My high (low) points of the week
by Andrew Mason
I watched pretty much all of the hearings as they happened this week. My overriding first impression was just how cosy and relaxed the proceedings often seemed to be. There were times where Sir John’s input seemed to actually answer the questions rather than to formally pose them. Mandarinese is a relatively new language to me, and I’m staggered at the long-windedness and unnecessary complexities of what would otherwise be reasonably straightforward queries. I offer two examples here, taken almost at random:
“That is a parenthetical question and doesn’t indeed perhaps deserve an answer, but with long hindsight now, is it possible that Saddam, in pursuing those two contradictory objectives that we have just described, was not actually getting the reality, the truth, from his own immediate supporters and friends? Who would go to Saddam and say, “No, we haven’t actually got battlefield chemicals fairly immediately available”, if the money had been siphoned off to someone else?”
“One line I was driving at was this: that not a lot of fresh intelligence was coming out post UNSCOM’s departure, but, because of the change in the nature of the assessment of the threat, a mounting appetite from people such as yourselves, not least, as well as Ministers, thought more better founded intelligence, pressure, therefore, on the intelligence collection agents and we will be talking to them probably in the private session about that but can you make a basic connection between mounting pressure to produce new intelligence in a very difficult environment, which Iraq certainly was, wasn’t it, and the fact that a considerable amount of that intelligence produced since was subsequently withdrawn? Is there a connection between the two or is it likely that any intelligence gathering exercise in a Saddam type regime country would be found to be unreliable?”
I did some of the live blogging here at the Digest, and I often found it really difficult to even follow where the line of the questioning was actually going, let alone to pick out what was the substantial point of the reply. I’m sure that we’re all aware of the expression relating to being perplexed by bovine waste product, but there was definitely an impression of witnesses being led by the preconceived presumptions of at least one member of the committee panel.
My own interest in these matters is much more related to the ongoing debate about the later (seemingly non-existent) state of Iraq’s non-conventional armoury, rather than about the locus of the political machinations which led us along the pathway towards war, so I have a particular ear for the detail of the evidence which formed the basis for the Government’s claims that Iraq was is serious breach of its obligation to divest itself of such weaponry.
To this end, I had a particular interest to hear the evidence presented by Sir William Ehrman and Tim Dowse on Wednesday. The one thing I really wanted to know was what it was exactly that Iraq could have used (as claimed) on the battlefield, given the assumption that it had had these weapons, as well as both the will and the want to use them in the first place. I ended up being disappointed, because no such detail ever emerged. Quite obviously, the notion that Iraq had this capability formed a large part of the case made by the September dossier, insofar as these items represented the more immediate ‘threat’ which Iraq was said to be capable of. The vagueness of the testimony which emerged only highlighted the paucity of substantive proof for the existence of these items. The following exchange emphatically demonstrates this:
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: But given, going back to our discussion earlier this morning, that the most likely thing that they had to show that this was more than a projection that war might happen should sanctions fail, should sanctions be abandoned, was a battlefield chemical capability, it wasn’t a trivial bit of information.
SIR WILLIAM EHRMAN: 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 exchange shows that the supposition concerning this chemical weapon capability was based on practically pure conjecture, provided for by an assumption that the intelligence was correct in the first place. Nothing about the specifics of either the precise nature of these allegedly Iraqi-held weapons or the provenance of the information supporting their existence was revealed at the hearing, the matter of which I believe requires being noted as something of a major deficiency, similarly exhibited by the previous inquiries which looked at the same issues. At the beginning of the session Sir John stated that several reports have already been published on issues relating to weapons of mass destruction, and that the committee did not propose in this session to go in detail into areas which have already been examined closely before by other investigations.
It must be remember that the 45 minute claim was based on information that came from an Iraqi insider/spy, one Lieutenant Colonel al-Dabbagh, who had claimed that his unit took delivery of an unspecified number of crates which appeared to contain short-range weapons, supposedly rocket-propelled grenades intended to be fired from civilian jeeps as a last-ditch defence by Saddam loyalists, themselves wearing gas masks, against advancing Coalition forces. Later it was admitted that he had never in fact seen inside the purported chemical weapons crates upon which his 45-minute claim was based. Sometime after this MI6 subsequently withdrew its reporting for this claim, and on 13 October 2004 Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, made a statement to Parliament to confirm that this had indeed occurred. The WMD intelligence Butler Inquiry had already published its final report prior to this, on 14 July of the same year, so full details of this affair never entered the public domain other than by the following reports issued by the mainstream UK media. In regard to these matters, it would appear that the Chilcot Inquiry is not going to throw any more light onto this fiction than has already been radiated.
