Gordon's Iraq Hoax

I've just posted a new story for Index on Censorship online about how Gordon Brown's promise in 2007 to make sure that the Iraq dossier debacle is never repeated turned out to me all spin and fantasy.

A challenge for Chilcot

In a new piece for Index on Censorship online, I describe how my latest freedom of information request has unearthed still more unpublished documents on the Iraq dossier, including some from the intelligence services that are outright exempt under FOI. The new Chilcot Inquiry must see the documents, take note of them and publish them, whatever their origin.

Sir John Chilcot - or rather the Cabinet Office - has named the secretary (ie the head of the secretariat) to his Iraq inquiry. It will be Margaret Aldred, currently Director General and Deputy Head of the Foreign and Defence Policy Secretariat in the Cabinet Office.

This secretariat took over from the Overseas and Defence Secretariat, which helped Tony Blair cook up the clever plan to take Britain to war in Iraq. It produced the March 2002 options paper and its deputy head in 2002 asked joint intelligence committee chairman John Scarlett to drop the caveats from the Iraq dossier.

So Aldred should know where the bodies are buried. Will this be a help or a hindrance to the inquiry.

Straw, Blix and dirty tricks

As justice secretary Jack Straw makes an announcement on prisons an probation, I have a new piece on Comment is Free showing how he misled Parliament over comments that former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix gave on an early draft of the Iraq dossier.

Life vs Art

Having included a reference to the Thick of It in my latest piece for the New Statesman, I find an article about In the Loop, Armando Iannucci's film about the Iraq deception, that refers to

further evidence published this month that the dodgy dossier was indeed sexed up.

Relating a recent encounter with Campbell, Iannucci says:

“I think he was confusing fact with fiction. And not for the first time.”

Campbell's guest editorship of the New Statesman has proved slightly less controversial than the dossier itself but has upset a few people. Sarah Brown's diary piece is beyond satire:

The Big Question when I returned from the US was: “What was Michelle Obama like?”

Answer: warm, friendly, smart, stylish and funny. I can’t wait for the British people to see her close up when she joins her husband on their visit to London for the G20 next month.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and her charming academic professor husband came to visit us on Friday, staying overnight for meetings on Saturday. We combined a relaxed evening with a lot of discussion about the international challenges – a demonstration, to my mind, of the courage many of the leaders are showing to take the necessary steps to rebuild our financial future.

Scotland's Sunday Herald has a superb opinion piece looking back at the Iraq dossier documents released last week:

THE "POLITICAL manipulation" of the government's case for war against Iraq in 2003 is now clearer than it has ever been. ... These [the documents] show the extent of the political duplicity that was a signature of this phase of Tony Blair's time in power.

Recall the fake outcry and controlled indignation there was from the government when it was accused of "sexing up" the notorious dossier. Recall the statements of denial from senior Cabinet ministers of any wrong-doing that were given to the Hutton Inquiry, especially the testimony of the then defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, or the material given to Hutton from Alastair Campbell, then effectively Britain's real deputy prime minister. Yet we now learn - and this comes as no surprise to newspapers such as this one which dug deep into the government's case and found it severely wanting - that there was a climate of disbelief among key defence and intelligence officials at how the case for war was being presented with qualified information offered up as certain and verified.

...

The harsh truth is that New Labour under Tony Blair, subverted Britain's democratic processes in the way it chose to spin the case for a war.

...

The same process of spin and cover-up were taken by Labour into the 2005 general election. The result of that poll reflected the degree to which Blair and New Labour had lost the trust of the electorate. But what would the result have been if the extent of the duplicity over Iraq had been revealed? It is unlikely Blair would have been able to survive as the leader of his party. The position of those inside the Cabinet who had supported Blair unconditionally - and this includes the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, who remained silent on Iraq - would have been equally difficult.

Hutton's conclusion and, equally, the conclusions of Lord Butler's follow-up investigation, have had their validity eroded by the release of these previously protected emails and memos.

Make your own coverage

I've also done Iraq dossier pieces this morning for Comment is Free and IndyMinds.

Also on IndyMinds, John Rentoul has chosen to disagree with the least significant non-revelation in he papers released yesterday. He has also shown that he doesn't understand the difference between "made available to" and "disclosed". How the spin doctors must love him.

The penny drops

The story of the new Iraq dossier memos gets good coverage in the press today, although it was largely ignored by the mainstream broadcast media. I don't think anyone mentioned - or even knew - that it was my freedom of information request that forced the documents into the public domain.

I've done a piece for the Guardian today with the estimable Richard Norton-Taylor. The Independent also has a good take on it currently leading its website, stating without caveat or qualification, that the dossier was sexed-up. The Times covers it briefly but the Mail does it better.

Newsnight had a good, if brief, piece on it yesterday, perhaps reflecting the BBC's continuing reluctance to be seen to be causing trouble for the government on the dossier. The best line of all came from Today's Sarah Monague, who "hestitated" to use the phrase "sexing up" but did so anyway.

This appears to have prompted the Telegraph, which covered the story on its website yesterday, to do another, good, piece this morning:

Mandarins openly discussed removing caveats from the security assessment of the ability of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, to deploy weapons of mass destructions.