ROHAN PEARCE
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair has, for the moment at least, escaped becoming a victim of his pre-war deceptions about Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction.
On January 28, an inquiry headed by James Hutton released a report on the death of civil servant David Kelly that absolved Blair of blame. Kelly was found dead, having apparently killed himself, after the British Labour government revealed him to be the source for a BBC story that accused the Blair government of "sexing up" a dossier on Iraq's WMDs, released in September 2002, to make the case for war.
So far, the report has led to the resignation of BBC director-general Greg Dyke over the broadcaster's supposedly shoddy reporting of the Kelly affair. Government loyalists are claiming that the report somehow vindicates Blair's claims about Iraq's non-existent WMDs. This is despite the fact that, if nothing else, the Hutton inquiry has confirmed the accusation of "sexing-up" the "evidence" of Iraq's WMDs was true.
For example, a September 17, 2002, email from Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell to John Scarlett, chairperson of the House of Commons' Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), was submitted to the inquiry. The email said that an early draft of the dossier "is good and convincing for those who are prepared to be convinced" but "does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam".
Powell's email continued: "In other words, it shows he has the means but it does not demonstrate he has the motive to attack his neighbours, let alone the West. We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat. The case we are making is that he has continued to develop WMD since 1998, and is in breach of UN resolutions... If I was Saddam I would take a party of Western journalists to the Ibn Sina factory or one of the others pictured in the document to demonstrate there is nothing there. How do we close off that avenue to him in advance?"
The published version of Blair's dossier argued that Ibn Sina was being used for WMD-related activities, yet a visit to the facility by UN inspectors less than three months after the document's release found no traces of illegal activity.
The key controversies examined by the Hutton inquiry were the dossier's claim that Iraq's "military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them" and exactly how Kelly's name was revealed to the media as the source of information that questioned this claim.
Guessing game
Hutton concluded that the Ministry of Defence's decision to confirm to journalists the scientist's name if they guessed it correctly "was not part of a covert strategy to leak his name, but was based on the view that in a matter of such intense public and media interest it would not be sensible to try to conceal the name when the MoD thought that the press were bound to discover the correct name". Hutton added that the MoD were concerned that journalists shouldn't erroneously focus on other civil servants.
But a submission by Kelly's family, pointed to extracts from the diary of Alistair Campbell, Blair's former director for communications, that indicated that the government wanted Kelly's name to come out in order to discredit the BBC. Campbell wrote that if Kelly was identified as the source for a story at the centre of the controversy by the BBC's Andrew Gilligan, it would "fuck Gilligan".
The substantive criticism levelled against the BBC by Hutton is that Gilligan's report was wrong. Hutton endorses the government's argument that the claim that Iraq could launch WMDs within 45 minutes was not inserted to "sex up" the final dossier, but because the "intelligence" it was based upon only came to light late in the drafting process.
Yet Hutton ignores the fact that the 45 minutes claim was clearly false, that it underwent substantial changes in its presentation in different drafts and that an absurdly unreliable source for the "intelligence" was used.
The inquiry heard that during a May 30 telephone conversation, Kelly revealed to Susan Watts, another BBC journalist, that he had concerns over the claim. He told her that it "was a statement that was made and it just got out of all proportion... They were desperate for information, they were pushing hard for information which could be released. That was one that popped up and it was seized on and it was unfortunate that it was, which is why there is the argument between the intelligence services and cabinet office/Number 10, because things were picked up and once they've picked up on it you can't pull it back. That's the problem."
Blair's "intelligence source" appears to have been a member the Iraqi National Accord (INA) — a US-funded Iraqi opposition group of army officers and Baathists, which, through the 1990s, the US had hoped would lead a military coup to replace Hussein with a pro-US dictator. The Blair government relied on a single, second-hand source for the claim with which it could paint the Iraqi regime as an immediate threat to neighbouring countries.
A 'crock of shit'
In the January 20 British Guardian article, David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor report that a Washington-based representative of the INA, Nick Theros, told them, "We were passing it [the 45 minute claim] on in good faith. It was for the intelligence services to verify it". Clearly, he added, the information now seemed to have been a "crock of shit".
On January 25, prior to the publication of the Hutton report, the Scottish Sunday Herald revealed that "senior members" of the intelligence organisations that were central to the production of Blair's dossier — the Defence Intelligence Staff, the Join Intelligence Organisation and MI6 — warned they would not accept being "blamed for the failure to prove the case for war, the death of Dr David Kelly and the lack of WMD in Iraq".
The Sunday Herald's Neil Mackay reported that the key points they wanted "on the record" were:
- "Many had been openly sceptical about the presence of WMD in Iraq for years";
- "The intelligence community was under pressure to provide the government with what it wanted, namely that Iraq possessed WMD and was a danger"; and
- "Intelligence was 'cherry-picked', with damning intelligence against Iraq being selectively chosen, while intelligence assessments, which may have worked against the build-up to war, were sidelined".
Pro-Blair bias
The absurdity of Hutton's report is that, thanks to a narrow interpretation of his terms of reference, which had been deliberately drafted to serve the interests of the Blair government, Hutton did not examine whether the British government's other "evidence" used to justify the invasion of Iraq was true or false, such as:
- The fact that the claims by British and US intelligence services that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Africa were based on crudely faked documents.
- The repeated insistence by London and Washington that aluminium tubes imported by Iraq were proof of attempts to construct a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium, despite experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency — and even Washington's department of energy and state department — concluding that this was untrue. A September 19 memo from Campbell to members of the JIC even noted that they had "toned down the reference to aluminium tubes" in the September dossier because of "very recent exchanges on intelligence channels". However, the dishonest reference was not removed.
- The suppression of information supplied by former head of Iraq's WMD programs General Hussein Kamel, who defected in 1995. He told the CIA at the time that Iraq had completely destroyed its WMD stockpiles and programs in the early 1990s.
Will Hutton's report give Blair a much-needed political breathing space? Not if a survey by YouGov, reported in the January 30 London Daily Telegraph, is anything to go by — 56% of respondents indicated that they thought the Hutton report was a "whitewash". A January 30 ICM poll in the British Guardian found that 68% of respondents trust the BBC more than they trust the Blair government, and that 45% believe Blair lied when he claimed he did not authorise the leaking of Kelly's name.
From Green Left Weekly, February 4, 2004.
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