The Guardian’s Ian Cobain reports that:

The UK has faced tough questions this week from a UN panel closely scrutinising the UK’s human rights record, following a series of disclosures about involvement in so-called extraordinary rendition and torture in the years following the 9/11 attacks.

Over two days in Geneva, the UK delegation went before the UN committee which monitors the implementation of the international convention against torture to face hundreds of questions covering a range of issues including: complicity in abusive interrogation; renditions to Libya; the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq; and the stalled official British inquiry into the treatment of terrorism suspects.

[...]

After posing a series of questions about the killing of Baha Mousa and the mistreatment of individuals detained by the British army in Iraq, Xuexian Wang, a Chinese diplomat, complained loudly that while the UK delegation’s responses were being “given in beautiful English”, they seemed “almost to be non-answers”.

These are of course issues that the Iraq Inquiry has avoided looking at while the government avoids looking too carefully at them through other inquiries. The reference in the article to a stalled inquiry links to “The Detainee Inquiry“. The website for that Inquiry does say on its FAQ page that:

We will not exclude any rendition case because it started with the military, as opposed to the intelligence agencies. This will therefore include the cases of two detainees captured by UK forces in Iraq, handed over to the Americans, and then subsequently subjected to rendition to Afghanistan in 2004, as well as any other allegations of the awareness of or involvement in mistreatment or rendition by UK personnel whether they are military or civilian.

That Inquiry was wound up last year and a report on its work so far given to David Cameron. As Cobain noted last month:

An official report into Britain’s involvement in rendition and torture since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US has yet to be published more than nine months after it was completed and delivered to David Cameron.

According to Cobain’s article, a police inquiry into rendition to Libya is only part of the reason for the delay:

David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has said that was only one reason for the decision.

“Part of it was a dispute over the question over who should have the word on disclosure,” he said. “Should that be the security services or should that be the chair of the inquiry? And it was partly that the police decided that it wanted to investigate with a view to some criminal prosecutions, and that in the end was the reason given for the inquiry being put off.”

Under the terms on which the inquiry was established, the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, and not Gibson, will have the final say on which sections of the report will be censored before publication. The Cabinet Office has declined to say whether material may be censored in order to protect the reputations of the UK’s intelligence agencies.

As this suggests, and as the Detainee Inquiry itself acknowledges, these arrangements are based on those of the Iraq Inquiry. There are slightly fewer reasons for blocking disclosure but, with the cabinet secretary having the final say, including on the question of whether a valid reason for blocking disclosure exists, the difference is perhaps academic.

From non-answers to delays and disputes over disclosure, the British establishment does have a way of obstructing inquiries. Of course an establishment inquiry like the Iraq Inquiry is far too polite too complain over non-answers.

The suggestion that the Syrian opposition, as well as the Syrian government itself, may have used chemical weapons continues to provide an interesting lens through which to consider the concepts of evidence, proof and indeed belief when it comes to intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

There has been some fairly inept reporting of recent suggestions regarding the Syrian Opposition, including this one from the BBC a couple of days ago

UN commission downplays claim Syria rebels used sarin

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria has sought to distance itself from comments made by one of its members that there was evidence of the nerve agent sarin being used by rebels.

Carla Del Ponte said testimony from victims and doctors had given rise to “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof”.

But the commission stressed that it had not reached any “conclusive findings”.

So Carla Del Ponte says there are “concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof” and the UN Commission of Inquiry somehow distances itself from her by stressing that it had not yet reached any “conclusive findings”.

Ironically, there is an equally inept critique of the BBC story on the News Unspun website:

The BBC, reporting on the various suggestions that the rebels or regime have used chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war, report incorrectly that ‘evidence that government forces have used chemical weapons’ has been found by western governments. In reality, what western governments have found, according to David Cameron, is ‘limited, but growing‘ evidence – clearly not conclusive evidence.

Such reporting can easily mislead readers – a correct report may have referred to evidence that government forces may have used chemical weapons.

