Examination of Witness (Questions 80-99)
CLARE SHORT
MP
17 JUNE 2003
Q80 Mr Illsley: The quality of intelligence
was not good enough when Blix acted on it, when he had been given
it. You just mentioned earlier that Cabinet members were allowed
to go in twos and threes to joint briefings from the intelligence
staff.
Clare Short: That is from the
Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee who is a former member
of the security service and then he takes on a different role
when he assesses the raw intelligence in order to make reports.
Q81 Mr Illsley: Just before, you
said that the PM authorised you to see this intelligence, so was
the Prime Minister or Ten Downing Street controlling exactly what
members of the Cabinet could see or could be briefed on?
Clare Short: Earlier on, after
September/October, I asked to see SIS, which I often did over
Africa or different situations in the world, so I knew them quite
well and I often asked to see them. SoI asked to see whoever the
expert was for a briefing on Iraq, and they came back and said
the answer was no, because Number Ten says no, and I made a fuss
and it had to go to the Prime Minister individually and then I
did see them. Then I saw them throughout, myself, when I asked,
as well as seeing the material, but I think there are a lot of
ministers who do not deal with intelligence material because they
are in domestic departments or whatever and would not be in that
relationship, and I presume they did not see it, and Defence and
Overseas Policy, where normally the senior figures in the Cabinet
come together, was not meeting, never met, never had any papers
before it, so there was this one occasion when it was suggested
by the Prime Minister at Cabinet that Cabinet members should be
given a briefing by the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee
and that happened, so people went in twos and threes and had an
hour or so and he gave his assessment of where things were.
Q82 Mr Illsley: In that sort of control
of access by Number Ten, but of you in particular because you
knew the system and the individuals, do you think that was coming
from the Prime Minister himself or from his advisers?
Clare Short: Unquestionably coming
from the Prime Minister himself and when I pressed Sir David Manning,
he made it clear that he had to ask the Prime Minister to get
me permission to see the security services over Iraq in the same
way when I saw them normally over other situations in the world.
Q83 Sir John Stanley: Were you suggesting
to the Committee a moment ago that there was some deliberate policy
by the US and the UK Government not to co-operate fully with Mr
Blix's inspectors?
Clare Short: I think that they
wanted to make an effort through the UN for the sake of international
public opinion and probably United States' public opinion, so
they wanted 1441 and, therefore, wanted the return of weapons
inspectors. Well, you can remember the dissident voices, and I
think Vice President Cheney said publicly that he did not want
weapons inspectors, so there were different views in the Administration
and you will know that the US Administration does have different
views always and it is usually quite a fractured system, and particularly
so through the state departments and the Pentagon through the
early stages of this crisis. Certainly President Bush and our
Prime Minister wanted 1441, wanted the weapons inspectors back
in, but then I think in the US they were worried about getting
entangled in the weapons inspection process and it taking longer
than they would have liked, maybe trapping them into that way
forward, and there was some of this briefing against Blix which
again was in the media and I see he is talking about this publicly.
So I think they wanted to try through the UN, but they did not
want to get entangled in the UN and they wanted to be free to
act, having tried the UN, when they wanted to act.
Q84 Sir John Stanley: So are you
saying that there was a policy of only giving partial assistance
to Mr Blix and thereby ensuring that perhaps weapons of mass destruction
were not found as rapidly as might be the case, assuming they
are still there, in order to keep the military option open?
Clare Short: Well, my understanding
is, and I think Blix asked for more help publicly in one of his
sessions at the Security Council, that the UK determined to give
him more help and I think it is a matter of record him saying
that the US were less helpful, but it is a fractured Administration.
You cannot assume coherence in that decision like a conspiracy
to make Blix fail. You have got different parts of the US Administration,
some of them never wanting to go back to the Security Council
and never wanting Blix in anyway, so who was controlling the decision
not to give him full help on the intelligence, I do not know.
Q85 Sir John Stanley: You have made
the, to my mind, extraordinary statement that the Defence and
Overseas Policy Sub-Committee of the Cabinet never met on Iraq.
Clare Short: Never met.
Andrew Mackinlay: At all.
Q86 Sir John Stanley: That is exactly
what Ms Short said.
Clare Short: It is a long time
since it has met.
Q87 Sir John Stanley: Did you make
a formal or informal request to the Prime Minister that that very,
very important Cabinet sub-committee should meet?
Clare Short: No, I did not. The
way I pursued matters was both by bringing everything up in Cabinet,
reading all the intelligence, seeing and getting regular briefings
from SIS and seeing the Prime Minister quite frequently myself
individually. I was working absolutely on the assumption that
the UK could see its role as being to use our relationship with
the US to try and keep the US with the UN and with the international
community if we could possibly do it, and I operated in the way
that I have described, and I think now I was working on a false
premise, but that is what I decided to do. This is happening actually
in our government system, a breakdown of normal decision-making
procedures and decision-making getting very individualised in
Number Ten, and that is happening in general.
Q88 Sir John Stanley: You have made
two references to areas where you thought the intelligence picture
was exaggerated in the sense that the threat was exaggerated,
and you referred to the issue of imminence and you referred also
to links with al-Qaeda. Were there any other areas where you believed
the intelligence position was exaggerated?
