Chris Ames

Who is spinning more, Chilcot or his witnesses?

2009-12-17T17:23:53Z

Sir John Chilcot's statement this afternoon as the Iraq Inquiry broke up for Christmas was reported by the Telegraph at 3.30, a few minutes after he gave it. Presumably they had an early copy of the text. I didn't get one, perhaps because I have been critical on some of the issues that Chilcot addressed. I'm going to be even more critical: it is difficult to know who is spinning more - Chilcot or his witnesses.

We have learnt that Tony Blair will give evidence in public, although it remains unclear whether he will also have a secret session; that the Inquiry will seek to protect Labour from political embarrassment during the election campaign; and that it will only now begin to ask government permission to discuss and disclose actual documentary evidence.

On the last point, Chilcot explained that "We took a conscious decision to do this through the oral hearings rather than through the publication of a mass of documentary material, because we believe that this is the most helpful way to provide the necessary context. We have therefore not yet made any requests to Government to declassify documents to allow them to be published."

Chilcot implicitly admitted that the Inquiry's questioning has been hamstrung by the prohibition on quoting from the documents that it has failed to have declassified. He said that "As we move into the next phase of evidence taking, where we will hear from Ministers and the most senior civil servants and military officers, the Inquiry will increasingly wish to draw on government records which are currently classified -in some cases highly classified -in its questioning"

The effect has been that witnesses have felt free to spin away to their hearts' content. What makes this more farcical is that many of the documents that have been tiptoed round have long been in the public domain through leaks. Would referring to leaked documents be an "ambush" as Chilcot puts it?

Here is an example. There is documentary evidence that shows that Sir David Manning told Condoleezza Rice in March 2002 that Tony Blair "would not budge" in his support for regime change. Manning gave evidence without reference to this. Here is what he said:

"I went across to talk to Dr Rice, to prepare for this visit, in a sense to take soundings, to find out what it was the Americans would want to put on the agenda and also to see where they might have got to in reviewing the Iraq policy, but also to reflect to them the preoccupations that the Prime Minister had, the priorities he would have for this visit, and also his own thinking, how his own mind was turning on Iraq and on a lot of other issues. I did say to Dr Rice at this meeting, at this reconnaissance meeting, that if the United States was thinking about reviewing its policy and it wanted coalition support, if it wanted the participation of its allies in a new policy, then it would need to address allies' concerns, very much obviously including our own, and I think it is just worth recalling the coalition idea had been powerful after Afghanistan, that the Americans had worked with a coalition and, therefore, there was a lot to be said for encouraging them to work with the coalition on this new issue. I said to Dr Rice that if they were going to construct a coalition, there were a number of issues that they must think through, as far as we were concerned. One was: what role did they envisage for the UN inspectors? What were they going to do by way of explaining the threat that Saddam posed? It was very important, if we were going to ramp up the pressure on Iraq, to explain what the nature of the threat was, so that the public was aware of that. They would need, if the peaceful route failed, a convincing plan about how you got rid of Saddam Hussein if it came to that issue of regime change, and they would certainly need a convincing blueprint about what a post-Saddam Iraq should look like. I also said that the Middle East peace process, which I have alluded to already, which was in a very dangerous state at this time, that the Israel/Palestine issue was critical; it was not an optional extra. I suggested that we weren't anywhere near, at this stage, having answers to these problems, and Dr Rice agreed. I said that, naturally, the next stage in this would be for the President and for the Prime Minister to discuss this when the Prime Minister went to Crawford."

Anyone who thinks that this witness was "commendably open and candid" is either very naive or spinning more than the witness. The truth is that the "narrative" that the Inquiry's government witnesses have constructed is a partial one - in both senses of the word. If the public get a sanitised version of events, because the Inquiry chooses not to publish the evidence, it is doing more harm than good.

Having said that the Inquiry will now wish to make better use of classified documents, Chilcot added that: "Where we do, we will seek the necessary declassification of records in advance of the relevant public hearings, with a view to making the written records publicly available." Again by saying this, he admits that such documents are - and have been - necessary for public understanding.

His explanation falls apart at this point. Even if the Inquiry does not intend to publish documents until the next phase, it could well have begun the process of "declassifying" them long before now. Has he not read the protocol that he talks about? Does he not realise that it sets up a very torturous process by which the government can delay, delay and ultimately veto? If the next phase begins and there are outstanding requests for permission to publish, Chilcot will only have himself to blame.

Chilcot also added a fake veneer of mystique to the status of many of these documents when he talks about them being "classified" and therefore "declassified". This reflects more about the government's failure to bring about true freedom of information. As is well established, the list of reasons why things might not be published goes far, far beyond national security.

