Lioness gives Chilcot inquiry teeth

By Simon Hoggart www.guardian.co.uk

The Iraq inquiry burst into life yesterday, thanks to a quiet, thoughtful yet furious woman who ripped into the government like a genteel but very hungry lioness. Elizabeth Wilmshurst was the first witness to get a round of applause from the public.

Her evidence was brief, less than an hour, but Jack Straw and Lord Goldsmith must have loathed every word. It was like being torn apart by a cross between Judi Dench as "M" and Princess Diana – softly spoken, but as hard and inflexible as a crowbar.

And it had been almost as bad in the morning, when Sir Michael Wood, Ms Wilmshurst's old boss, set about sticking pins into a wax model of Jack Straw. Not any old pins, either: these were beautifully chased antique pins, honed like the slenderest Toledo blades, so sharp he can't have felt them before he saw the spurting blood. Or as the late Boris Karloff put it: "An icicle inserted in the brain will melt, and leave no trace."

But it was Ms Wilmshurst who was the inquiry's first star, not least because she had resigned just before the war began on the grounds that it was ­illegal. Every lawyer in the Foreign Office thought it was illegal, and they had missed no chance to say so. Ministers ignored them.

But whereas Sir Michael, who retired peacefully three years later, murmured that "questions of conscience are very personal questions" and that he had not wanted to be "disruptive", Ms Wilmshurst just cleared off. "I did not agree with [the government] on a matter that was central to my job," she said.

There was one especially tingling moment. Sir John Chilcot asked: "Did it make a difference that Jack Straw was a qualified lawyer?"

Ms Wilmshurst barely paused. "He is not an international lawyer."

The implication – that he had no idea what he was talking about – elicited what may have been the first laughter since the inquiry began. Ms Wilmshurst's face did not crack. To her this was not a joke, although I swear that on the giant TV feed you could just see the corner of her eyes crinkle with pleasure at the reaction. Later, the 24-hour-news channels showed the clip many times, like a Hawkeye analysis of a doubtful lbw decision.

One of the curious aspects of her evidence was that to her, the law is the law, as clear and immutable as the gospels are to a true believer. Whereas most lawyers take the view that the law is whatever you want it to be, or whichever interpretation pays best, she saw no ambiguity. The invasion was plainly illegal, and to do something plainly ­illegal was not only wrong but harmful to Britain and its reputation. You just know that Ms Wilmshurst would chase someone down the street if they accidentally dropped 10p.

At the end she ­described how the ­attorney general (who in the mists of history had also thought the invasion illegal) was finally consulted only at the very last minute as the troops were ready to go in. "I thought the process that was followed was lamentable," she said, and the word seemed to echo round the room. This ­inquiry will now never seem the same.

Now we know: Blair went to war on an "assumption"

By Chris Ames, guardian.co.uk, 18 January 2010

By any standards, it was an astonishing change of tack. Unable any longer to stick to the line that British participation in the invasion of Iraq was based on what the intelligence services were telling Tony Blair, Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, told the Iraq inquiry today that it was really based on an "assumption" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The dossier was not important, whatever Alastair Campbell said last week.

This afternoon's hearing was a fascinating battle between the Chilcot committee and Powell, who has clearly learnt to play the game. Quote selectively from documents of your choice. Give your version of documents that the inquiry has not been allowed to publish. If you are put on the spot, claim that you cannot remember.

The committee tried the tactic that they used last week of more or less saying out loud what the documents that they have seen reveal. Powell did not bite and said that they should look at the documents.

The inquiry's witnesses are not supposed to confer and, on the face of it, you would imagine that Powell and Campbell had not conferred, as their evidence was so contradictory. Where Campbell had said that the September 2002 dossier was a very, very significant piece of communications, Powell sought to play it down. But you wonder whether this contradiction will merely confuse the inquiry, like Campbell's recent "clarification" of his own evidence.

