Dossier was sexed-up
by Chris Ames
What have we learnt after the second day? I’m not sure I agree that the “revelation” that Britain received intelligence that Iraq may have disassembled its chemical/biological weapons and have no means of delivering them is as significant or new as is being made out. After all, it implicitly incorporated the claim or assumption that Iraq had chemical and or biological weapons, which it didn’t. But as Paul Waugh points out, when this first emerged (nearly) six years ago, the late Robin Cook observed that it didn’t tally with Blair’s 45 minutes claim:
“Intelligence indicating that chemical weapons remained disassembled and that Saddam had not yet ordered their assembly, and that was highlighted.
“That is light years away from what the House was told in September. If the Government had had such an assessment in March, they should have shared it with the House before we voted.”
I do think that the admission from Tim Dowse that a disputed claim about aluminium tubes, which was criticised as misleading by the Butler inquiry, was put in the dossier only because it was cited by US vice president Dick Cheney is very significant. I agree with Waugh’s earlier observation that:
“The dossier was indeed ’sexed up’, at least on the issue of aluminium tubes suspected by some hawks of being used for a nuke programme. It was only after Dick Cheney went public on US TV with his allegations that Britain decided to include them in the dossier. ‘Dick Cheney made a public comment on the aluminium tubes. It would have looked odd if we said nothing on the subject,’ Dowse said.”
The Committee should have made more of this, but didn’t. I’m not convinced that they are as on the ball as they should be. Today they allowed Dowse and Ehrman to get away with a lot of fudges, imprecise language and half truths.
When asked whether other countries, such as the permanent members of the UN Security Council, agreed with the UK assessment of Iraq’s wmd capability, Ehrman instead said that they did not challenge it, which is a different issue.
In fact, Ehrman said that the Russians said “show us the evidence”, which sounds pretty challenging. As for France, Ehrman had a prepared answer. He quoted President Jacques Chirac as saying that Iraq “probably” had banned weapons, which was also the internal UK assessment. But Tony Blair had said publicly that intelligence had “established beyond doubt” that Iraq had such weapons, which represented quite a gap. Did the French agree with our private position, or Blair’s public one? No-one pressed Ehrman on this. He then spun further, quoting Chirac as using the word “certainly”, except that this related to the public disclosure that UN inspectors had found and were destroying missiles with a greater range than was permitted.
Ehrman also said that “the” tolerance for continuing the policy of containing Iraq diminished after 11 September 2002, which stood out as a deliberately vague piece of language. The question should have been “whose tolerance?”
Yesterday Peter Ricketts, also of the Foreign Office, referred to a memo he had written to Jack Straw in March 2002 (subsequently leaked but still not published by the Inquiry) in which he said that government’s line in support of regime change should be that “what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September”. Ricketts said “I think the ‘our’ in that sentence is as much America as — perhaps more America than the UK.” Given that the Butler Inquiry quoted from the document but was blind to the distinction, this was a key revelation, consistent with the evidence yesterday that UK policy changed in early 2002 after the US made clear its desire for regime change. But Ehrman was allowed to leave open the question of whose tolerance had diminished. Perhaps the Inquiry was already clear of the distinction, but it gave no acknowledgement of it.
We also learnt a bit about how the dossier drafting group (which was packed with spin doctors) decided what would go in the dossier’s executive summary and therefore get presented as a “judgement” of the joint intelligence committee. But not as much as we should have, as the Committee did not follow this up.
As for Chilcot referring to the UN inspectors being “kicked out” in 1998 and digging out the lie that Chirac promised to veto any resolution, under any circumstances…
2 Responses to “Dossier was sexed-up”
Comment from chris lamb
Time November 26, 2009 at 9:06 pm
This tends to be perhaps too downbeat an analysis of Day 2 evidence. What seems to have been missed from the Ehrman and Dowse evidence is that, at the crucial time invasion was being driven through the Cabinet and Parliament from 10-18 March 2003, enough was known officially about the intelligence not being sufficiently reliable and, thus, that any construction of a WMD “imminent threat” was highly suspect.
Even if Blair was personally driven to perpetuate the deception underlying the pretext of WMDs, why did the key Cabinet meetings of 13 and 17 March 2003 apparently not deliberate upon the meeting held in February 2003, mentioned by Dowse, between Blix and ministers in which Blix torpedoed the myth of WMD, or indeed the intelligence report of 10 March on “disassembled” CWs and warheads? Why did the intelligence drawn by MI6 from Saddam’s defected intelligence chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush- rubbishing WMD claims- also not figure in these deliberations? It is not even clear whether Cabinet properly considered the UN weapons inspector report on Iraqi disarmament of 07 March.
There can only be two conclusions drawn. Either vital evidence extant at the time was withheld from Cabinet by Blair and his minders because it would sink his version of events or the Cabinet had this information and deliberately ignored it in order to rubber stamp Blair’s position.
On both counts, this signifies a serious failure of Cabinet government in checking and balancing Prime Ministerial power and shows the edifice of deception- and the potential breach of international law- to have been systemic and not just down to one individual- overpowerful though Blair and the Prime Ministerial office undoubtedly were.
The way the Government managed the Parliamentary business and votes for the invasion resolution also manifested a stranglehold against any countervailing evidence from being presented. The opposition amendment to the resolution was only allowed the most cursory time for presentation. The suppresion of countervailing evidence and denial of a proper debate was as serious an abuse as the Executive power misleading Parliament over the real purpose of the invasion.
Comment from andrewsimon
Time November 25, 2009 at 11:30 pm
More like William Ehrman was sexing things up.
Page 41 of today’s (morning) transcript:
…we were not receiving contradictory intelligence to what we got up to then. We did, in the very final days before military action, receive some on CBW use that it was disassembled, that you might not have the munitions to deliver it.
Page 96 of today’s (morning) transcript:
We did, at the very end, I think, on 10 March, get a report that chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and Saddam hadn’t yet ordered their assembly, and there was also a suggestion that Iraq might lack warheads capable of the effective dispersal of agents. But until
then, until 10 March and this was assessed in a JIC assessment on 19 March we hadn’t had contrary intelligence.
Page 99 of today’s (morning) transcript:
No, but in a sense the two bits of intelligence we had got almost confirmed that he did have this. It said that CW remained disassembled. Well, there must be some there to remain disassembled, and that, also, he might not have the munitions for the effective dispersal of agents. It wasn’t questioning whether agents existed.
This is really what he’s talking about – from the Butler report:
204. …We have also noted information from one intelligence source in 1998 suggesting that Iraq retained sufficient complete missiles and components to allow it to assemble up to 16 missiles in total.
206. We conclude that the impression left by JIC assessments in the mind of readers at the time of departure of the United Nations inspectors will have been of concern about the ability of Iraq to regenerate a small number of ballistic missiles, either through bringing back into use missiles that had been hidden or by re-assembling missiles from hidden components.
He’s not talking about chemical weapons at all, he is talking about one particular delivery system (Scud missiles, of which none remained in Iraq) and conflating them to be chemical weapons to justify the claims that were made about their existence.
Is this the first demonstrable example of the Inquiry committee being told (or sold) a crock of ****?