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13 Jun 2007 : Column 289WH—continued
The Minister for the Middle East (Dr. Kim Howells):
Is the hon. Gentleman saying that he believes that everything that is written by every official in any Government Department, whether it is a first draft, it is thinking outside the box or a suggestion about how policy could move forward, should be made public? Is he saying that every single draft of every document
should be made public? If he believes that, how does he think that a Government could work in the future, including perhaps a Conservative Government?
Mr. Baron: Let us remember why this document is so important. It is the first full draft of the dossier—a dossier that was instrumental in convincing this country to go to war. The first full draft should, in my view, be made public, but my view is perhaps less important than that of the Information Commissioner, who has already adjudicated on the matter and believes that it is in the public interest to make the document available to the public.
In answer to my parliamentary questions, the Foreign Secretary talked on 23 April 2007 at column 914W of Hansard about “prejudicing national security”, but those concerns about national security hardly make sense, as the John Williams document was a draft document intended for publication—that was its purpose—and previous and subsequent drafts have already been made public.
Certainly the importance of the document was downplayed by the Government during the Hutton inquiry. During his evidence session, Alastair Campbell was asked very straightforwardly:
“Do you recall whether or not at 9(th) September there was a dossier?”
He answered: “No, there was not.” John Scarlett, in his evidence, acknowledged Williams’s role in “some additional drafting”, but downplayed its significance. He said that Williams was working “on his own initiative”. However, when circulating his own draft in September 2002, Scarlett referred to
“considerable help from John Williams”.
We know, from new evidence from the Information Commissioner, that Williams’s draft
“was requested by the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee”,
hence its importance. In his own evidence to the inquiry, John Williams failed to refer either to his draft document or to his presence at the drafting meeting on the afternoon of 9 September. No wonder the Hutton inquiry did not focus on the Williams document and the report did not even mention it.
I have recently been told in a letter from the Foreign Secretary that the Williams draft was indeed submitted to the Hutton inquiry on 12 September 2003. However, I have seen no evidence that its significance was appreciated, and it has not been made public on the inquiry’s website. We do not even know that Lord Hutton was made aware of the authorship of the document and its place in the chronology of the dossier.
The Minister will remember that at FCO questions recently I asked him about the Williams draft. He replied that Lord Hutton was given the opportunity to see the dossier because
“Both John Scarlett and John Williams referred to the draft dossier in their evidence sessions.”—[Official Report, 1 May 2007; Vol. 459, c. 1361.]
We now know that that is incorrect. Why did not the Minister—I believe him to be a very straightforward individual—simply confirm to me what the Foreign Secretary had stated in her letter? That long trail of smoke and mirrors in the downgrading of the
importance of the John Williams draft is consistent with Government policy generally on downplaying the role of press officers in the drafting process.
However, let us move on. What about the idea that the JIC was given an opportunity to approve or sign off the final dossier? Ultimately, Lord Hutton saw the sexing up of claims in the dossier as the legitimate redrafting of existing intelligence assessments because he believed that the JIC had the power to reject or endorse any suggestions that were made. It is important here to distinguish between the JIC, the JIC assessment staff—the secretariat—and the committee’s chairman, John Scarlett. The dossier was always in the hands of Scarlett, whom Alastair Campbell commissioned to produce it, but I have seen no direct evidence that the JIC as a whole was asked to approve the dossier. The final draft was circulated among individual members for comment, but John Scarlett signed it off. Indeed, there is little evidence that the Committee even debated it. During the Hutton inquiry, Dr. Brian Jones of the Defence Intelligence Staff said:
“What was unusual or what did not follow the normal practice was that this was not a paper that was going through the process by which it was examined and argued over at a full meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee”.
Essentially, the JIC was commenting on a document issued in the name of the Government, not the JIC. After all, the dossier included the words “The Assessment of the British Government” in its title and was written in the first person, with the JIC referred to in the third person. In addition, we know that Campbell tried to describe the dossier as
“the work of the JIC”,
but Scarlett would not allow it and insisted on the words
“based, in large part, on the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee”.
Had the dossier been written exclusively by the JIC, Scarlett could have had no objection to Campbell using the words that he had proposed. At the time, the grey area between the assessment of the Government and that of the intelligence community did not seem important. However, we now know that it was because the dossier upgraded or exaggerated assessments made by the JIC.
In summary, our understanding of the Iraq dossier must now fundamentally change. The idea that we had was that spin doctors stood outside the drafting process, making suggestions that could be endorsed or rejected by the JIC as a whole. We now know that spin doctors were inside the process, drafting material and shaping decisions about content. The JIC appears not to have been given the opportunity to approve the final dossier. When we understand that, the scope for sexing up appears much greater. Let us briefly look at some examples.