Powell more or less admitted what Campbell had said last week, that Tony Blair had told Bush early on that Britain would go to war. He more or less admitted that British policy was aimed at getting rid of Saddam Hussein, with the caveat that it could not be done if he complied with demands to disarm. For Powell, such caveats, which might look to others like dancing on the head of a pin, were very important.

When it came to basing the policy on dodgy intelligence about WMD, Powell has presumably seen the writing on the wall, that the inquiry is saying out loud that Blair's claim that intelligence had "established beyond doubt" that Iraq had WMD was unsustainable on the basis of intelligence assessments. Equally, the committee members have said that they can find nothing in the assessments that supports Blair's claim to parliament that Iraq's WMD programmes were "growing". Powell's answer was to accuse them of too detailed a textual analysis – "dancing on the head of a pin" – and to say that the case for war was neither based on the dossier nor even on intelligence that Iraq had WMD, just an assumption, based on Saddam's past record of possessing and using such weapons and subsequently lying about it.

Sir Lawrence Freedman put it to him that this was a perfectly reasonable working assumption, but distinguished between that and the kind of "hard evidence" that you would need for a policy that would ultimately lead to war. Amazingly, Powell doesn't seem to have grasped this – or has realised that he has nowhere else to turn. He repeated what other witnesses have told the inquiry – that the lack of evidence when inspectors went in did not change the policy because people in government were convinced that there were weapons. They were "amazed" when there were none.

Of all the witnesses to the inquiry so far, Powell has to win the prize for pure nerve. When asked whether inspections beyond March 2003 might have made a difference because the case that Iraq was hiding weapons would have become increasingly weak, he turned the point on its head, pointing out that Iraq didn't actually have WMD. So further inspections would not have convinced anyone because they would not have turned anything up. He even had the front to articulate – and then deny – a point that was not put to him but which many people suspect: that it was the danger that continued inspections would weaken the case for war that meant that they had to be curtailed.

Powell also confirmed that the issue was that the Americans would not allow more time, in spite of British pleas. When it became clear that a second resolution would not be obtained, it became impossible to make the case for delay to George Bush.

Powell also takes the prize for the most brazenly selective memory and use of documents. He was quite happy to quote from any number of documents that he saw as suiting his case. But would he admit directly what was put to him, that Blair's letters to Bush gave an unqualified commitment to go to war? In a sense, he did by saying that it was necessary to do this if we were going to influence the Americans. But it was an outrageous case of having his cake and eating it, by justifying something that he is not directly admitting to – just as Blair did with Fern Britton by saying that he would have had to make a different case for regime change if it had been clear that there were no WMD. The game here is to justify regime change without admitting directly that that was what lay behind the policy.

And when it came to Jack Straw's alleged doubts, Powell claimed that he could not remember the timing of Straw's March 2002 letter to Blair, even though it was (re)published by the Sunday Times only yesterday. What about another of the "Downing Street Documents", the record of the meeting of 23 July 2002? Was Straw arguing for changing regime in Iraq or alternative options? Powell said that he cannot remember that either. He suggested that the panel would have to look at the record of that meeting. If the panel's tactic – which partially worked with Campbell – is to put the contents of still classified (albeit leaked) documents on the record by asking witnesses to say them out loud, Powell saw through it.

But if you look at the overall picture of what Powell said today, even in his own terms, it paints a shocking picture of the way that what many people see as the greatest foreign policy disaster for half a century evolved. Britain gave backing to a US desire for military action to depose Saddam on an "assumption" that he had weapons of mass destruction and that this would provide a justification. Having given such backing, but with no smoking gun, Blair felt obliged to honour his commitment. As has been observed previously, the one thing that Blair, Powell and Co did not factor in was that there might be no weapons. That, we now learn, was not due to a failure of intelligence but to a misplaced, if perfectly reasonable, assumption.

I said in November that by the time Tony Blair appears – now confirmed as being next Friday (29 January) – the evidence might have made it impossible for him to make claims "about intelligence failures and weapons of mass destruction". It looks as if he will still talk about WMD, but intelligence failures were never really the point, apparently.

