Secret Iraq dossier published

Published 18 February 2008

The government has been forced to publish the secret first draft of the Iraq WMD dossier written by a Foreign Office spin doctor, reports Chris Ames

The secret first draft of the Iraq WMD dossier written by Foreign Office spin doctor John Williams has finally been published after a ruling back in January under the Freedom of Information Act.

The document contains an early version of the executive summary of the next draft, which was attributed to Intelligence chief John Scarlett. The document places a spin doctor at the heart of the process of drafting the dossier and blows a hole in the government’s evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.

Last month the Foreign Office was ordered by the Information Tribunal to hand over the Williams draft, which I first requested under the Freedom of Information Act in February 2005.

From the time that the row first erupted over Andrew Gilligan’s allegations that the dossier had been sexed-up, the government has claimed that Scarlett’s draft, produced on 10 September 2002, was the first full draft and produced without interference from spin doctors. But the Williams draft, dated a day earlier, shows that spin doctors were sexing up the dossier at the time the notorious 45 minutes claim was included.

Initially the government withheld the draft from the Hutton Inquiry. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s director of communications, denied its existence. But when Scarlett admitted that Williams had done some early drafting, the BBC asked to see it.

The government then supplied a copy of the draft to Lord Hutton but told him that it was “not taken forward” because a “fresh start” was made with Scarlett’s draft. Confirmation that Scarlett took up elements of Williams’s drafting shows that the government misled Hutton.

Williams did not include the 45 minutes claim in his draft but it is now clear that he did not have access to the intelligence on the claim at the time. However, it has recently been confirmed that Williams attended the meeting that produced Scarlett’s draft.

At this meeting, he and other spin doctors saw the intelligence assessment that contained the claim. Scarlett’s draft then included it for the first time. When he sent his draft to Campbell, Scarlett wrote of “considerable help from John Williams”.

The draft also shows that Williams was responsible for a number of key changes that strengthened the dossier’s claims. His executive summary claimed that Iraq had “acquired” uranium. Previous versions only alleged the material had been “sought”.

Scarlett’s draft also alleged that Iraq had got hold of uranium, stating that it had “purchased” it.

Williams appears largely to have been working on a version of the dossier that was produced during the summer of 2002, before Tony Blair announced in September of that year that a dossier would be published.

He appears not to have made substantial changes to the body text of the document’s section on Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) but it is clear that he was aware that this section was being rewritten. In fact, the WMD section contains a comment: “I don’t propose to rewrite this until I take delivery of the new version.” This shows that Williams intended to continue to rewrite the dossier.

Subsequent versions of the dossier show that the executive summary expressed its claims about Iraq’s WMD more strongly than the main text. In many cases, including the 45 minutes claim, the main text was then brought into line with the executive summary.

The involvement of spin doctors in drafting the summary process suggests that they led the sexing up of the dossier.

Post this article to

8 comments from readers

smb1971
18 February 2008 at 20:16

"...the tribunal has ordered that one of the handwritten notes should be redacted from the draft when it is published. It is clear that the Foreign Office has claimed that disclosure of this comment would be damaging to international relations, a claim that it did not make at the time of its initial refusal." (23 January 2008)

Do you have any further information on this handwritten note?

It would also be helpful to identify the people who reviewed this particular draft document. If Jack Straw is one of them, then he may find himself in hot water (r.e. the uranium claim). Straw told Sir John Stanley in June 2003 that he "had absolutely no knowledge of any documents relating to this area being forged until the IAEA said that in one of their reports in February or March 2003". Something I find impossible to believe. But an obvious question arises: If the documentary uranium intelligence was to be considered authentic, why did they not stand by the original wording as per the Williams daft, which was much stronger? Jack Straw cannot seriously claim he was out of the loop. No, I believe Paul Waugh was correct when he wrote:

"The revelation that the claim was originally much stronger will fuel suspicions that Britain was forced to amend its dossier after warnings from the CIA that the Niger link was unproven. It also suggests that the UK was so anxious to portray Saddam as a nuclear threat that it decided to keep even a weakened version of the allegation in its dossier." (26 August 2003)

nawawimohamad
19 February 2008 at 02:30

Blair had purposely fooled the British people and directly responsible for the dead British soldiers in Iraq and the Iraqi people. He is also responsible for the bombings in London and the threat to the security by giving the excuse for the extremists to operate and exist in Britain. And all for the US and NOTHING for Britain!

The main players behind these schemes are the American-British Friendship.The British people are being taken for a ride and will continue to be so by these handful of people for their own self interests which has nothing to do with the betterment of the British people.

Carl Jones
19 February 2008 at 04:21

War crimes, genocide and charges of treason should be brought against Blair and cabal.:)

mitchy
19 February 2008 at 11:18

Hear Hear!

Hang 'em high...

Riaz Ahmad
19 February 2008 at 21:28

It is astonishing that the journalist who exposed the fake nature of the dossier was forced to quit his job, while the priminister and his cronies who misled the British people, took the country to war under a false propectus was stiil head of the country. Is this democracy?

Nabil
19 February 2008 at 23:12

I hope these people's conscience (if they have one) will strangle them for the rest of their lives. The term "sexed up" is an understatement to what happened; the whole build-up to the war was a lie. Also, praise for the BBC for probably the noblest thing it has ever done since its establishment and probably will ever do.

Kiumars
22 February 2008 at 10:35

Are any of these people going to be prosecuted for orchestrating the massacre of 100s of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians killed by their crook works? That day would be the day we see the end of “sexing up”.

BritishAirman
27 February 2008 at 15:34

Future intermittent document releases will only ever shed light on particular points of legal jurisprudence. Any future release of any governmental document that portrays the truth should be welcomed whilst remembering some documents will never be released, despite the 30-year ruling. The Iraq War has set such a legal precedent, overruling the spirit of the United Nations, for instance, that any country intending to resolve future conflicts by the use of military means might well turn to ‘legal references’ that could surface from within Britain. In the view of many British people, the war against another sovereign state was illegal, unfounded and based on dubious and unreliable intelligence. The ostensible nature by which intelligence documents were changed in making ‘justification’ is a serious charge but one that requires political clarification. So many questions still remain unanswered.

Despite the inquiries from Lord’s Hutton and Butler, the public is right to remain curious and skeptical because, firstly, the terms of reference of those inquiries were set by the Government themselves. When does an inquiry cease to be an inquiry, when so many limitations and prohibitions exist in how that inquiry should report? An inquiry, implicitly, should be impartial and separate from any governmental interference. A government that, retrospectively, virtually pre-determined the outcome given the evidence it would only deem permissible. What does this say of the moral obligation and duty of a government that has controlled previous inquiries from start to finish?

A full complete and independent inquiry can only ever get to the root problem. Open transparency means a court-of-law having full access to the machinery used in making those ‘political decisions’. An examination and analysis of those political decisions being publicly aired has always been vociferously opposed by the Government, on grounds that the processes used in reaching certain decisions are the preserve of the Government and isn’t open for public scrutiny. Until this anomaly is resolved, no tribunal or inquiry will ever get to the truth of why Blair decided to commit British forces in toppling Saddam Hussein. The Government, of course, runs the risk of being found culpable – which could lead to impeachment charges against the former British Prime Minister – if legal pleas proved the government to have acted illegally if such an analysis was ever allowed to be used in defending the anti-war lobbyists.

http://www.markatscotland.blogspot.com