Another matter of especial interest to me was the mention of Al Samoud missiles. The following (admittedly uncorrected) transcript is inaccurate in as much as Sir Lawrence did mention them by name at this exact point in the proceedings:
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: The other thing that was going on, of course, was the discussion under UNMOVIC of the missiles, the arsenal of missiles. Again, going back to our earlier discussions, this was not a trivial thing to be happening. If means of delivery were critical to turning stocks of weapons into a threat, removing the means of delivery was actually quite a major setback.
SIR WILLIAM EHRMAN: In military terms, yes. From a pure counter proliferation point of view it just proved that he had been lying, that he had prohibited items.
(MR TIM DOWSE: I would add that the destruction of the missiles took quite a long time for the Iraqis to agree and not many had been destroyed by the time we were into what proved to be, if you like, the diplomatic endgame by mid-March.)
These missiles were a much later development undertaken by Iraq, specifically intended to comply with the restriction imposed by R.687, which prohibited possession of ballistic missiles with a range of greater than 150 kilometers (about 94 miles). There is a definitive account of their description to be found in UNMOVIC’s final ‘Compendium of Iraq’s Proscribed Weapons Programmes in the Chemical, Biological and Missile areas’, as published in June 2007 (linked to from here).
These Al Samoud missiles were relatively small examples of this class of weapon, being in the region of seven metres long. Earlier versions were of 500mm diameter and slightly longer, but this variety tended to suffer from instability and break-up in flight, due to what Iraq claimed was an excessive length-to-diameter ratio. Later versions were redesigned to have a diameter of 760mm and a length of 7150mm, and these were then designated as being Al Samoud 2 missiles. This later variety was intended to carry a 280 Kg warhead, with 140 Kg of this being the actual explosive charge.
In 23 test flights 13 of these missiles were claimed to have exceeded the 150 Km limit, in one case by an extra 33 Km. As a result of this, following the decision of a panel of international missile experts convened to examine this issue, the entire Al Samoud programme (missiles, parts, associated logistic equipment and designated production equipment) was proscribed by UNMOVIC, thereafter Iraq was ordered to destroy under supervision its entire holdings. This process began at the start of March 2003, and was still underway at the time of the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Even as late as 8 March 2003, with the destruction of the Al Samoud 2s already underway, Iraq provided UNMOVIC with the conceptual design of a new version of the Al Samoud missile that would satisfy the range limitation set by Security Council, this time with a 720mm diameter airframe. Assessment of this proposal was never made because of the withdrawal of UNMOVIC inspectors on 14 March 2003, although Iraq was entirely within its rights to development such a compliant missile system.
For Sir William Ehrman to claim that the possession of these missiles was ‘proof’ that Iraq was “lying” about its possession of prohibited items at a time when UNMOVIC had full access to all the facilities relating to this programme, and was already acting in accordance with its mandate, was to stretch a point far beyond its breaking point.
Some basic rocket science for dummies (and everyone else who reads this)
Part of the reason why the Al Samouds may have exceeded their range requirement was because nearly every test launch was conducted with a 220 Kg warhead, instead of one weighing 280 Kg, which was the combat specification. Obviously the lighter the missile, the further it will fly. The engine only fires for the first 73-82 seconds of flight taking it to approximately 22 Km altitude and 18 Km downrange. Beyond this it still climbs in free flight to an absolute altitude of some 45 Km, following a parabolic (ballistic) trajectory.
