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Britain: Parliamentary probe exposes lies on Iraqi weapons
Part 1: Clare Short, Robin Cook and Andrew Gilligan
By Richard Tyler
3 July 2003
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The following is the first in a series of articles.
The Foreign Affairs Select Committee investigation into whether
Prime Minister Tony Blairs Labour government distorted intelligence
material to justify its planned war against Iraq is to publish
its verdict on July 8. There is every reason to suppose that the
Labour-dominated committee in Parliament will make criticisms
of the government that stop short of accusing it of lyinga
classic fudge. But some of the testimony given to the inquiry
makes this difficult. It stands as a damning indictment of the
way the government set out to sell a previously determined decision
to go to war by claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
In order that this information does not remain buried amidst thousands
of pages of undigested transcripts, the World Socialist Web
Site is publishing a précis of the most important testimony
given.
Clare Short
The decision to go to war against Iraq was not only taken behind
the backs of the British people and Parliament, but to a large
extent even the cabinet was excluded from the discussion.
Evidence given by former cabinet minister Clare Short paints
a picture of a small coterie of Blair apparatchiks who were in
charge of policy as British troops invaded Iraq alongside
the United States. The gang of four, as the press
has dubbed them, are all unelected and owe their positions and
generous salaries exclusively to Tony Blair.
According to Short, Blairs close entourage consists of
his communications director, Alastair Campbell, Chief of Staff
Jonathan Powell, Director of Political and Government relations
Baroness Morgan and Foreign Policy Adviser Sir David Manning.
That was the team, they were the ones who moved together
all the time. They attended the daily War Cabinet.
That was the in group, that was the group that was
in charge of policy, Short told the committee.
She said the cabinet had never been presented with any papers
analysing the risks, dangers, military, political and diplomatic
options before the war was launched. Neither had the relevant
cabinet body, the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, met to
discuss Iraq. There was never a paper. There was never an
analysis of options and there was never an analysis on paper before
any Cabinet committee or any meeting and it was all done only
verbally at meetings lasting something under an hour.
The paucity of cabinet discussion was not limited to the impending
war against Iraq but extends to all major policy areas, according
to Short. The collapse in the decision-making process, not
having Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, not having any papers,
not considering options, diplomatic and military options, I think
is very, very poor and shoddy work and is a deterioration in the
quality of British administration which is shocking and this deterioration
has been taking place for some time ... and it is not just in
relation to Iraq, but it is more generally, on foundation hospitals,
top-up fees.
Short told the committee that the decision to go to war had
already been taken last summer. She said that three extremely
senior people in the Whitehall system had told her the decision
had been made by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, and
the target date was mid-February [2003] and later extended
to March because of a difficulty with the Turks and so on and
to give our prime minister a little more time.
It also emerged that the cabinet did not meet for almost three
months last summer, between the end of July and the third week
in October, the very timeframe in which Short says the agreement
to go to war was made between Blair and Bush.
Answering a question whether there had been a deliberate attempt
to emphasise certain aspects of the intelligence reports concerning
Iraq and the alleged weapons of mass destruction in
order to make the threat more credible, Short responded, To
make it more immediate, more imminent, requiring urgent action,
yes.
I think it is a series of half-truths, exaggerations
and reassurances that were not the case to get us into conflict
by the spring.
Short accused Blair of carrying out an honourable deception
in order to secure support for British participation in the war.
I believe that the prime minister must have concluded
that it was honourable and desirable to back the US in going for
military action in Iraq and that it was, therefore, honourable
for him to persuade us through the various ruse and devices he
used to get us there, so I presume that he saw it as an honourable
deception.
Robin Cook
Also addressing the first day of the committee hearing was
Robin Cook, a former foreign minister and, until he resigned in
March, leader of the House.
Cook asked the committee to consider why there was such
a difference between the claims made before the war and the reality
established after the war?... We have found no chemical production
plants. We have found no facilities for a nuclear weapon programme.
We have found no weapons within 45 minutes of artillery positions.
He also questioned why UN weapons inspectors had not been allowed
back into Iraq. I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion
the reason we do not is because they would confirm Saddam did
not have an immediate threatening capability.
Cook also asked if the absence of weapons of mass destruction
undermined the legal basis of the war:
The opinion of the attorney general is entirely on the
justification for war being the need to carry out the disarmament
of Saddam Hussein. If he can find no weapons to disarm does that
legal opinion still have basis?
We went to war. Five to seven thousand civilians were
killed. Some British troops were killed. To go to war you need
to have a real compelling justification for breaking that taboo
which war should necessarily represent and to embark upon wholesale
military action.... It is a question of whether you really did
have compelling, convincing evidence posing, as the prime minister
expressed it, a current and serious threat. It is plain from what
we now know he did not pose a current and serious threat. It is
therefore a grievous error of policy to have gone to war on the
assumption he was.