Whoever wrote this article doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of evidence or its usage and seems to have confused the concept with proof. Evidence that something has happened does not have to be conclusive to be described in this way. It is still evidence, even if it is not conclusive. There is no need to double-qualify such a statement by saying that it is evidence that something may have happened.

Given the extensive confusion about the meanings of these words, it’s not surprising that there remains so much scope for confusion and misrepresentation about Iraq. Leaving aside Tony Blair’s unjustified expressions of certainty, the former prime minister continues to misrepresent the views of other leaders on the WMD issue before the war.  Here he is writing in The Sun a couple of months ago:

the view that he had a WMD programme was held not just by the intelligence services in the UK and US but in countries which opposed military action.

Here’s a report from the Guardian just after Blair published his WMD dossier in September 2002:

Russian rebuff for Blair over Iraq

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, today told Tony Blair that he doubted that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

…

Mr Blair sought to make the best of the clear disagreement, telling reporters: “There may be different perspectives on how sure we can be about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction but there is one certain way to find out and that’s to let the inspectors back in to do their job.”

A pretty explicit acknowledgement from Blair that Putin was not convinced. The late Brian Jones describes in his book Failing Intelligence how unconvinced his Russian intelligence counterparts (he did not directly identify them as such) were by a presentation he gave at the time:

“… you have not provided us with any information that convinces us beyond doubt that Iraq actually has chemical or biological weapons.”

French President Jacques Chirac similarly said in February 2003:

as things stand at the moment, I have, to my knowledge, no indisputable proof in this sphere.

Blair is not so much lying when he says that countries that opposed the war held a “view” that Saddam had WMD but finessing once again the distinction between belief and certainty.  That seems to have got us to a situation where people are so keen to point out that evidence isn’t conclusive evidence that they overlook the fact that no-one is saying that it is.

The situation in Syria and allegations that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons has brought inevitable comparisons with Iraq, with the obvious suggestion that Western governments are more reluctant as a result both to make intelligence-based claims about weapons of mass destruction and to intervene militarily on the basis of such claims.

In this BBC report from last week, David Cameron deliberately chose his words carefully with regard to the allegations and accepted the comparison with Iraq:

The prime minister then addressed concerns about the quality of the UK’s intelligence and fears that unreliable evidence could again be used as a justification for the West to become involved in a Middle Eastern conflict.

He said: “I would want to reassure people and say the lessons of Iraq have been learned.

“There are proper processes in place to try and make sure that what people say is properly backed up by the information.

In the context of the Inquiry and the government’s ridiculous refusal to say anything about Iraq or even allow a debate until the Inquiry’s report is published, these comments are significant for two reasons.

Firstly, it is notable that Cameron, as other ministers have said before, claims that the lessons (ie all of them) of Iraq have been learned. Given that the purpose of the Inquiry is said to be “to identify lessons that can be learned from the Iraq conflict”, it is not clear what the purpose of the Inquiry is now.

Secondly, Cameron’s point that “There are proper processes in place to try and make sure that what people say is properly backed up by the information”, implies very strongly that what happened over Iraq was that people said things that weren’t backed up by the information. The phrase “the information” is a bit ambiguous here. With Iraq you can identify the flimsy and “limited” intelligence, the assessments made by the intelligence experts on the basis of that intelligence, and the claims made by politicians as to what that intelligence showed. But Cameron is very clearly talking about what is said publicly and the difference between that and the intelligence and/or intelligence assessemnts.

Interestingly, the BBC’s Gordon Corera doesn’t need to wait for the Inquiry report either:

With Iraq a decision had been made to go to war and the intelligence was brought into the public domain to make the case for it.

The BBC reports that:

Peers have called for a speedy conclusion to the Iraq Inquiry amid growing dissatisfaction with the length of time it is taking to report.

Former Conservative Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd called on ministers to “inject some urgency” into proceedings.

Labour peer Lord Morris called for a “time limit” on inquiries while Lib Dem Baroness Williams said lessons would be less relevant with the passage of time.

The story also contains an interesting exchange on the suggestion that government intransigence over the “declassification” of documents is partly responsible for the delay.