Think it won't be a whitewash? Think again.

Channel 4 News: Who Knows Who

Key links between Tony Blair and members of Sir John Chilcot's Iraq Inquiry panel have been highlighted by Channel 4 News' "Who Knows Who".

The network of connections is outlined as Blair prepares to give evidence to the five-member committee within the next few weeks.

Today former Blair aide Alastair Campbell will appear as a witness before the panel over his role in the dodgy dossier affair.

Perhaps the most pronounced link occurs between Blair and committee member Sir Lawrence Freedman.

In 1999, Freedman was invited to help shape "a philosophy that Blair could call his own" on foreign affairs, wrote former New Statesman editor John Kampfner, in his book Blair’s Wars.

Show less

This input was said to have preceded the "doctrine of the international community" Blair announced in his famous speech to the Economic Club in Chicago in 1999.

Freedman, a professor of War Studies at Kings College, was also commissioned to write a book by Blair, an official history of the Falklands War.

An inquiry spokesman said Blair may well have read a foreign policy paper written by Freedman around the period of the Chicago speech, but suggestions of his direct involvement in providing policy ideas were overstated.

A fellow historian and Iraq Inquiry member, Sir Martin Gilbert, also has some clear links to Blair.

Gilbert, the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill, claimed in 2004 that Blair and his United States counterpart George W Bush may one day be seen as akin to Roosevelt and Churchill for their actions in the Middle East.

He wrote in the Observer: "Although it can easily be argued that Bush and Blair face a far lesser challenge than Roosevelt and Churchill did - that the war on terror is not a third world war - they may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill."

It was also rumoured in November 2007 that Blair, during his final days at Downing Street, corresponded with Gilbert about ideas for writing his own prime ministerial memoirs.

An inquiry spokesman said that such is Gilbert’s standing as a biographer, it would not be unusual for the two to have discussed the subject. He said Gilbert’s comparison between Blair and Churchill was merely a prediction with caveats, not a judgement.

Sir Roderic Lyne, another inquiry panel member, was British ambassador to the Russian Federation from 2000 to 2004, while Blair was prime minister.

Perhaps a sign of the familiarity between the two camps was that Alastair Campbell, Blair's press secretary from 1994 to 2003, used to take part in running races against Lyne when the pair met up on diplomatic duties.

In 2003, Campbell took time out from a St Petersburg summit to race Lyne through six miles of city streets. This was the third in a series of races the pair had run in Russia.

An inquiry spokesman said the pair were never regular or serious running partners, despite their Russian exertions.

Sir John Chilcot, chair of the panel, was knighted in the first "people's new year's honours list" after Blair came to power in 1997.

Chilcot was also appointed to an independent commission tasked with recommending an alternative to Westminster's 'first-past-the-post' voting system in 1997. The commission was set up by Tony Blair.

Baroness Prashar, the first civil service commissioner, was made a life peer under Tony Blair in 1999. She too sits on the Iraq Inquiry panel of five.

An inquiry spokesman said the award of a knighthood to Chilcot was standard practice for a departing permanent secretary, and that Prashar's life peerage was a reflection of her significant contribution to public life. He said neither honour could be seen to have political motivations.

Prime minister Gordon Brown appointed the members of the committee, with opposition parties consulted.

How Alastair Campbell changed Iraq dossier

By Chris Ames and Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, 10 January 2010

New evidence reveals the extent to which those drafting the Iraqi arms dossier colluded with the US on Alastair Campbell's instructions. Photograph: Graham Turner

Fresh evidence has emerged that Tony Blair's discredited Iraqi arms dossier was "sexed up" on the instructions of Alastair Campbell, his communications chief, to fit with claims from the US administration that were known to be false.

The pre-invasion dossier's worst-case estimate of how long it would take Iraq to acquire a nuclear weapon was shortened in response to a George Bush speech.