Cook accused the Blair government of not presenting the
whole picture:
I fear the fundamental problem is that instead of using
intelligence as evidence on which to base the conclusion of a
policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which we could justify
a policy on which we had already settled.
Cook was critical of the document produced by the British government
in February to support the claim that Saddam Hussein represented
an immediate danger to both the UK and the US, which was later
shown to have been largely plagiarised from a PhD thesis. This
dodgy dossier contained very little that actually
represented intelligence of a new, alarming, urgent and compelling
threat, Cook told the committee.
Moreover, The dodgy dossier was not discussed in Cabinet,
and I took part in every cabinet discussion over four months on
Iraq and it was almost weekly. I do not recall us discussing this.
While not overtly accusing Blair and the government of lying,
Cook said, I think it is quite clear that some of the facts
put to the House, both in the [first] September dossier and some
of the speeches to the House, cannot be reconciled with the facts
as we know them on the ground.
In response to a question, Cook said that if the chemicals
used to make weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq it was
curious no one had come forward to show where they were, since
the reward would be immense. They could have their own ranch in
Texas if they were to lead us to such a thing at the present time.
More strenuously than his former cabinet colleague Short, Cook
sought to exonerate Blair from any personal culpability:
I actually have no doubt about the good faith of the
prime minister and others engaged in this exercise.... That is
not deceit, it is not invention, it is not coming up with intelligence
that did not exist, but it was not presenting the whole picture.
Andrew Gilligan
Reporter Andrew Gilligan and the BBC have been accused of dishonest
reporting by Blairs director of communications, Alastair
Campbell. Their alleged crime is to have cited an intelligence
source in the May 29 and June 4 editions of Radio Fours
Today Programme, claiming that Campbell had sexed
up the September intelligence dossier by insisting on including
the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within
45 minutes.
When asked where the claim had come from, Gilligan said it
was a single source but was corroborated by other journalists
who went to their own sourcesthen it was corroborated
and we saw similar reports appear in several newspapers in the
days after my story.
He went on, I am aware of disquiet within the intelligence
community over the governments handling of intelligence
material related to Iraq, not just on this particular issue of
the September 24 dossier but on others.
This was confirmed, From a total of four different people,
who had spoken to me generally of their concern about Downing
Streets use of intelligence material over the last six months,
Gilligan said. They spoke to me about the allegations made
of links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. They spoke to me about the
so-called dodgy dossier, the one produced in February,
and they spoke to me about this [September] dossier.
He described his single source on the 45-minute claim as one
of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the [September]
dossier and I can tell you that he is a source of longstanding,
well known to me, closely connected with the question of Iraqs
weapons of mass destruction, easily sufficiently senior and credible
to be worth reporting.
Another source had spoken to Gilligan about the link
being made by the prime minister between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
He was kind enough to leak me a document on that link which said
that there was not one or there had not been one lately.
When asked what was the classification of the document he saw,
Gilligan replied, Top secret.
Gilligan had said on the May 29 Today programme
that his source said the September dossier was transformed
the week before it was published to make it sexier. The classic
example was the statement that WMD were ready for use in 45 minutes.
That information was not in the original draft.
His source said the 45-minute claim was real information
... but it was included in the dossier against our wishes because
it was not reliable. It was a single source and it was not reliable.
Gilligan added later, It was not a claim that was in
any way made up or fabricated by Downing Street. Another one of
the reasons why this story took on the life that it did was that
Downing Street denied a number of things which had never been
alleged. They denied, among other things, that material had been
fabricated. Nobody ever alleged that material had been fabricated.
The committee had told Gilligan that Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw had told them that the almost identical claim
was made in intelligence material provided to the government.
He was asked, Are you saying that the foreign secretary
is lying to this committee? Or will you now acknowledge that your
source was incorrect in saying that the 45-minute claim was not
based on a genuine assessment of the [Joint Intelligence Committee],
fully approved through the [Joint Intelligence Committee] process?
Gilligan replied, I note the words almost
identical in the foreign secretarys response. I would
simply say that it is not my business to say whether the foreign
secretary is lying or not. All I would say is that I invested
strong credibility in my source, who is a person of impeccable
standing on this issue, and whose complaints have been reflected
in something like seven or eight newspapers and other media outlets,
including other BBC outlets, since my original story and his complaints
have also been reflected by named, on the record, former intelligence
officers from Australia, from the United States, and also, to
some extent, by other members of the House.
His source had also been quite cutting about the claim
that uranium had been sought from Africaa claim that
has subsequently been found to be a lie that was based on crudely
forged intelligence documents from a foreign country. Gilligan
said, My source believed that the documents on which the
allegation rested were forged.
To be continued
See Also:
Britain: Blair government blames BBC for
crisis over Iraqi war lies
[2 July 2003]
Crisis over missing Iraqi
WMDs
Britain: Blair, advisor boycott parliamentary inquiry
[12 June 2003]
Britain: Blair caught in lies
over Iraqi WMDs
[31 May 2003]
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