Cross-bench peer Lord Butler, who conducted his own inquiry in 2004 into the intelligence used to justify the decision to go to war, said Chilcot’s terms of reference were “so wide as to be almost infinite”.

“The timing of the publication of the report depends not just on the handling of the representations but the government’s own clearance of what is to be included in the report. Will he undertake that this process will be done as quickly as the government can manage?”

‘Working well’

Lord Hill said the Chilcot inquiry had made it clear that the process of de-classification was “working well” and the government would co-operate as fully as it could to “expedite the process of de-classification”.

When putting together the previous post linking to a blog piece on the legality of the war from Nigel D. White, Professor of Public International Law at the University of Nottingham, I realised that Professor White had made a submission to the Inquiry in response to the Inquiry’s invitation in 2010.

Professor White has now kindly made his submission available for publication on the Digest. I have added it to the page that lists (I think) all the submissions that have so far been published. The Inquiry has not published these submissions itself.

On the Oxford University Press’s Law and Politics blog, Nigel D. White, Professor of Public International Law at the University of Nottingham, has a piece entitled “Lessons from Iraq 10 years on“, which looks at the implications for international law, diplomacy and intervention of both the Iraq was and the Western intervention in Syria.

Ten years after the capture of Baghdad on 5 April 2003 by US troops, following an invasion of Iraq by US and UK forces, we are still awaiting the outcome of the Chilcot Inquiry which was set up by the government of Gordon Brown in 2009. The report has been delayed at least until the end of 2013 due to the reluctance of the government to release key documents, but the outcome as regards the illegality of the invasion should not be in doubt.

White then discusses the 2011 Western intervention in Libya as a further case where a UN resolution that Security Council permanent members China and Russia had been persuaded to sign up to “was subject to greater and greater demands placed upon it, stretching the Resolution beyond its meaning and contrary to the collective understanding of that resolution.” His account of the result of all this is interesting, given Tony Blair’s recent comments about Syria:

What started out in appearance at least, as an application of the emerging R2P [responsibility to protect] doctrine to protect civilians in Libya based on a clear Security Council mandate, was within a few weeks heading towards another instance of illegal regime change as in Iraq in 2003, with all the problems that entailed. Unfortunately, the unwillingness of those permanent members using force in Libya (UK and France with the assistance of the US) to learn all the lessons of Iraq, by abusing the mandate given to them, has meant that those permanent members that normally advocate non-intervention (Russia and China) have a reason to block any move towards a resolution that authorises necessary measures, or indeed, remembering Iraq, any resolution that might be so construed. The temporary coming together of the permanent membership in March 2011 has proved to be the exception as the people of Syria know to their cost.

* With apologies to Roger Waters/Pink Floyd

Saddam must go. His continued survival after comprehensively losing the Gulf War has done untold damage to the West’s standing in a region where the only unforgivable sin is weakness. His flouting of the terms on which hostilities ceased has made a laughingstock of the international community. His appalling mistreatment of his own countrymen continues unabated. It is clear to anyone willing to face reality that the only reason Saddam took the risk of refusing to submit his activities to U.N. inspectors was that he is exerting every muscle to build WMD. We do not know exactly what stage that has reached. But to allow this process to continue because the risks of action to arrest it seem too great would be foolish in the extreme.

Margaret Thatcher – July 17, 2002 – from her Wall Street Journal op-ed – Don’t Go Wobbly

In the ongoing debate in Australia about whether there should be an inquiry into that country’s participation in the invasion of Iraq, former PM John Howard is to make a speech defending his actions. A version of the speech is online on theaustralian.com website, with the predictable title Errors were made but we did not go to war on a lie.

The gist of Howard’s defence is this passage:

After the fall of Saddam, and when it became apparent that stockpiles of WMDs had not been found in Iraq, it was all too easy for certain people, who only months earlier has said Iraq had the weapons, to begin claiming that Australia had gone to war based on a lie.

That claim merits the most emphatic rejection. Not only does it impugn the integrity of the decision-making process at the highest level but also the professionalism and integrity of intelligence agencies here and elsewhere.

Some of their key assessments proved to be wrong, but that is a world away from those assessments being the product of deceit and/or political manipulation.