As Campbell prepares to appear before the Iraq inquiry on Tuesday, new evidence reveals the extent to which – on his instructions – those drafting the notorious dossier colluded with the US administration to make exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

In a keynote speech to the UN on 12 September 2002, Bush claimed: "Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year." This contradicted the first draft of the British dossier, drawn up two days earlier, which stated that it would take "at least two years" for Iraq to get the bomb.

The Cabinet Office has disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act that those who drafted the dossier were immediately asked to compare British claims against the US president's speech. The next day the dossier's timescale was halved to claim Iraq could get the bomb in a year.

A Foreign Office official who helped draft the dossier, Tim Dowse, told the Chilcot inquiry that disputed claims that Iraq had acquired special aluminium tubes for a nuclear programme were included because the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, had publicly referred to them.

Both changes to the weapons dossier were part of a detailed process of comparing the British claims with US statements and those in a forthcoming CIA dossier. The comparisons were made on the express instructions of Campbell. He told the joint intelligence committee (JIC) chairman, John Scarlett, in a memo on 9 September 2002, that the British dossier should be "one that complements rather than conflicts with" US claims.

Documents that the information commissioner ordered to be released last year show that the drafters of the UK dossier compared its claims closely with the CIA dossier and raised possible contradictions over estimates of Iraq's capabilities.

The commissioner also accidentally released a secret list of documents that he allowed the government to withhold on national security grounds. These included an email dated 13 September 2002 "covering a copy of a Bush speech to compare with UK dossier claims". The Cabinet Office has confirmed the speech was the one Bush gave to the UN the day before.

A new draft of the British weapons dossier virtually eliminated the difference between the US and UK positions. When Blair presented the dossier to parliament 11 days later, he said that Iraq might get the bomb in "a year or two".

The JIC, which prepares formal intelligence assessments, considered the scenario so unlikely that it did not estimate how long it might take.

New evidence has also emerged of Scarlett's extensive US consultation on the dossier. On the same day as the Bush speech, Scarlett met political and intelligence officials in Washington to discuss the dossier, according to a previously classified US state department memo.

The government has sought to conceal evidence of Scarlett's consultations with the US over the dossier. One email sent to Campbell was disclosed to the Hutton inquiry with a sentence blacked out. It was later disclosed that the sentence was: "Clearly John will be speaking to US."

Warmongers, disloyal mandarins and WMD

By Sabah Jawad
Iraqi Democrats Against Occupation
January 10 January 2010

The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war opened amid widespread scepticism in Britain and internationally.

There is concern that the investigation - the fifth of its kind since 2003 - will be another whitewash. Critics argue that the British government will try to prevent the truth from coming out, fearing the serious political and legal repercussions that might follow.

Anti-war campaigners also cite the remit and composition of the inquiry team as pointers for a probable cover-up. Four knights and a baroness investigating a war crime to learn lessons for the future!

Prior to his appearance before the inquiry, Tony Blair admitted unexpectedly that he would have gone to war regardless of whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or not. His decision to do this comes from an awareness that public pressure for full exposure of the facts will be relentless and lasting. He probably also suspects that some disloyal mandarin or politician is lurking around with incriminating evidence, ready to spill the beans.

This is a strong indication that popular pressure is bearing fruit and that it will be unacceptable to hide the lies and deceptions which accompanied preparations for the war. There is an overwhelming determination by peace and justice campaigners to expose the truth and bring those responsible for this war crime to justice.

The war and occupation of Iraq have so far led to the deaths of 179 British soldiers and more than 4,370 US troops.

But they have had a much more devastating impact on the people of Iraq and their land and waters. More than 1 million people were killed, millions were widowed and orphaned and 4 million refugees have been created internally and in neighbouring countries. The war has wrought environmental disaster and deformity of the newly-born, land and water has been contaminated and basic infrastructure and services have been destroyed.

Yet the inquiry will not visit the scene of the crime or hear from Iraqi witnesses on the impact of this war on their lives. Under most justice systems, victims of a crime or their relatives are given the chance to state their grievances.