On the issue of taking a break for the election, the Inquiry could have decided to carry on without fear or to favour the government by keeping damaging revelations out of the campaign. It has chosen to do the latter. Make no mistake, this is censorship. The excuse that "the Inquiry should not be used as a platform for political advantage" is a scandalous piece of spin. No-one is suggesting that MPs should be invited to the hearing to make statements. The way a democracy works is that you give people the facts and let them decide.

Chilcot's statement today can be summed up in a few words: "don't trouble the public with the facts - they can't handle it."

Brian Jones on Iraq Inquiry Digest

2009-12-16T00:34:39Z

The article by Brian Jones referred to in the Independent's lead story Scarlett accused of misleading inquiry is in fact on the Iraq Inquiry Digest website. It includes a near contemporaneous account of what experts at the Defence Intelligence Staff made of the notorious 45 minutes claim before it was published in the dossier:

this was far from convincing intelligence on which to base a decision to go to war.

‘I think there should be mention of this,’ I said, ‘But it should be that there is an unlikely possibility – no more.’

Blix on Iraq Inquiry Digest

2009-12-15T10:15:44Z

Iraq Inquiry Digest has published the full text of Hans Blix's article, published in the Guardian today. Read it here.

Blix on Blair, Regime change and hypocrisy

2009-12-14T22:58:38Z

The Guardian has published a hard-hitting piece by Hans Blix: "Blair sold Iraq on WMD, but only regime change adds up", in which he responds to Tony Blair's comments at the weekend:

"Must we not conclude that the WMD arguments were "deployed" mainly as the best way of selling the war?"

The former weapons inspector accuses Blair of an unpredictable gamble in seeking regime change through the UN. The gamble failed when "Iraq became more co-operative and showed no defiance that could prompt the authorising of armed force."

Blix, who has not been asked to give evidence to the Iraq inquiry, compares the war preparations to a train moving towards the front which nothing could stop: "Of course, if regime change – and not WMD – was the main aim, the steady speed becomes logical."

It is a deeply eloquent and considered piece from a man who has had his words twisted to justify war and has been slow, until now, to doubt the good faith of Tony Blair, however much he felt that his refusal to accept that Iraq might not have wmd showed a lack of critical thinking.

The absence of convincing evidence of WMD did not stop the train to war. It arrived at the front before the weather got too hot and the soldiers got impatient waiting for action. The factual reports of the IAEA and Unmovic did, however, have the result that a majority on the security council wanted more inspections and were unconvinced about the existence of WMD.

At the end the UK tried desperately to get some kind of authorisation from the security council as a legal basis for armed action – but failed. Confirming the fears of Dick Cheney, President Bush's vice-president, the UN and inspections became an impediment – not to armed action, but to legitimacy.

Unlike the US, the UK and perhaps other members of the alliance were not ready to claim a right to preventive war against Iraq regardless of security council authorisation. In these circumstances they developed and advanced the argument that the war was authorised by the council under a series of earlier resolutions. As Condoleezza Rice put it, the alliance action "upheld the authority of the council". It was irrelevant to this argument that China, France, Germany and Russia explicitly opposed the action and that a majority on the council declined to give the requested green light for the armed action. If hypocrisy is the compliment that virtue pays to vice then strained legal arguments are the compliments that violators of UN rules pay to the UN charter.

Verdict first, evidence nowhere

2009-12-14T19:43:37Z

When it comes to the Iraq Inquiry, not everyone in the media is rabidly anti-war and anti-Blair. In a piece for the Spectator Melanie Phillips praises "John Rentoul’s excellent ‘Iraq inquiry rebuttal’ blog" and attacks "the hallucinatory distortions now taking place almost every day in the media reporting of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war."

She points out what Iraq Inquiry Digest contributor Stan Rosenthal has repeatedly said - that most of the evidence so far has been in favour of the government's case. For example, Phillips says:

As Sir Christopher Meyer told the Chilcot inquiry, by March 2002 the British government had independently of the US decided

"that containment and sharper sanctions had run its course..."

Interesting that the claim that this was an "independent" decision of the British government is not backed up by an actual quote. I did try searching Meyer's evidence for "independently" and "independent" but they are not there.

Meyer did say that in early 2002 the government's policy:

wasn't to abandon containment,
2 but the knowledge that Iraq was under active discussion
3 in Washington, in a way that hadn't been the case
4 before, the signals that we were picking up from our
5 military advisers in the British Embassy, that the
6 thinking was now going ahead on Iraq, that Rumsfeld had
7 been tasked to think about this and come back, and
8 Rumsfeld and Franks -- the general in charge of the
9 Central Command -- was being told to look at all this,
10 that started wheels turning, I believe, inside the
11 Foreign Office.
12 So by the time you have the first meeting between
13 the President and the Prime Minister, which was at
14 Crawford in April 2002, they weren't there to talk about
15 containment or sharpening sanctions. There had been
16 a sea change in attitudes in the US administration to
17 which the British Government, progressively from October
18 onwards, had to adapt and make up its mind where it
19 stood on these various issues.