Intelligence assessments never produce evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. To illustrate, in his book The Finish, which deals with the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mark Bowden quotes CIA deputy director Michael Morell telling Barack Obama that he had spent a lot of time on both WMDs and the tracing of bin Laden to Abbottabad, “and I am telling you the case for WMDs wasn’t just stronger, it was much stronger”.

I’m not by any means familiar with what Howard’s government said about the certainty with which intelligence was said to show that Iraq had WMD but his line that “Intelligence assessments never produce evidence beyond a reasonable doubt” is a real shot somewhere painful for Tony Blair. Blair’s assertion in the September 2002 dossier that “assessed intelligence” had “established beyond doubt” that Iraq had WMD came in for criticism early in the Inquiry’s hearings from Sir John Chilcot, who said that the Butler review, of which he had been a member, “came to a view that it was not a statement it was possible to make on the basis of intelligence”.

The question that comes to mind is not so much why Howard believed this as a general rule while Blair didn’t, but why no-one told Blair that it wasn’t true in relation to Iraq, if indeed no-one did. When the issue was raised at JIC chairman John Scarlett’s first appearance at the Inquiry, Scarlett seemed to dodge the the issue, which wasn’t put to him directly anyway:

I’m not able to completely reconstruct the thought process, but my memory at the time quite clearly was this was something which was the Prime Minister’s and it was going out under his signature. So it was different from the attention that I paid to the wording of the dossier.

It’s worth recalling here that the main function of the JIC chairman is to make sure that ministers and the prime minister in particular have a good understanding of intelligence. Scarlett seems to be implying that he didn’t really notice what Blair was saying sufficiently to correct him, either for the sake of being accurate in public statements or so that he didn’t base his policy on a complete misconception. It says a lot about the Inquiry that this point wasn’t pressed. But then it says a lot about the Inquiry that Scarlett was never asked about his comment in March 2002 that having a dossier about Iraq only, as opposed to four countries with WMD programmes of concern, would  have “the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional”. Once you know that Scarlett said that, you know that from the outset he was happy for the dossier to mislead people about Iraq’s WMD.

The story in today’s Independent on Sunday, Tony Blair and Iraq: The damning evidence is another one of those where it’s very difficult to know what is new and what isn’t. The main gist of the story, that

Hitherto unseen evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence has revealed that former prime minister Tony Blair was told that Iraq had, at most, only a trivial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Libya was in this respect a far greater threat.

is based on transcripts that have been on the Inquiry website for a long time and have been discussed on this website and elsewhere. In this piece in the Guardian Ian Black names witness SIS4 as Sir Mark Allen. Strangely, the Indy story does not identify SIS4, although it says that:

“Chilcot has the full story and it’s a very complex one,” a former senior MI6 officer, who would not be named, told The IoS.

The story also says of the Inquiry’s report that:

“This report will be absolutely damning on Blair’s style of government, the decision-making process and the planning and execution for its aftermath,” said a source close to the inquiry, speaking before the 10th anniversary on Tuesday of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue.

Last week’s Panorama investigation The Spies Who Fooled The World into pre-war intelligence and its use during the run up to the invasion of Iraq presents what happened as an intelligence failure. Because of deliberate deception by Iraqi sources, such as the spy code-named “Curveball”, and with a dose of wishful thinking and self-deception on the part of the British and US governments, the world was fooled into believing that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Indeed, in the closing seconds we are shown Peter Taylor asking a rather sheepish looking Curveball whether his lies caused the war. He actually replies “yes”. One could almost be forgiven for thinking that responsibility for the Iraq war lay with this one individual! Indeed, as Peter Taylor, the investigator for this Panorama Special, states early on: “Faulty intelligence, fabricated by spies like this man, pressed the button for war.”