The engine fitted to the Al Samoud was originally intended for the SA-2 surface-to-air missile. Liquid fuelled (TG-02 and AK-20K) engines such as these suffer from a phenomenon known as ’spluttering’ as they begin to run out of fuel. This spluttering can have a marked affect on the trajectory and stability of the missile, being as the thrust generated by the engine can be other than linear to the longitudinal axis of the missile. In the case of the SA-2, this effect did not matter much as the missile was radar guided and independently steered towards its target. To overcome this effect in the ground-to-ground role, Iraqi engineers fitted the Al Samouds (which had no terminal guidance system) with a number of fuel shut-off valves, intended to allow for a clean engine shut-down. These would have resulted in some fuel and oxidiser remaining in the tanks, estimated to weigh some 70 Kg (c. 5% of 1380 Kg overall capacity). UNMOVIC recovered a number of these shut-off valves, which utilised the firing of pyrotechnic squibs to produce gas pressure which allowed a piece of metal to move inside the propellant line and fold by crimping a sheet of metal to close off the line. During static tests in the Al Rafah Liquid Engine Test Facility, UNMOVIC inspectors observed that these shut-off valves did not work reliably. In the event of an in-flight failure of these valves, the missiles may indeed have flown very slightly further than intended. An extra burn time of even a single second would have a not-inconsiderable effect on range. Conversely, the missile may have become substantially less accurate as a direct secondary effect.
8 Responses to “My high (low) points of the week”
Comment from Brian Jones
Time November 29, 2009 at 5:03 pm
I, also, was most interested in Dowse/Ehrman and intend to post something on my impressions in due course.
Although having spent almost 15 years working in the Whitehall village (1987-2003), I too was struggling with Sir John’s verbosity and tortuosity. However, I am not nearly as discouraged about the Chilcot committee’s approach by what I heard (although I still doubt that any of their findings can or will be translated into meaningful action). Nonetheless, I thought Sir Lawrence Freedman’s questions were penetrating and clever (hopefully because my interpretation of what he was after is the same as his) and I believe he provided both witnesses with just about enough rope for them to hang themselves and a few others as well. I hope to explain why I think this in future posts. I also thought Baroness Prashar asked some perceptive questions, albeit in a hesitant and sometimes circular way – perhaps that is deliberate. In the process she exposed one or two things I had not quite grasped previously – I hope she intended to, and that Freedman’s apparent ideas will be followed up later.
At times it was hard to tell whether we were listening to an inquisition on policy or intelligence. Presumably the hard questions on intelligence are yet to come.
But the real point of my inquiry is to ask Andrew about his assertion that the 45 minutes came from al-Dabbagh. I suspect you may well be right, but I have never seen evidence that raises this to more than a likelihood. I have spoken to Con Coughlan of the Telegraph about his reporting on this but never managed to achieve certainty. Unless you have absolute proof of what you say, what we should be doing is to urge the inquiry to investigate this point. Not so much because the original intelligence was shaky – because the reporting always told us that, and was the basis of much of my evidence to Hutton and Butler, but becuase it would reveal that the original reporting was corrupted in the process and deceived even some of us in the intelligence community. Whether that deception was deliberate or not is another key question the inquiry must show it has tried to answer. I have long suspected that knowledge of what al-Dabbagh actually reported, rather than the CX that was issued, was the basis of Dearlove/Scarlett’s certainty and perhaps now Dowse and Ehrman’s claim that 45 minutes referred to battlefield weapons.
I can assure you that in September 2002 the analysts in both the DIS and on the Assessment staff looked at whether the word “munitions” as used in the CX report we saw might exclude the possibility that it might refer to ballistic missiles and decided we could not go that far. That is why I used the form of words I did in my evidenc to Butler which he included on p126, para 509, of his report.
I have done an extensive analysis of al-Dabbagh and 45 minutes and if it is of interest I will post it on the Digest.
In other words, I don’t think anyone should rush to judgement on Chilcot quite yet.
Comment from Stan Rosenthal
Time November 29, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Here are my highlights from the first day (with acknowledgement to Julie’s Think Tank—against mainstream opinion formation).
Moderator Note:
This post has been edited for the following reasons:
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2/. The link did not address the original source material, instead it only linked to the homepage of the initial writer’s website
3/. The post was simply a extremely long ‘cut and paste’ of someone else’s work, when a summary and a link would have been sufficient. Also, as a result of this, formatting errors appeared on this page
4/. The post led to two following comments of a personal and off-topic nature (flaming)
The link above has been corrected and the two subsequent offending comments have been deleted.