I may be missing something but it seems that Meyer's evidence was exactly the opposite of what Phillips said it was. If you are Melanie Phillips, the rule is clearly "verdict first, evidence nowhere."

Blair: I'll spin when it suits me

2009-12-12T08:56:14Z

by Chris Ames

Two weeks ago, Tony Blair was asked on US television about the allegation that he had bullied attorney general Lord Goldsmith into backing the war. He said:

"I think the best thing with this inquiry is actually - to let us all give our evidence to the inquiry. ... I think the appropriate place to [go through these issues] is at the inquiry."

It seems as if Blair was merely looking for the right opportunity to begin the spin operation on his own terms. He has now given an interview to the BBC in which he declared that he would still have thought it right to depose Saddam Hussein, even if he had known he did not have weapons of mass destruction:

""I would still have thought it right to remove him. I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments, about the nature of the threat."

...

He added that there had been "12 years of United Nations to and fro on this subject" of Iraq's weapons and that Saddam had "used chemical weapons on his own people, so this was obviously the thing that was uppermost in my mind - the threat to the region".

Chilcot's killer question hits Blair

2009-12-08T21:24:01Z

In this post this morning on Iraq Inquiry Digest, I wondered whether Sir John Chilcot would follow through with his question about Tony Blair's claim in the foreword to the September 2002 dossier that intelligence had "established beyond doubt" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Was it backed, as has been claimed, by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)? I suggested that "In spite of Blair’s claim that he was just disclosing the JIC’s assessments, Scarlett knows better and might just tell the truth." Well Chilcot did ask the question and Scarlett's answer hung Blair out to dry, as I argue in this Comment is Free piece.

The Daily Mail says similarly: Sir John Scarlett distances himself from Blair's 'overtly political' foreword to Iraq dossier

Chaos in Iraq? There's a story that needs some development

2009-12-07T17:45:55Z

The Iraq Inquiry has published a written statement by Major General Tim Cross, who gave evidence today about his experience of being attached to the US Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance before the invasion and the Coalition Provisional Authority in the chaos of post-war Iraq, which he apparently predicted.

"My UK team was strengthened a little, including a very useful media team provided by Alastair Campbell, effectively from within No 10."

Who might that be? Here's an article from the Telegraph, MPs call up Campbell over 'dodgy dossiers', dated 20 June 2003:

The Telegraph has learnt that two authors of a second dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction were posted to Baghdad from Downing Street only days before Mr Blair announced two parliamentary inquiries into the alleged misuse of intelligence information by the Government.

Paul Hamill and Naheed Mehta, who might be able to shed light on the dossier's preparation, were moved from the Communication and Information Centre, a No 10 department located within the Foreign Office.

They are now working as press officers for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Hamill was the CIC's head of story development and had a big role in both the September 2002 dossier and the January 2003 (really) dodgy dossier. It seems he wasn't moved just to be got out of the way but also because the occupation of Iraq was turning into a PR disaster.

Blix comments are another blow to the Iraq inquiry

2009-12-05T17:27:31Z

Hans Blix’s comments to the Daily Mail have received surprisingly little coverage but are an indictment not just of Tony Blair but of the Iraq Inquiry so far. Once again we have learnt something about the build up to war - that Blair pressurised Blix to sex-up his findings - from the newspapers rather than the Inquiry.

It is amazing that Blix has not so far been invited to give evidence at the Inquiry, which has heard testimony exclusively from current or former government insiders - evidence that has largely gone unchallenged. Now that evidence has been challenged from the outside, and by someone who knows what he is talking about:

Dr Blix also takes issue with a statement made at the Chilcot inquiry this week by Sir David Manning. He told the hearing that Dr Blix’s team had examined ten of 19 sites named by British intelligence and ‘turned up some quite interesting stuff’.

But the weapons inspector says he ought to have been asked what ‘interesting’ really meant.

‘Yes, they led to interesting results, that’s true – but never to WMD. We found a few documents and some conventional weapons – grenades and so forth – nothing more.

Blix has directly criticised the lack of critical questioning from the Inquiry, pointing out just one example of where language that amounted to little more than spin went unchallenged.

And the Mail piece has a great punchline:

the Chilcot inquiry has clearly reawakened so many memories, and he is not one to stand by and watch history being distorted.

Sir John would only need to lift the phone and – much to Blair’s discomfort – the man who warned him about the absurdity of going to war on a false premise would board the next London-bound plane.