Framed in this way, the documentary only tells half the story about what we now know to be true. For sure, as US scholar Robert Jervis has argued in his book Why Intelligence Fails, most intelligence agencies in the West, and Hans Blix himself, made incorrect judgements regarding Iraqi possession of WMD. Most believed that Saddam probably possessed some kind of WMD capability, albeit one which was minimal. Perhaps some covert programmes, some limited stocks of chemical or biological weapons, but certainly no nuclear capability or possession significant enough to pose a tangible threat. But that was the extent of the intelligence failure. The other half of the story concerns the deliberate manipulation and exaggeration of the intelligence and deception by the British and US governments in order make people think that Saddam’s WMD capability was far more serious, pressing and imminent than was ever indicated by the intelligence.

The documentary certainly does a reasonable job in terms of relaying the way in which intelligence was used selectively, and how intelligence was based upon dubious sources, especially Iraqi exiles or those who had something to gain from supplying the ‘right’ information. However, it does fall short of clearly identifying the role of the politicians involved as both active and conscious participants in the process of creating a distorted and inaccurate picture of Iraqi WMD. Indeed, the impression left upon the viewer is that the story of Iraq is one of intelligence failure, specifically the manipulation of Western government by untrustworthy foreign spies. The extensive use of Lord Butler and his references to “mistakes” and “errors” reinforces the impression that misleading intelligence caused the politicians responsible for initiating the war to make honest mistakes.

The truth of the matter is that the British and US governments never relayed an accurate picture of the intelligence, and both embarked upon elaborate perception management campaigns  designed to persuade public opinion of the threat posed by Saddam’s alleged WMDs. For example, former White House spokesperson Scott McLellan has described how the Bush administration set up the White House Information Group in August 2002 in order to coordinate the “‘marketing” campaign regarding Iraq WMD.[i] In a document released by the Iraq Inquiry, Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, stated on 19 July 2002 that:

We need to make the case. We need a plan for a timetable for releasing papers we have prepared on human rights abuses, WMD etc. We need to have the sort of Rolls Royce information campaign we had at the end of Afghanistan before we start in Iraq.

More than simply public information campaigns, evidence has now emerged that US and UK perception managment also involved conscious exaggeration and deception. For example, one of the documents released following an FOI request from Chris Ames  shows JIC chairman John Scarlett suggesting that the dossier should focus only on Iraq, and not other countries of concern such as Iran or North Korea, because this would have the “benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD, Iraq is not that exceptional”. Another document shows Tim Dowse (Foreign Office) recommending manipulation of an intelligence assessment. He states:

I realise that this would not in the end hoodwink a real expert, who would be able to reverse the calculation and work out that our assessment of precursor quantities had fallen. But the task would be … impossible for a layman. And the result would, I think, have more impact on the target audience for the unclassified paper.

On a more general level, a series of credible insiders have now provided detailed published accounts of how intelligence was manipulated and spun for political purposes, the most prominent of these being the late Brian Jones’ Failing Intelligence and former CIA analyst Paul Pillar’s Intelligence and US Foreign Policy. At the same time, leading US academic John Mearsheimer, in Why Leaders Lie, has stated categorically that both Bush and Blair lied to their publics with regard to the intelligence on Iraq, and did so in order to fearmonger and mobilise sufficient public support for a war against Iraq.
 

The September Dossier Revisited … again

One specific, but extremely important, example of where the documentary dodges the issue of political responsibility for deception concerns the notorious September 2002 Dossier published by the British government, and the way in which a newly arrived piece of intelligence from a “source on trial” was used to strengthen key claims being made in the dossier. As Brian Jones and Chris Ames have explained, this late-breaking piece of intelligence, which Jones has called “Report X”, ended up being used to stifle Defence Intelligence Staff opposition to the strength of claims being made about both continued production of chemical weapon agents and the ability of Iraq to launch WMD within 45 minutes of an order. But here Panorama only alludes to the evidence that now exists with regard to the way in which this piece of intelligence was used, how weak it actually was, and the way in which politicians, including Blair himself, were involved in the decision to use it in the dossier.