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Comment from Lee Roberts
Time November 29, 2009 at 8:02 pm
What is much more interesting is Gordon Brown using the capture of Osama Bin Laden as a (typical) attempt to divert attention. We will undoubtedly hear a lot more terrorism-rattling from Gordon as he is pushed into a corner on keeping documents secret.
Comment from Stan Rosenthal
Time November 30, 2009 at 11:42 am
With reference to the moderators note
Lengthy comments have not been barred before (see the responses to my “22 things the Inquiry should consider” post). Likewise cut and psste jobs have been allowed many times before both in relation to the proceedings of the inquiry and to articles written by someone else.
As for the deletion of those flaming comments, the first simply accused me of cherry-picking, which was a fair point, the second (my reply) “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” was also a fair point. If these are flaming comments I wonder how you would describe the comments at the Gaurdian Comment is Free site.
Methinks there are darker reasons at play here bearing in mind that my comment covered quotes from the inquiry that supported the government’s case.
Comment from Tony Simpson
Time November 30, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Brian, I for one would be interested to see you analysis on the Digest:
“I have done an extensive analysis of al-Dabbagh and 45 minutes and if it is of interest I will post it on the Digest.”
Comment from John Bone
Time November 30, 2009 at 2:50 pm
The first week of the Chilcot Inquiry has changed the way in which the invasion of Iraq is discussed. Several layers have been peeled off the onion. WMD are now in the background; the meetings between Blair and Bush in March and April 2002 have come into focus. Greenstock’s account of what went on at the UN focus on different interpretations of Resolution 1441 and less on what the weapons’ inspectors were doing or on why the UK Government said that it knew that Iraq had WMD. This change in focus has come about partly because of what was said in the hearings, and partly because the press has been saving up a few leaks for which the opening of the Inquiry provide a convenient hook.
So will the Chilcot Inquiry take any more layers off the onion? Will they drill down deeper about why decisions were taken and what assumptions lay behind them? Blair seems to have seen support to the USA as a “no-brainer” (as Matthew Parris says in the Independent) but then so did most of our political establishment: will Chilcot’s Inquiry be capable of getting them to switch their brains on and think about the assumptions that they are making? I have added some suggested questions to the “Questions for Manning” post, which are where I think more layers need to be taken off the onion. I couldn’t help thinking though, when writing them, that the Inquiry might think it unseemly to air these issues in public.
Jeremy Greenstock’s testimony was not as dramatic as Meyer’s had been the day before. His written evidence concludes that it was difficult for the UK to get a “second resolution” because the position of the USA was completely different from that of the rest of the Security Council, over what the objectives were and over what Resolution 1441 said. Fancy that! What Greenstock does not explain is how the UK got itself into the position of trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and why in the end the UK supported the minority position. Will the Inquiry ask these questions or does it too take it for granted that this is the basis of UK foreign policy?
Comment from andrewsimon
Time December 1, 2009 at 1:19 am
Dr Jones -
The details I used about the 45 minute claim came fom a report by David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor published in the Guardian on Tuesday 27 January 2004. Key parts of this report are as follows:
…the Iraqi exile group in London which claims to have supplied MI6 with the intelligence about Saddam’s 45-minute capability admitted that the information might have been completely untrue.
Nick Theros, the Washington representative of Iyad Allawi, who headed the Iraqi National Accord in exile, said it was raw intelligence from a single source, part of a large amount of information passed on by the INA to MI6.
He told the Guardian: “We were passing it on in good faith. It was for the intelligence services to verify it.”
[]
But Mr Theros said the information now seemed to be a “crock of ****”. “Clearly we have not found WMD,” he said.
Mr Theros works with his father, a former US ambassador, to promote the political affairs of Mr Allawi, who is now a member of the Iraqi governing council in Baghdad.
He said the Iraqi officer who claims to have been the original source of the intelligence had in fact never seen inside the purported chemical weapons crates upon which his 45-minute claim was based.
The former INA spy, who calls himself Lieutenant Colonel al-Dabbagh, although this is not his full name, is now said to be “in hiding”.
At the time, he says, he commanded a frontline unit.
He told the Sunday Telegraph and NBC television that before the September 2002 dossier was published he smuggled out sketchy intelligence about WMD to MI6 via a general in Baghdad working for the INA.
