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Iraq Dossier (September 2002)

The September 2002 dossier, entitled ““Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction””, was central to the Government’s case for war in Iraq. There is little doubt that the dossier was ““sexed up””—that the balanced judgments and reservations of the intelligence community were transformed into near certainties—but we also know that Lord Hutton and Lord Butler ultimately cleared the Government of sexing up the dossier, because they believed that the Joint Intelligence Committee had authorship and ownership of the document. However, I suggest that recent evidence casts doubt on that conclusion. Part of that evidence points not only to a hitherto unknown first full draft of the dossier, written by a press officer, but to its importance in the drafting process itself. Indeed, it shows that spin doctors were on the inside of the drafting process and were integral to it, and that the JIC did not approve or sign off the document in any meaningful way. That is contrary to what we have been told by the Government so far. It is therefore no wonder that the dossier was characterised by spin and exaggeration. I make no apologies for raising this issue four years after the event. It is important because the dossier was central to the argument for the war, which is still costing lives today. It is important because a public servant lost his life, and because, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer has admitted only very recently, we must learn the lessons from this episode and never again go to war on a false premise. May I say at the outset that I would welcome any interventions from the Minister, as such interventions would help our discussion? I hope that he will show me the same courtesy when he is speaking. Lord Hutton cleared the Government of sexing up the dossier, because he believed, as we all believed, that the dossier"““was prepared and drafted by a small team of the assessment staff of the JIC””" and"““was issued…with the full approval of the JIC.””" Since Parliament voted for war in March 2003, we have learned much more about the role of spin doctors in the drafting process. For example, from the Hutton inquiry, we know now what Parliament did not know in 2003—that Alastair Campbell commissioned the dossier from John Scarlett, chairman of the JIC, that Campbell chaired the two planning meetings on the dossier and that he bombarded Scarlett with drafting suggestions throughout the process. However, what was not credited by the inquiry was the involvement of press officers on the inside of the drafting process, working alongside the assessment staff of the JIC and attending meetings. I understand, for example, that press officers attended the drafting meeting on 9 September 2002 at which the 45-minutes claim was picked up and subsequently inserted into the dossier. John Scarlett acknowledged the involvement of up to four press officers—one from 10 Downing street and the others from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—in his memo to the Prime Minister on 4 June 2003, but new evidence shows that spin doctors were not only shaping decisions about the content; they were helping to write the dossier itself.