What is now in the public domain about Report X is powerful and significant. Although the details of this intelligence report remain secret, the Butler Report revealed that it claimed the “production of biological and chemical agent had been accelerated by the Iraqi Government, including through the building of further facilities throughout Iraq.”[ii] When the intelligence arrived, on September 10, Richard Dearlove (Head of SIS/MI6) contacted Scarlett, alerting him to the arrival of new intelligence but emphasizing that it could not be put into the dossier. Dearlove has also stated that it was “authoritatively” excluded from the dossier because it was not assessed intelligence.[iii] On September 12, Dearlove briefed Blair and Alastair Campbell about the intelligence, describing it as from a “source on trial”. Crucially, and as confirmed by both the Butler Review and testimony of SIS officials at the Iraq Inquiry, Report X did not refer to specific evidence of WMD production, but rather to the promise that evidence would soon be provided. As one SIS official noted about Report X: “[h]ere was a chap who promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow”, and faith in the source was based “… in part on wishful thinking”.[iv]

And yet, despite the weakness of Report X, and the need for further additional evidence to actually confirm the claim being made, it ended up being used by those drafting the dossier to express with greater apparent certainty the claim that Iraq was continuing to produce chemical and biological weapons. Precisely, Scarlett stated at the Hutton Inquiry that Report X, referring to it as “compartmented intelligence” not available to DIS staff, was “underpinning the judgement” with respect to CW agent production.[v] As Chris Ames shows , by comparing 10th and 16th September versions of the dossier executive summary, the judgement regarding Iraqi possession of chemical weapons changes from:

Our judgement, based on all the available resources is that Iraq: has stocks of chemical and biological weapons available, both retained from before the Gulf War, and probably from more recent production;
10 September Dossier draft 

To:

And it (intelligence) allows us to judge that Iraq: has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.
16 September Executive Summary

In turn, this judgement then underpinned Blair’s extraordinary statement in the dossier foreword that continued Iraqi production of chemical weapons was “beyond doubt”[vi] Essentially, Report X, which was inherently uncertain, had been seized upon in order express the dossier position on continued production with greater certainty and allow the Prime Minister to state that the Iraqi WMD production was “beyond doubt”. Indeed, in a remarkable admission to the Inquiry in 2010, Scarlett noted the weakness of Report X:

We were told that this [Report X] was important, potentially important reporting, but a new source, with a little bit more about the nature of access of the subsource, but a very limited amount, not really possible to make – much of it.[vii]

Unsurprisingly, given Scarlett’s awareness that Report X was so little to go on, the decision to use it to harden the dossier claim was not made by him alone. In 2003, Alastair Campbell claimed that Dearlove had told them (Blair and Campbell) that the newly arrived intelligence could used through “assertion”, although Campbell stated that he accepted himself that they were not able to use the intelligence directly in the dossier.[viii] Critically, the Butler Report clearly implicates all of the key officials in the decision making process by which Report X came to be used in the dossier, and it is worth quoting at length. After stating that the failure to show Report X to DIS analysts had resulted “[i]n a stronger assessment in the dossier in relation to Iraqi chemical weapons production than was justified by the available intelligence”, [ix]  the Butler Report states:

The Chief of SIS told us that, because he had been aware of the report on 10 September. He had mentioned it to the Prime Minister’s Foreign Affairs Adviser (Sir David Manning) at a meeting on 10 September and followed this up by arranging for the report to be sent to Sir David. As it happened, the Chief of SIS had a meeting with the PM on 12 September … He told us that he underlined to the Prime Minister the potential importance of the new source and what SIS understood his access to be; but also said that the case was developmental and that the source remained unproven. Nevertheless, it may be that, in the context of the intense interest at that moment in the status of Iraq’s prohibited weapons programmes, and in particular continuing work on the dossier, this concurrence of events caused more weight to be given to this unvalidated source than would normally have been the case. [x]

Other evidence now available also clearly points toward Blair as the politician who was particularly influenced by Report X. For example, Lyne states “It’s [Report X] more than an example, because it clearly had an impact at the political level”.[xi] SIS4, when pushed as to whether he thought there should have been concern over how much excitement the report might cause in No10, SIS4 suggested that he could not pass judgement on a suggestion that reflected badly on his former boss:

What I divine to be the direction of questioning is the issue of whether the Chief detonated a psychotropic line of thinking and excitement in the Prime Minister by giving him what in quieter days might be thought rather precipitate briefing on casework which turned out not to be real. I don’t think it is for me to offer a judgement on that.[xii]

SIS1 made a guarded reference to the influence of Report X: “he didn’t influence assessment. He influenced expectation on the part of people who were concerned, are we going in the right directions.”[xiii] Finally, an exchange between SIS1 and Sir John Chilcot confirms the impact of Report X upon Blair:

SIS1: Here was a chap who promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow … REDACTED … Now, you have got to go for those, because sometimes that can be just what you are looking for.