First, there is the notorious 45-minute claim. The claim appeared in the standing JIC assessments, but was not thought important enough to be included in the parallel draft dossiers of 5 and 9 September. The Government have always stated that the 45-minute claim appeared in the first draft dossier, but we now know that that is in incorrect, courtesy of a recent letter to me by the Foreign Secretary. Even when the claim did appear, there was a significant change in the wording. According to the assessment:
“Intelligence...indicates that chemical and biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within 20-45 minutes.”
The final dossier rendered that as:
“The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes”—
Secondly, let us take the changes that were made between the draft documents of 10 and 16 September. In the first, the executive summary makes a clear division between one set of bullet points, which are described as judgments, and a second set, which represent what recent intelligence was said to indicate. In the later document, the two sets of bullet points were merged, and all the points that had previously been described as indications were upgraded to judgments. The Cabinet Office has been unable to identify the person who wrote the executive summary.
Thirdly, there is the nuclear claim. It was claimed that if sanctions had been removed and Saddam Hussein had acquired fissile material from abroad, he could have produced a nuclear weapon within one to two years. The Prime Minister was careful not to attribute that claim directly to the JIC, and now we know why: the JIC assessment was significantly different, saying that it would take Saddam less than five years to produce a nuclear weapon. During the drafting process, that changed to “at least two years” and then, finally, to “one to two years”. Again, further new evidence shows that the Cabinet Office has been unable to substantiate that claim. Some weeks ago, I asked the Prime Minister on the Floor of the House to explain the justification for that timetable, but he was unable to answer. It appears to have been quite simply an exaggeration of the assessment provided by the intelligence experts.
Those three examples are serious enough, but the dossier is littered with others. In many places, a phrase such as “intelligence indicates” was replaced with one such as “intelligence confirms”. Even the title of the dossier was changed at the last minute from “Iraq’s Programme For Weapons of Mass Destruction” to “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction”—one suggesting that Iraq wanted WMD, the other implying that it already had them.
The Hutton and Butler inquiries acknowledged those facts, but the role of spin doctors and the marginalisation of the JIC must now be re-examined. In the light of the new evidence, will the Minister answer the following questions? First, what is in the John Williams draft of 9 September and why are we not allowed to see it? What are the Government hiding? Secondly, if the Williams draft was submitted to the Hutton inquiry, what form did it take? Was Lord Hutton fully informed of its authorship and the document’s place in the chronology of the dossier? Why is there no evidence of it on the inquiry website? Thirdly, who were the members of the drafting group supporting John Scarlett, and who, in particular, wrote the executive summary? Fourthly, in what meaningful sense, if any, did the JIC approve the dossier? Surely it was John Scarlett, the chairman, acting independently of the committee and reporting back to Alastair
Campbell, who signed off the dossier, not as a JIC document, as we have heard, but as the Government’s assessment.
The case for addressing such concerns is overwhelming. On Monday, our future Prime Minister said that lessons should still be learned about the role of intelligence in presenting the case for military intervention. The Chancellor would not have said that if he believed that the Hutton and Butler inquiries had been exhaustive. British servicemen and Iraqi civilians are still dying in Iraq. The Prime Minister is leaving office this month, and the war is his legacy. We must never again go to war on a false premise, and the questions that I have put to the Minister must therefore be answered.
11.17 am
The Minister for the Middle East (Dr. Kim Howells): I congratulate the hon. Member for Billericay (Mr. Baron) on calling the debate and thank him for providing us with the opportunity once again to clarify the issue. Allow me to respond on behalf of the Government, who, I must report, have made their position on the issue clear in the past, and that position has not changed. I am sure that my response will disappoint the conspiracy theorists, but I am afraid that the truth about the production of the Government’s dossier on weapons of mass destruction is much more mundane than they would like.
In the short time allocated to me, I want to start with two important points about the John Williams draft. First, the draft was a personal attempt by John Williams at drafting a document in which the Government would explain the threat that Saddam and his regime posed. It was not specifically commissioned as part of the formal drafting process overseen by the then JIC chairman, John Scarlett, and it was not used as the basis for the dossier that the Government subsequently published. Secondly, I can assure hon. Members categorically that Mr. Williams made no reference in his draft to weapons of mass destruction being deployed within 45 minutes.
Before describing how the dossier was produced, it is important that I remind hon. Members of why it was produced.
Mr. Baron: I certainly did not claim that the 45-minute claim was in that first full draft. However, will the Minister not accept that John Scarlett, as we have learned since, actually requested that document one day before he produced his own first full draft? That is why the John Williams draft is important and why it is only right that it should be made public.