Clare Short: No. I think our intelligence
service absolutely believed, as I do, that Saddam Hussein was
going on with the science and going on with trying to get chemical
and biological weapons. They were absolutely clear that he was
a long way from nuclear, that he did not have any capacity and
it would take years, though he had tried it before. Their briefing
and the conversations with them were like that, but I think it
is this phrase "weapons of mass destruction", when that
is used, people think of bombs full of chemical and biological
weapons that are going to rain down out of the sky and drop on
people or whatever. They did not think of scientists in laboratories
doing experiments, and I think that is where the falsity lies.
Yes, he was dedicated to having scientists doing the work to try
and create chemical and biological capacity, but the suggestion
made to the public was that it was all weaponised and could be
used imminently and was a dangerous threat to us and other neighbouring
countries, and I think there was talk of Cyprus being reachable
and so on.
Q89 Sir John Stanley: So you are
suggesting that it was the use of the intelligence material by
members of the Government and politicians which was responsible
for the exaggeration?
Clare Short: That is my suggestion,
yes.
Q90 Chairman: Was there any complaint
at the time when you met the JIC and the SIS people that their
raw material was going to be misused by the Government?
Clare Short: They never said that
to me, but we discussed the desirability of the second Resolution,
which they thought highly desirable. My understanding of their
judgment was that this should not be left, but that we should
try and keep the world together. I have read the media, as have
you, and my own reading of the analysis is that when there were
no WMD found, and now so much information you get through off-the-record
briefings to the press, it started to be suggested that maybe
the intelligence was defective and that made the intelligence
community so angry that they started to brief about the way in
which their material had been exaggerated politically. That is
my reading of it.
Q91 Mr Hamilton: Clare, can I move
on to the September dossier which I think on 3 December the Prime
Minister announced would be published with the Government's assessment
of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability. Can I ask you
whether you saw any related papers to that dossier before it was
published in September?
Clare Short: Well, I just said
that I saw the raw intelligence as it comes in, which is telephone
reports and reports of conversations with individuals, and it
does not say who they are, but it says, "a reliable source"
or "a new source", but that kind of material all the
time, and then the dossier, or I saw all the Joint Intelligence
Committee reports and then the dossier which was threatened once,
then held back and then it came again. I have to say that there
were three dossiers, were there not, and they were all pretty
shoddy pieces of work, even the human rights one. There is no
doubt that even the human rights piece was very old material,
a lot of it preceding the first Gulf War, so I am afraid I was
not surprised that it was not a kind of forensic, highly accurate
document because I think that is the house style.
Q92 Mr Hamilton: Do you recall how
much of the information which was included in the September dossier
came through shared intelligence arrangements with other countries?
Were you ever told?
Clare Short: No. My understanding
is that we share with the US, but I have been informed that our
intelligence is better. I understand that we share with France
and theirs is good and that was uninterrupted right through the
crisis, funnily enough, or that is my understanding, or France
shares with us.
Q93 Mr Hamilton: That is interesting.
I do not think I have heard that before. Can I ask you whether
it was an accurate reflection of Iraq's threat at the time or
was it, how shall I put it, exaggerated?
Clare Short: I have not reread
it, so now this is quite a long time, but my sense is that lots
of it was accurate and the exaggeration and the suggestion of
immediate threat and the suggestion, which is not in the dossier,
but was made in press briefings and maybe in the House of the
potential link to al-Qaeda, that is where the falsity lay. Of
course when you see the picture of what happened, the exaggeration
of immediacy means you cannot do things properly and action has
to be urgent.
Q94 Mr Hamilton: So you think there
was a deliberate attempt to emphasise certain aspects of the intelligence
to make the threat more credible, real and immediate?
Clare Short: To make it more immediate,
more imminent, requiring urgent action, yes.
Q95 Mr Hamilton: Did you try and
oppose that in any way in Cabinet? Did you try and challenge it?
Clare Short: I think I was seen
as pretty awkward throughout. I raised the question of Iraq repeatedly
in the Cabinet and kept questioning, but you cannot fire on all
sides on all issues all the time. I was still dedicated to the
second Resolution as the way of restraint and, therefore, I did
not fight over the dossier.
Mr Hamilton: I cannot believe you would
have been awkward, Clare.
Q96 Mr Maples: I wonder if we can
just pursue this question of the dossier. What was, as far as
you are aware, the process by which the September dossier, the
weapons of mass destruction one, was produced? Did a draft come
to the Cabinet? Were you involved in the raft of comments in the
process of it being drafted since you were seeing the Chief of
Staff?
Clare Short: No, a draft did not
come and I did not comment on a draft. Again speaking from memory,
there was talk of a dossier earlier, the publication of intelligence
material, and then I think that went quiet for a bit and then
it was brought back. Alastair Campbell and co. were involved,
so I left it to them. That is not my speciality, that side of
things.
Q97 Mr Maples: I was going to ask
you about that because when you said that the Prime Minister's
close entourage was involved, you were including the Head of Government
Information Service in that category—
Clare Short: Well, Alastair Campbell
individually, Jonathan Powell, Baroness Morgan, Sir David Manning,
that close entourage.
Q98 Mr Maples: And what do you know
of their involvement in producing this dossier? Do you think they
were involved in that?
Clare Short: I do not know in
any direct way. That was the team, they were the ones who moved
together all the time. They attended the daily `War Cabinet'.
That was the in group, that was the group that was in charge of
policy.
Q99 Mr Maples: Campbell, Manning,
Morgan, and you mentioned somebody else.
Clare Short: Jonathan Powell.
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