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Mr. Eric Joyce (Falkirk, West) (Lab): The hon. Gentleman said at the beginning of his speech—and I am pretty much quoting—that Andrew Gilligan was quite right to use Dr. Kelly as he did. He has now said that he thinks that Andrew Gilligan should have been sacked. Which view does he take, or is it both?

Mr. Marsden: The fact is that a journalist is fully entitled to investigate and quote sources to substantiate a very important point—in this case, the suggestion that this country had been misled and that Parliament had arguably been misled by a dossier that had been sexed up, as Andrew Gilligan called it, and embellished, embroidered and so on.

In reading the evidence, I have looked at what else Andrew Gilligan said on the fateful broadcast of 29 May:

"The draft prepared for Mr. Blair by the intelligence agencies, actually didn't say very much more than was public knowledge already and Downing Street our source says, ordered a week before publication, it to be sexed up to be made more exciting and ordered more facts to be discovered."

He went on to say:

"Our source says that the dossier as it was finally published made the intelligence services unhappy."

He was fundamentally right. When we look at the evidence on those two claims, we see that there is no disputing it. For example, let us consider the argument that the Joint Intelligence Committee approved everything that the Government did. Let us accept that the JIC came up with a draft on 11 September 2002 and approved it, and it does have the experts who would have gathered all the evidence together. Surely it defies logic to suggest that when that document was challenged and Downing street officials requested that the wording be amended and subtly changed to help the

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case for war, it should then be changed into a second draft for 16 September, and changed again on 19 September.

If the JIC was in total control of the document, why was it amending it at the behest of politicians and officials in No. 10 Downing street? Let me give an example. The executive summary was changed so that, instead of saying that weapons of mass destruction could be deployed within 45 minutes of the order for their use being given, it said that they were deployable within 45 minutes. That is clearly a substantial change. Alastair Campbell had to admit in his evidence that he had suggested 16 changes. Dr. Brian Jones, who should know about these matters as the head of the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons section in the MOD's defence intelligence and analysis staff, today simply reconfirmed what he has said previously. I quote from The Independent:

"In my view, the expert intelligence analyses of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier back in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."

So Andrew Gilligan was right. The intelligence services were unhappy. The Prime Minister has claimed that that information was not passed on to his desk, although we will never know, as I doubt whether the Butler inquiry will be able to get to the bottom of the matter. That is why I fully endorse what has been said about the reasons why the Liberal Democrats would not support the Butler inquiry. I have a quote. It reads:

"The Liberal Democrats are absolutely right to have nothing to do with this charade. The pity is that the Tories haven't taken the same robust view."

Those are not my words. They appear in today's editorial in the Daily Mail. That demonstrates the simple fact that most people have doubts about what will come out of such a private inquiry. Tony Cragg, the former deputy chief of defence intelligence, has undermined the Government's case that there was nothing that made the intelligence services unhappy. Of course they were desperately unhappy, as the right hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) said.

I find all the Beeb bashing this afternoon despicable. We have the finest public service broadcaster in the world. We need it more than ever to hold to account a Government who have utterly failed the British people.

5.26 pm

Mrs. Alice Mahon (Halifax) (Lab): Weapons of mass destruction are haunting the Government. I do not believe that the issue will be brought to rest until the big political questions are answered. There is little to suggest that Lord Butler will succeed in exorcising the phantom where three other inquiries have failed. Whatever is said in the House, the majority of the public believe that Lord Hutton forfeited his credibility by trying to lay all the blame on the BBC and none on the Government.

I do not know how the Butler inquiry can command greater confidence when the Prime Minister has already told us that the Government decision to go to war is out of bounds. He has put a man in charge of the inquiry

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whose background will equally incline him to exonerate the Government. Even the Intelligence and Security Committee, which backed the Government when it reported on September, was critical of the Government's assessment of weapons of mass destruction. I will remind the House of what the Committee said in its report. Referring to the September dossier, it said:

"The use of the phrase 'continued to produce chemical and biological weapons' in the foreword and the absence of detail . . . could give the impression that Saddam was actively producing both chemical and biological weapons and significant amounts of agents. However, the JIC did not know what had been produced and in what quantities".