Sir John Chilcot: But that puts a huge strain on the validation process and the way in which it is reported.

SIS1: Well, there wasn’t much to validate. What he was promising had not arrived. That was the point.

Sir John Chilcot: In effect it was the promise that there would be.

SIS1: The promise that there would be, and I think that that created an expectation which could not be fulfilled, not only on the part of those who were briefed on it at quite a senior level in the UK … REDACTED.

Sir John Chilcot: Yes. It goes in our system right up to the top policy making levels and to the PM indeed.

SIS1: Yes. REDACTED.[xiv]

Ultimately then, senior politicians, indeed no less than the PM himself, were involved in the process by which an unassessed piece of intelligence, which itself was only the promise of a “silver bullet”, came to be used in the dossier in order express with apparent certainty that Iraq was continuing to produce WMD. As such, rather than the dossier being a reflection of what the intelligence services were informing the Prime Minister, as has always been the official line, it actually reflected a judgement on Iraqi continued production that closely involved the Prime Minister’s own reading of the intelligence.

Furthermore, compelling evidence that Blair’s statements and claims in the dossier were well beyond the limits that the intelligence services were willing to sanction, comes with the last minute alterations to the dossier foreword. While Campbell had always staked the integrity of the dossier upon it being authored by the intelligence services, Sir David Omand (Blair’s intelligence and security adviser) ended up communicating with Scarlett over revising the foreword so as to distance the JIC from the dossier. First, Scarlett [xv] altered the opening line of the forward from:

The document published today is the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee [xvi]

to:

The document published today is based, in large part, on the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

Second, in the closing paragraph, the line:

I believe that faced with the information given to me by the JIC in recent months[xvii]

Becomes;

I believe that faced with the information available to me.[xviii]

Third,[xix] regarding Blair’s beyond doubt claim, the following line:

What I believe the JIC reports to me have established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons[xx]

was changed to:

What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.

The extraordinary conclusion that this leads to is that, rather than the dossier being a reflection of what the intelligence services were informing the prime minister, as has always been the official line, it actually represented the prime minister’s own assessment of the intelligence, at least with respect to the key issue of whether Iraqi WMD production was continuing. To all intent and purpose, Blair and his closest advisors had placed themselves beyond the ‘operating envelope’ defined by both the intelligence and the intelligence services. When Blair and Campbell claim that the dossier was the work of the intelligence agencies and that their claims reflected, and were sustained by, the intelligence, they are not speaking the truth. In reality, the accuracy of the central claim of the dossier, that production of WMD was continuing, rested upon a prime ministerial wing and a prayer that the intelligence promised in Report X would soon turn up.
 

Letting the Politicians off-the-hook and Disguising the Truth About Why We Went to War

The story of Iraq, then, is not only one of intelligence failure, it is also one of conscious and deliberate manipulation of intelligence by politicians. The Spies Who Fooled the World ultimately misses too much of the big story here. With respect to Report X and its use in the dossier, the documentary misleadingly states: “Although the source was not quoted in the dossier, the intelligence was seized upon as active conformation that Saddam had active WMD.” That fact that Report X was used in the dossier, and in a vey powerful way, is lost in the shuffle. Overall, Panorama leaves the politicians involved looking foolish in terms of their capacity for self deception, and very gullible in their willingness to accept the word of characters such as Curveball. But, critically, it largely spares them from having to face responsibility for their own actions which served to transform a “patchy” and “sporadic” intelligence base on Iraqi WMD, into a series of statements of certainty over Iraq production of WMD and its ability to launch such weapons within 45 minutes.