Dr. Howells: I will come to that in a moment if the hon. Gentleman will allow me. The sequence is important, and we need to get it absolutely right. He said that the war goes on and that men and women are still dying in Iraq. As a frequent visitor to Iraq, I know what the situation is like and I know the gravity of our military involvement. That is why it is important that we separate the conspiracy theories from the facts, so I will continue, if I may.
The threat posed by Saddam’s regime was real. It had waged a long and bloody war against Iran, occupied Kuwait and violently suppressed its own people—notably the Shi’a and Kurds. Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran and his own people. No Iraqi, whatever his or her ethnic or religious background, was safe from the abuses of his appalling regime. The threat went further, into the international arena, where the regime’s flagrant disregard for the numerous Security Council resolutions that followed the first Gulf war was a running sore for more than a decade. Saddam’s serial flouting of international conventions and his determination to abuse programmes put in place to help the Iraqi people, such as the UN oil for food programme, not only added to the suffering of the Iraqi people but threatened to undermine international relations and the rule of law. We also had to take seriously the threat posed by Saddam’s determination to develop weapons of mass destruction, coupled with his proven willingness to use them against other states and his own people.
Through the UN’s inspection regimes, intelligence gathering and subsequent examination of Iraqi archives, we now know a lot more about the extent of Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programmes and Saddam’s determination to maintain or resurrect them up to and beyond the inspection regime. Despite exhaustive attempts to establish the facts, not least by the Iraq survey group, it remains unclear exactly which of Iraq’s WMD programmes were ended, or when. The fact that those programmes existed, and that Saddam had shown a readiness to use WMD, is beyond doubt. It was against that background that the Government’s dossier on WMD was conceived. It was designed to help explain, within the limits of our knowledge at the time, the extent of the threat that Saddam’s regime posed.
As the hon. Gentleman has told us, concern about the dossier has centred on two issues: first, the accuracy of the intelligence that informed it, and secondly, the drafting process—specifically whether it was modified in its tone and content to have more public impact. Both of those issues were extensively covered by the four inquiries that have already been conducted on Iraq. All found that the Government had acted in good faith and that the assessment of Iraq’s WMD presented in the September 2002 dossier was consistent with the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments on which it drew.
The hon. Gentleman has claimed that he has new evidence, and I shall try to deal with that. The inquiries, however, also made important criticisms of the Government dossier. They found that key intelligence used in drafting the dossier had been “unreliable” and that some intelligence—particularly that relating to the claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes—had been presented, as the hon. Gentleman has told us, without adequate context.
Following the Butler review, the then Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), announced in a written statement to the House on 12 October 2004 the withdrawal of some of the intelligence that had formed the basis of the Government’s dossier. The Government further accepted that by March 2003 it
was unlikely that Iraq possessed actual stockpiles of WMD; and the Prime Minister accepted full responsibility for mistakes made with intelligence. Lord Butler’s committee said that some of the intelligence included in the dossier should have been better validated. The Government accepted that, and the Secret Intelligence Service has taken steps to improve the validation of intelligence, as the 2006 annual report of the Intelligence and Security Committee acknowledged. The ISC annual report also noted that the Government have introduced measures to ensure greater awareness and understanding of the limitations of intelligence among Ministers and other senior officials, including a confidential guide covering the nature and use of intelligence circulated to readers of intelligence across Government.
The inquiries confirmed that in drafting the dossier the Joint Intelligence Committee had not been subjected to political pressures; nor had its impartiality been compromised. That, I understand, is what the hon. Gentleman is saying. Yet some people continue to see conspiracies despite the work and findings of Lords Hutton and Butler, the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Mr. Baron: I suggest that the Minister is not addressing my central point. One accepts that elements of the intelligence were ropey and that in effect four inquiries have looked into the matter. However, my central point was that both Lord Hutton and Lord Butler accepted those points and accepted that the document had been sexed up, but thought that that was legitimate because the drafting process was owned by the JIC. The new evidence suggests that that was not the case—that spin doctors were on the inside of the process, driving it forward, and that that accounts for the sexing up. Will the Minister focus on that point about what the new evidence shows about the drafting process?
Dr. Howells: If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I shall try to answer his questions and the debate in my own way, and my own words. I am sure that he would not have taken a leaf out of the book of spin doctors, and tried to mouth what I am about to say. However, I will say this: first, he has said that Alastair Campbell commissioned the dossier, and I can tell him categorically that that is not true: the Prime Minister commissioned the dossier. I have no doubt that Alastair Campbell was involved in subsequent discussions with other civil servants about the dossier—I should be surprised if that did not happen—but the Prime Minister commissioned it. That is the first assertion that must be nailed.
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