Secondly, the first draft of the Prime Minister's foreword shows that the Government recognised that the nature of the threat that Saddam posed was not directly to mainland UK. It was unfortunate that this point was removed from the published version and not highlighted elsewhere.

The Committee went on to say that the dossier was for public consumption and not for experienced readers of intelligence material. The 45-minute claim, which was included four times, was assessed to refer to battlefield chemical and biological munitions, which should have been highlighted. The omission was unhelpful to an understanding of this issue.

The Committee concluded:

"We regard the initial failure by the MoD to disclose that some staff had put their concerns in writing to their line managers as unhelpful and potentially misleading."

One of these was Brian Jones, who made a formal complaint about it. Writing in today's edition of The Independent he traces in what I believe is convincing detail how he and his colleagues were overruled.

The public still want to know, and the House should demand that they be told, why the Government took this country into an illegal and unjustified war. Why was the Prime Minister so sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the weight of evidence did not merit such certainty? How can we be sure that the same pretext will not be used in future to take us to war again against Iraq, Korea or Syria?

The public think—rightly, in my view—that the Government are ducking and diving. That is hardly unreasonable in the circumstances. For months, and against all comers, the Prime Minister has been insisting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then, the day after George Bush decides that there will be an American inquiry, the Prime Minister calls for one in Britain. I have to say that it sent shivers down my spine when I heard the Prime Minister tell the Liaison Committee yesterday that whatever the outcome of the debate about weapons of mass destruction, he did not accept that it was wrong to remove Saddam Hussein. That is the beginning of an admission that weapons of mass destruction were a pretext, and the window-dressing for regime change. I believe that the new committee has already been judged in the court of public opinion, and only a full-scale inquiry, like the Scott inquiry into a previous Government's role in breaking the arms embargo, will satisfy public opinion. With that new committee, the Government are storing up problems for the future.

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The decision to go to war was taken at a very high cost. Thousands of Iraqis lost their lives and many more were injured—and many continue to die and to be injured today. The Anglo-American occupation is almost universally unpopular, and now we see the Iraqis protesting at not being allowed to vote for their own Government. That is a far cry from what the Prime Minister said today, when he assured us that the face of post-war Iraq looked much better. I wish that we, as an occupying force, would start counting the number of dead Iraqis, including civilians, and the number of children who are injured or killed by cluster bombs. The Prime Minister may have decided that he has given up on those of us who opposed the war, but every time I close my eyes I am determined to carry on opposing this illegal war, because I get a picture of little Ali, without any arms and without any family, and of thousands more children who have suffered. I certainly will not give up arguing that this was a bad war; we might stop the same happening somewhere else.

The Carnegie Endowment report "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications", which was published a few weeks ago and may have contributed to President Bush's decision to set up an inquiry, concluded that the war on Iraq was not the best or the only option. It made wide-ranging recommendations about American policy and practice. For example, it revised the US's national security strategy to eliminate unilateral preventive war—that is, the Bush doctrine of going to war in the absence of an imminent threat.

The report proposed international action and said that the UN Secretary-General should commission a high-level analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the weapons of mass destruction inspection process. I mentioned earlier a former UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, who is coming to a conference that I am organising in March. He was quoted today in the Daily Mirror and gave many examples of how false information was systematically spread in Britain.

If we are to learn anything from the WMD debacle, it should be, first, that a full-scale independent inquiry is the proper and only way to redeem the reputation of my Government and the Labour party, and we should have one before it is too late. Secondly, the task of overseeing weapons inspections should be returned to the UN, with Kofi Annan in charge of overhauling those procedures, so that in future we do not go to war on false pretences. Unlike the Prime Minister, I believe that the world is a far less safe place because we took this country into an illegal war.

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