If Iraqi witnesses and experts were called they would also tell the inquiry about the political system built by the occupation. This system, despite "elections", is still under the control of occupation forces and warlords with conflicting sectarian and ethnic interests fighting for a share of the crumbs while the country is being destroyed by the occupation, corruption and terrorism.

Parliament, the presidential council, judiciary, army, police, security agencies and civil service are all divided on sectarian and ethnic lines and in conflict with each other.

Religious diversity and ethnic differences have been used to create division and internal conflict to prolong the hated occupation. Such occupation-engineered schemes include the constitution and various laws and legislation.

On the economic front, the second round of "auctioning" Iraq's major oil fields to multinational oil companies is moving apace, without parliamentary approval. The legislative council has repeatedly failed to pass the oil and gas law.

The Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions described these illegal acts as being against the national interest. What is needed is a "national policy of investment and redevelopment rather than the policy of open doors to the multinationals", it said.

As the inquiry goes on, the occupation and bloodbath also continue. In one week alone last month, two major terrorist atrocities took place in Baghdad, killing hundreds and wounding thousands in what came to be known as Bloody Tuesday. This latest crime against innocent civilians is the fourth of its kind in as many months.

There is a widespread conviction in Iraq that these terrorist atrocities are the work of the occupation and its policies. Iraqis point out that terrorism did not exist in Iraq before the war and that the occupation was and is in command of Iraq's security apparatus.

Creating a weak and fragmented country is the occupation's response to the Iraqi people's opposition to it.

The war and occupation have caused immense suffering and destruction for the people of Iraq and their country. They are demanding justice. The first step must be to bring those responsible for this war of aggression and war crimes to justice.

Former PM John Major on Blair and Iraq war

Tony Blair will give evidence to the Iraq Inquiry in the next few weeks. Stop the War will call a protest outside the Inquiry when he appears. Will former Prime Minister John Major join us?

BBC 02 January 2010

Former Prime Minister Sir John Major has criticised Tony Blair's handling of the Iraq war and his presentation of the case for invasion in March 2003.

Sir John said he had reluctantly backed the war because he believed what Mr Blair had said as prime minister.

But now, he said, big questions had been raised by the unfolding evidence to the Chilcott Inquiry into the war.

He told the BBC the argument that Saddam Hussein was a bad man and must be removed was an "inadequate" one.

Sir John said it now seemed there were doubts before the invasion about whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

'Utterly certain'

In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said he wanted to know whether the cabinet had known about those doubts.

He said: "I had myself been prime minister in the first Gulf War, and I knew when I said something I was utterly certain that it was correct, and I said less than I knew.

"I assumed the same thing had happened and on that basis I supported reluctantly the second Iraq war."

Sir John said he did not know whether the invasion was potentially illegal, but he added that in the mid-1990s President Clinton's administration had raised the question of regime change with his officials.

They replied that any attempt to remove Saddam Hussein as a bad man had to be legal and viable.

Sir John said the argument that someone was bad was an inadequate argument for war.

"There are many bad men around the world who run countries and we don't topple them, and indeed in earlier years we had actually supported Saddam Hussein when he was fighting against Iran.

"The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for regime change."

Sir John said concerns about the Iraq war needed to be addressed if the public's trust in politics was going to be restored.

But he said spin was also "a real problem" and the government needed to get rid of advisers who "exercise the black arts" who say things which are "often questionable, if not downright dishonest".

"I think we can get respect for Parliament back providing governments and oppositions are frank... providing they don't let spin doctors perpetrate half truths and don't produce absurd slogans like boom or bust and whiter than white," said Sir John.

"It won't be easy and it won't be quick, but it is absolutely essential, in my view," he added.

Politics also needed to reassert the "independence of mind of the backbencher" - so the whole House of Commons was not governed by the executive and whipping system, he said.

It was "degrading" for members of parliament to have to respond to the party line with the "parrot slogan of the day", he added.

Tony Blair is due to answer questions at the Chilcott Inquiry in the next few weeks.