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Iraq Inquiry

I am aware of that. I was unable to support the previous motion at the time, because I felt it was playing politics and was personalising the matter. I take on board the hon. Gentleman's point, however. Earlier, I mentioned the Butler report and the Intelligence and Security Committee, and I cited evidence that came to light in the Hutton inquiry of an e-mail from somebody called Matthew Rycroft to Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Clare Sumner, Robert Hill, David Manning, Alastair Campbell and John Scarlett. I shall read out the relevant parts of it:"““Ann Taylor read the draft dossier this morning and passed on some detailed comments to John Scarlett. She has just rung me to underline the following points.””" A number of points are then made, and the message ends:"““the hardest questions in the debate, not fully answered by the dossier, remain why now and why Saddam. The PM should take these on in his statement to undercut critics””." Those questions are still relevant and have not been addressed—and certainly not by the ISC or the Butler report. Ann Taylor was a member of the Butler committee, and she was also the chairperson of the ISC. The Foreign Secretary was surprised that I cast doubt on the Butler report. I should like to illustrate why I cast doubt on it—and not only on its membership. I and a former Member of this House, Llew Smith, submitted a detailed dossier to the Butler committee. We focused on the Government's claim that Iraq had sought to procure uranium from Niger. We asked many detailed questions, and we made 15 recommendations. I will not go into all of them, but the report is posted on my website. It asks some pertinent questions, and refers to the fact that I and colleagues had often received contradictory evidence in response to the many parliamentary questions we had asked, and that when we queried those contradictions we were referred back to the Butler inquiry. We were anxious that Butler examined this issue in detail, because it was one of the core arguments about the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to us. We made 15 recommendations, and I wish to read out a couple of them. We stated:"““From the information made publicly available by the UK Government, the IAEA and the FAC, it is our view that the ISC investigation into this matter was insufficiently inquisitive—the ISC do not make it clear whether they even saw the relevant primary documentation. We recommend that the Butler Committee ask the Government for all relevant primary documentation on the claim, including the forged documents mentioned by the IAEA and assess what impact the forged evidence had on the UK sources of June 2002 (which is officially ""still 'under consideration' over a year after the forged evidence was revealed) and of September 2002 (the single source upon which the UK relied).””" We further recommended"““that the Butler Committee investigate whether the information the Government have made publicly available provides an accurate reflection of the primary evidence.””" The Butler committee did answer that question, concluding that it was reasonable for the Government to make their claims. The logic by which it reached that conclusion must be highly questionable. It cited information obtained from the International Atomic Energy Agency that makes it clear that not only before the war, when it presented its evidence to the UN in March 2003, but more recently, it had received no further evidence that would lead it to believe that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. The Butler report makes no comment on the fact that the international agency charged with looking into these matters did not believe that Iraq had sought to procure uranium from Niger, but simply talks about reasonableness. It states:"““Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.””" That is a risible argument. How can we take such an argument seriously? Yet, that was the Butler report's conclusion. Furthermore, that report did not take on board the argument that we had presented, which was that under article 10 of UN Security Council resolution 1441, member states were required to provide any information on Iraq's prohibited weapons programmes, so either the British Government did not make that information available or they did make it available and the IAEA concluded that it was not credible.