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Iraq Inquiry

I do believe that it is a good starting point. As I said, I am very much in favour of a committee of inquiry in principle. If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I shall try to spell out how it should operate. The most important issue that has been left hanging in the air is the interface between the intelligence services and the political decision-makers. I noted that the previous Secretary of State for Defence said only last month:"““I saw the intelligence from the first time I came into the office in May 1999—week in, week out—that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction””." On the other hand, a few months before that, Carne Ross, a diplomat at Britain’s UN mission in New York in the run-up to the invasion, revealed:"““There was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of chemical weapons, biological weapons or nuclear material””." Those statements are totally inconsistent. Whatever the truth, and none of us can be sure either way—and that is my point—a much tighter degree of parliamentary oversight is clearly needed to ensure the integrity of the intelligence services’ advice. The committee of inquiry ought to spell out in some detail how that might work. The Attorney-General’s advice on the legality of the war was only disclosed in full, well after the event, because of the fear that it would be leaked bit by bit, damagingly, in the immediate run-up to the 2005 general election. That is not an acceptable precedent. We need a firm Government commitment that the Attorney-General’s advice will always, in such circumstances, be published uncensored. Furthermore, reference should also be made to any significant dissenting voices, such as Elizabeth Wilmshurst’s from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and to the grounds on which that dissent is argued.