02 March 2004	Tuesday	10 Muharram 1425

LONDON, March 1: Britain's Tony Blair rejected fresh calls on Monday to publish the legal advice he was given over the Iraq invasion and was pressed as to why former minister Clare Short, now a fierce critic, had not been punished.

Former aid minister Short alleged last week that Britain was involved in spying on U.N. chief Kofi Annan before the Iraq war and later claimed that the government's top lawyer only ruled that military action would be legal under heavy pressure.

"It is hard not to suspect that he had doubts and was leant upon," Short said at the weekend. Her extraordinary intervention prompted the head of the government's civil service to write to her, ordering her not to give any more interviews about British intelligence operations.

Short's response was to make his letter public and defiantly conduct a further round of television appearances. For the prime minister, anxious to shift political debate back onto the domestic agenda that wins and loses elections, Iraq is the problem that appears never to go away.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said last week he had ruled war was legal and still thought he was right. But the government has only ever published a short summary of his thinking.

On Monday, Blair's spokesman would not say what action may be taken against Short and refused to publish Goldsmith's legal advice. "It is precisely because of the need to give frank and free advice, that the convention is that such advice is given in private," the spokesman told reporters. But without doing so, Blair cannot put the saga behind him. "I think this issue won't go away for the government," said Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs expert. -Reuters