I found in Iraq's looted foreign ministry cast light on the paranoid world of Saddam Hussein How many Iraqi officials does it take to fix the leaky roof of a diplomat's house in London? How long does a skilled translator need to convert one of George Galloway's parliamentary speeches into Arabic? In almost 1, 000 pages of Arabic prose, each stamped with the Eagle crest of Iraq, the files found inside the foreign ministry in Baghdad cast a somewhat surreal light on the questions that turned the bureaucratic wheels of Saddam...

Fireworks in Washington, despair around the world The Bush administration is in denial about its disastrous failure in Iraq Robin Cook Friday January 21, 2005 The Guardian Inauguration does not do justice to the exuberant celebrations of this week. Coronation would come closer. Washington ended yesterday with nine official balls. The night before George Bush gave a new spin to the phrase moveable feast by fitting in three separate banquets. He then expended as much ordnance in peppering the sky over the Capitol with fireworks as would get his occupation forces in Iraq through a whole 24 hours. The contrasts...

10/23/03 Labour forges ties with US' Democrats Norway's Labour Party is joining other European social democrats in linking up with the Democrats in the US. The goal is to be prepared with common strategies if a majority of them on both sides of the Atlantic come back to power. A group of European social democrats, led by former British Foreign Minister Robin Cook, met last week with several top Democratic politicians and party officials. They included US senators Hilary Clinton and Joseph Biden. They also had meetings with Ron Klain of presidential candidate Wesley Clark's campaign, and Stan Greenberg, former...

Labour forges ties with US' Democrats Norway's Labour Party is joining other European social democrats in linking up with the Democrats in the US. The goal is to be prepared with common strategies if a majority of them on both sides of the Atlantic come back to power. A group of European social democrats, led by former British Foreign Minister Robin Cook, met last week with several top Democratic politicians and party officials. They included US senators Hilary Clinton and Joseph Biden. They also had meetings with Ron Klain of presidential candidate Wesley Clark's campaign, and Stan Greenberg, former US...

Blair 'knew Iraq had no WMD' TONY BLAIR privately conceded two weeks before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein did not have any usable weapons of mass destruction, Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, reveals today. John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), also "assented" that Saddam had no such weapons, says Cook. His revelations, taken from a diary that he kept as a senior minister during the months leading up to war, are published today in The Sunday Times. They shatter the case for war put forward by the government that Iraq presented "a real and present...

Robin Cook, who resigned as leader of the House of Commons in March over Tony Blair's policies on Iraq, has called on the government to call off its "jihad" on the BBC. Writing in today's (Wednesday) London Independent, Cook observed that the Labor government appears to have aligned itself with conservative newspapers against the public broadcaster. "In my more suspicious moments, I wonder whether Number 10 does not regard those papers as too powerful to take on, but regards the BBC as weak enough to bully." Suggesting that the attack on the BBC may be "a classic diversionary tactic" to...

A question of guilt Quick to damn others, Robin Cook is lamentably slow to accept his part in the deaths of many Iraqis How many Iraqis has Robin Cook killed? Not by the favoured Baath Party means of feeding them into plastic shredders or gassing them in their villages, but indirectly through the policies he endorsed? It's hard to be precise - the body counters in Saddam's Iraq always needed more time - but the death toll must run into five figures and hits six if you believe the more gruesome claims about the effects of the sanctions he enforced....

A former US intelligence official who served under the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq war accused the White House yesterday of lying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. The claims came as the Bush administration was fighting to shore up its credibility among a series of anonymous government leaks over its distortion of US intelligence to manufacture a case against Saddam. This was the first time an administration official has put his name to specific claims. The whistleblower, Gregory Thielmann, served as a director in the state department's bureau of intelligence until his retirement in September,...

I know that we shouldn't laugh, but it is very hard to keep a straight face when the Italian president of our great European brotherhood starts hurling anti-Nazi insults at a German Lefty. No doubt the proper reaction to Silvio Berlusconi's outburst would have been to shake one's head gravely and echo Robin Cook's judgment: "The whole point of the European ideal is to get away from crude national stereotyping." But that was a typically dour, typically Scottish response.I'm afraid that I thought it was hilarious - but then I'm English, with more than a dash of Irish in me....

The British government needs to concede that we went to war for reasons of US foreign policy and Republican Party politics 30 May 2003 Chutzpah was the word that used to be applied to people who radiated belief in themselves without possessing any visible reason to justify it. In the chutzpah stakes Donald Rumsfeld is way off the top of the scale. Before the war he told us that Saddam had "large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an active programme to develop nuclear weapons". After the war he explains away the failure to find any of these stockpiles...

A host of Britons feature in the files of the Iraqi foreign ministry, which faithfully record dealings with Saddam Hussein's regime that many might prefer to forget. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing, but many of those who contacted the Iraqi regime wrote in somewhat naive terms. A letter from Sir Edward Heath dated March 6 2000 cheerfully records a luncheon with Mudhafar Amin, head of the Iraqi Interests Section in London, at his home in Salisbury. "I was delighted that you and your wife were able to come," wrote Sir Edward. "Thank you for leaving me with such an...

Tony Blair is ready to sack Cabiet rebels Robin Cook and Claire Short within the next 48 hours if they do not fall into line on Iraq.The Prime Minister met with all available Cabinet members individually yesterday to demand that they pledge their loyalty to him and express their support for military action.He is determined to deny his outspoken critics-and any other wavering ministers-theopportunity to resign at a time of their own choosing to maximize their impact. Leader of the House Mr. Cook was in Belgrade for the funeral of assassinated Serbian Prime MInister Zoran Djindjic yesterday- and many colleagues...

Tony Blair was facing deepening Labour disquiet over Iraq last night despite President George W Bush's promise to seek United Nations support for action to force Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction. The renewed criticism overshadowed a long-awaited declaration of support for Mr Blair's plans by Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr Bush said yesterday that it was "highly doubtful" that Iraq would comply with UN resolutions and made clear that war was all but inevitable. Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi deputy prime minister, raised the tension when he rejected the demand for unconditional access...