He said one of Saddam’s senior officials told a meeting of air defence commanders “probably sometime in the spring” that an arsenal of unspecified secret weapons would be used for battlefield defence against US invaders.
“They told us that [coalition troops] cannot pass across Iraq because we will use everything from the knife to nuclear weapons to defend ourselves.”
The colonel says his unit later took delivery of an unspecified number of crates which appeared to contain short-range weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades.
They were supposedly to be fired from civilian jeeps as a last-ditch defence by Saddam loyalists wearing gas masks.
Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, did not deny in evidence to the Hutton inquiry that the intelligence for the 45-minute WMD claim came second-hand from a single source who was a senior Iraqi army officer.
Con Coughlin’s report of 07 Dec 2003 “How the 45-minute claim got from Baghdad to No 10″ included an interview with Lieutenant-Colonel al-Dabbagh, and states:
When I asked him whether the information in the document (the September dossier) relating to the 45-minute issue was 100 per cent accurate, he responded with characteristic Iraqi enthusiasm: “It is 200 per cent accurate!” he exclaimed. “And forget 45 minutes. We could have fired them within half an hour.”
When I asked him whether he was the original source of the intelligence, he replied simply: “I am the one responsible for providing this information.”
British intelligence has admitted that it relied on a single source for the 45-minute claim, prompting several intelligence experts at the Ministry of Defence, including Dr David Kelly, to question its veracity.
Lt Col al-Dabbagh’s claim to be the source of the 45-minute claim, however, is backed up by General A.J.M. Muhie, his brother-in-law, who helped to smuggle the intelligence out of Iraq to the Wimbledon headquarters of the Iraqi National Accord (INA), which was then one of the leading Iraqi exile groups and is now a key member of Iraq’s Governing Council. “We only had one source for this information and that was Dabbagh,” said Gen Muhie.
Put together, these two reports go further than anything that has come out of Whitehall. It very much looks like this supposed evidence came about from Iraqi efforts to boost the morale of own troops, by suggesting to them that they had the ability to overcome Coalition advances. The INA were only too willing to capitalise on the rumours they had heard to curry favour with Washington, and to give supporting credibility to the specific claims made by London.
I personally have no further proof to support the above claims, but equally I know of nothing which contradicts them. It is well known that Con Coughlin has (or at least had) off-the-record contacts inside the intelligence and security services, so it is no real surprise that it was he who broke the story. What I don’t know is how much of the above was originally reported to DIS and above, and whether or not they only had a snippet which said WMD (in very general terms) has been moved out in preparation for the defence of Iraq when the invasion finally came. Fairly obviously, and assuming that the reporting about the weapons was correct, if it was known that it only referred to RGP style weapons then the Iraqi threat was fairly limited and purely defensive. If this was the case, the claim in the dossier did not accurately reflect this factor, and this omission may well have led a lot of people to otherwise conclude that Iraq had the ability to project aggressive WMD force against its neighbours, which plainly it did not have ability or military assets to do.
With regards to rushing to judgement, I look forward to seeing how the Inquiry intends to examine the various outstanding WMD issues. Only then will we be able to assess how comprehensive its investigations and reporting really are.
(I would be very interested to read your own analysis of the al-Dabbagh and 45 minutes claim issues. I understand that we are going to expand the ‘Analysis’ section of the Digest website in the very near future. I am very sure that we will be able to include and feature your work there in order to display it to its very best advantage.)
Comment from Lee Roberts
Time November 29, 2009 at 3:36 pm
The collusion between the panel and the witnesses is a direct function of the atmosphere Chiclot decided to establish and has very successfully established. Its upper class shmoozing, turning every question and answer into a nicely understated, opaque, or highly qualified piece of circumlocution. It is so difficult to establish a ribbon of fact from this style, that it is almost certain it could not be directly converted into evidence. Even the people directly involved make everything they say sound like conjecture, full of little tricks like “in a sense”, and “as one might suspect”, “given certain assumptions”. Yes, these people naturally speak this way, but Chilcot is chairman of an inquiry and could, if he wishes, tighten the process. But he doesnt want to, does he. One wonders, in a sense, why.