Framing the Iraq war as a case of “intelligence failure”, and disguising the culpability of the politicians eclipses an even bigger issue. The intelligence and WMD circus was, as we now know, simply the agreed way of justifying the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq. Removing Saddam from power (ie regime change) had long been a policy objective of neo-conservatives in the US and the events of 9/11 provided the opportunity for this policy to be realised. Indeed, in the aftermath of these attacks, some in the U.S. administration even advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan[xxi]. At the very most then, WMD was a subsidiary factor in shaping policy relative to what were more significant neo-conservative motivations to shore up US influence in a key oil-producing region through removal of Saddam, perhaps coupled with a naive belief that an America style liberal democracy might naturally spring from the invasion’s aftermath. In short, ‘fear’ of Saddam’s WMD was never the driving factor in this war.

Of course, once one understands this, the gravity of political deception, as least in the UK context, becomes even more profound. The official line of the British government has always been that if Saddam complied with UN resolutions and surrendered his alleged weapons and terminated ended his alleged WMD programmes, war could be averted. Indeed, attorney general Goldsmith’s advice was clear that regime change had no justification in International Law. But if the Bush administration was already intent on regime change, regardless of Iraq’s WMD status, then the British Prime Minister was either duped by the US government, or knew full well its intentions and, knowing that, then proceeded to deceive the British public on an epic scale. That is to say, knowing that Britain was heading into a war being driven by US neo-conservative rationales, Blair elected to deceive the British public into thinking it was all about dealing with the threat Saddam posed because of WMD, and disguising the fact that the war was actually about regime change. Of course, this imperative was not simply one of persuading the British public: it was also one of gaining legal cover for British action. As a signatory to the International Criminal Court, laws relating to war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity are applicable to a British government. British involvement simply had to be about WMD and violation of UN resolutions, and not about regime change per se.
 

Concluding Comments

In all of this, there is a very real danger that the whole truth about the Iraq war will fade into a distorted historical memory that recalls a war led by intelligence failure. Panorama largely dodges the key issue and, in doing so, is dangerously close to contributing to a distorted historical memory. This is perhaps not surprising. The last time the BBC went head to head with the government over Iraq was the 2003 Today Programme report by Andrew Gilligan, which accused the government of inserting false intelligence into the dossier against the wishes of the intelligence services. The outcome of that stand-off included the death of the BBC’s source, Dr David Kelly, in the midst of the political storm, whilst the ensuing Hutton Inquiry triggered the resignations of director general Greg Dyke, chairman Gavyn Davies and Gilligan. Hardly an optimal outcome for the BBC, and one that has probably left the insitution acutely risk-averse when it comes to criticising the British government over matters of high foreign policy.

Whether or not the yet to report Inquiry possesses the moral courage to get to the truth remains to be seen. Regrettably, the Inquiry now appears to have given up attempts to secure the release of key papers detailing Blair’s promises to the US government during the run up to the Iraq war. ‘Smoking gun’ evidence, then, that Tony Blair signed up to a war long before informing his cabinet, let alone the British public, may remain buried for decades. But, at the same time, the Inquiry does appear to have facilitated the publication of enough evidence which, in tandem with leaked documents and FOI requests, enables a reasonably clear, accurate and substantial account to emerge into the public domain. Indeed, there are few other foreign policy decisions, in any country, that have been accompanied by such widespread attention, release of information and public attention as has been the case with the Iraq War.

Of course, even if the final pieces of the jigsaw surface and finally enable the full truth about Britain’s decision to go to war come to be both known and told, the question remains as to whether the political will exists to actually do anything about it. States, as political entities, are notoriously poor at holding their leaders to account, especially with respect to decisions of war and peace. I suspect, although I hope to be proved wrong, that Westminster will be inclined to sweep the more difficult issues under the carpet and there is already talk of No10 taking ‘tight control’ of the eventual publication of the Inquiry report. This may well end up as a case where the public, and the rest of the world knows the truth of what happened, whilst the political establishment sticks its head firmly into the sand.