How Prime Minister’s right hand man
"sexed up" the September dossier
The September dossier contains on page 19 an assessment of what it calls "Saddam’s willingness to use chemical and biological weapons".

Until just before the dossier was published, this assessment gave the strong impression that these weapons would only be used for defensive purposes – which amounted to saying that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was no threat to ...

Labour MP, Paul Flynn, asked the following question in the House of Commons recently:

"To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what countries have promised to provide troops to the coalition force in Iraq; how many were originally promised; and how many are deployed in Iraq from each country."

He received the following written reply from Foreign Office Minister, Bill Rammell, on 15 September:

"In addition to ...

The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is not a Select Committee of the House of Commons, which reports to the House of Commons. It is a Committee appointed by the Prime Minister, which reports to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister has the legal authority to decide whether or not its reports are published and to censor them at will prior to publication.

The members of the ISC are normally senior MPs, often ex-ministers. It is ...

Since 9/11, a familiar refrain coming out of Washington has been that "terrorists" flourish in "failed states", where they have the freedom to organise and train unhindered by the security apparatus of a state. Doing something about "failed states" was said to be central to winning the "war on terrorism". It is ironic therefore that the US/UK have now created a "failed state" in Iraq. There may never be a functional state in Iraq ...

"The weakness, obviously, is our inability to say he [Saddam Hussein] could pull the nuclear trigger any time soon." (Tom Kelly to Alistair Campbell, 18 September 2002)

At the time of writing, the Hutton inquiry is into its third week. Countless, mostly irrelevant, documents have been submitted to the inquiry, and are available on the inquiry website. Witnesses have been examined in great detail about the merest trivia. And there is much ...

An interview with Clare Short by Steve Richards was broadcast on ITV on Sunday morning, 13 July 2003. The following extracts deal with the road to war on Iraq and the lack of preparation for its aftermath in Iraq, and with the problems thrown up by making policy in Downing Street.

CS: … we haven’t focussed yet on why Blix couldn’t continue to do his work. What was the urgency? … And there’s no explanation without them working to a ...

The US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, was given a hard time by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 29 July, when he appeared before it to report on "stabilisation" in Iraq.

The US Congress is waking up to the fact that the costs in US lives and in US dollars of occupying Iraq is open ended. The cost in dollars, currently running at around $4 billion a month, is not an insignificant amount even for the mighty US Treasury, ...

On 7 July, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee published the report of its inquiry into "The Decision to go to War in Iraq". At the time of its announcement on 3 June, the objective of the inquiry was stated to be to:

"consider whether the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, within the Government as a whole, presented accurate and complete information to Parliament in the period leading up to military action in Iraq, particularly in relation ...

"Army Col Richard McPhee … said he took seriously US intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given ‘release authority’ to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. ‘We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits’ for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, ‘there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. … Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long ...

"I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed" (General Hussein Kamel, son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, interviewed by UNSCOM & IAEA, 22 August 1995)

Clare Short suggested that Tony Blair thought it was honourable to back the US in taking military action against Iraq and that therefore he saw the various ruses and devices he used to get us there as "honourable ...