Show us the documents – Clegg
by Chris Ames
The Observer says that:
“Gordon Brown is facing demands to change the rules of the Iraq inquiry this weekend amid fears that the most explosive documents explaining why Britain went to war will not be made public.”
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has written to Gordon Brown to say that the government’s powers to restrict what the Inquiry can publish:
are draconian for a government that has pledged to allow the truth about Iraq to emerge. “The restrictions on information released by the inquiry are greater than those which apply under current freedom of information rules,” he writes.
“Unless you provide Chilcot with the freedom you claimed he has across the floor of the Commons this week, public trust in the final outcome of this review will be deeply damaged.”
According to reports, a five-page secret document known as the Manning memo records the White House meeting on 31 January 2003. It allegedly shows that Bush and Blair made a secret deal to carry out an invasion regardless of whether weapons of mass destruction were discovered by UN inspectors. It appears to contradict statements Blair later made to parliament that Iraq would be given a final chance to disarm.
In a separate piece, the same journalists, Toby Helm and Rajeev Syal, sum up the mixed picture after the first week:
Oxbridge-educated pillars of the establishment politely questioned other Oxbridge-educated pillars of the establishment about who said what to whom in which memo. The inquiry is a peculiar mixture of the old and the new, the open and closed. It is conducted in the language of Whitehall, yet beamed live by webcam to the world.
Critics are convinced that, for all Sir John Chilcot’s promises to the contrary, it will turn out to be another Whitehall whitewash. For the cognoscenti, little new information has yet emerged, and when the final report is written it will not seek to apportion blame. Yet beneath the equivocation and mandarin-speak, Whitehall seems, in as much as it knows how, to be using Chilcot to wield the scalpel.
According to the Independent, Blair feels this too:
Mr Blair’s friends claimed last night that he has found some of the evidence given so far “distasteful”, and potentially damaging to his reputation. “It is clear that the headlines so far have not been helpful to him,” a former minister said. “But more troubling is the sense that some of the people involved are so keen to stick the knife in. It is quite distasteful.”
Comment from Lee Roberts
Time November 29, 2009 at 11:37 am
Dontcha just feel for Tony ?