Michael Smith: Manning was outrageous

2009-12-04T18:13:42Z

Writing on Iraq Inquiry Digest, journalist Michael Smith, to whom the famous "Downing Street memos" were leaked, comments on the Inquiry's hearings so far in relation to regime change and the "early air war".

After the first couple of weeks of hearings, the Inquiry seems to be failing to ask key witnesses about crucial elements of the march to war that are already in the public domain, many of them from the so-called Downing Street Memos, leaked to me initially at the Daily Telegraph and later at the Sunday Times.
...
Manning was outrageous. His memo to Blair and Meyer’s memo to Manning are very clear on the commitment to regime change and no amount of suggesting that regime change did not mean regime change will work.

read the whole article

There's only one Tony Piggott

2009-12-04T15:32:27Z

Reading the Independent's account of the evidence given today by Tony Piggott, formerly deputy chief of the defence staff, to the Iraq inquiry, I'm wondering if this is the same Tony Piggott who attended a meeting at Chequers on 2 April 2002.

According to the account of today's hearing:

He said initially the focus was on getting Saddam Hussein to give up his weapons of mass destruction rather than "regime change" in Baghdad.

"The intent I was picking up from HMG Ltd - not the Americans, HMG Ltd - was WMD," he said.

According to Alastair Campbell's published diaries:

“We discussed whether the central aim was WMD or regime change. Piggott’s view was that it was WMD. TB felt it was regime change in part because of WMD but more broadly because of the threat to the region and the world.”

I'm not saying I'd take Campbell's word for anything, ever, but surely there must be a record of this meeting?

The Iraq inquiry fails again

2009-12-04T08:35:25Z

The Financial Times reports that:

Alastair Campbell, the former Downing Street spin-doctor, asked the head of the armed forces to give Tony Blair a more "glass half-full" assessment of Iraq war preparations, it emerged yesterday.

Lord Boyce, the former chief of defence staff, told the Iraq inquiry that he was "taken aside" and asked to give more optimistic advice after warning the prime minister over military planning. The inquiry did not ask who urged Lord Boyce to offer more upbeat analysis. But he later confirmed to the Financial Times he was approached by Mr Campbell.

Well done The FT's Alex Barker for finding this out. But the increasingly useless Inquiry did not even ask the most basic question. To recap:

The inquiry did not ask who urged Lord Boyce to offer more upbeat analysis.

Interestingly, Campbell's published diaries give a lengthy account of a meeting about Iraq on 2 April 2002:

CDS appeared to be trying to shape the meeting towards inaction, constantly pointing out the problems...

It's hardly rocket science, is it?

The Richard and Judy inquiry

2009-12-03T18:20:50Z

Iain Paton is a former RAF Flight Lieutenant who has made a submission to the Iraq Inquiry and written on Iraq Inquiry Digest about his experience of seeing a war being planned, badly and in secrecy, from mid-2002. This was the main issue covered by the Inquiry today. Once again, the only witnesses were from the government. They were given the usual easy ride and made references to documents that the Inquiry is unwilling or unable to publish. I wrote about this on the Digest this afternoon, after which Iain added this pithy comment:

Unfortunately, it’s fast turning into a Richard and Judy Inquiry! If it continues in this vein, it will make Hutton look good!

I don't think you could sum the Inquiry up much better, although Brian Jones, formerly of the Defence Intelligence Staff and a former Hutton witness, called the Inquiry's performance "pitiful" in a comment that I used in an article for Index on Censorship about how the Inquiry is being gagged. He added: "They didn’t get close to exploring the implications of what was in the documents we know about."

Another comment on the Digest was:

I’m an ordinary member of the public who listened intently to the session with Sir David Manning yesterday. Even I could identify areas where the most elementary forensic questioning should have been used by the panel and was not. Why not?

As Paton says, "radical action is needed to restore confidence". Does the Inquiry have an answer?

Taken for a ride

2009-11-30T18:34:34Z

I've just posted this on Iraq Inquiry Digest

Sir David Manning spent the afternoon trying to redefine “regime change”, unchallenged by the Iraq Inquiry panel. To square the circle of both contemporaneous evidence and witness testimony that shows that Tony Blair agreed to regime change in Iraq in March 2002, Manning claimed that this actually meant getting Saddam Hussein to disarm. He set great store by Blair’s insistence on going down “the UN route” but eventually admitted that the UN process was not exhausted because the Americans would not allow it.

However much Manning tried to spin things, the upshot of it is this. Blair committed Britain to war in early 2002 without telling the country and without getting Parliament’s approval. A year later, he was trapped, a passenger on Bush’s wagon.

As I keep pointing out, Sir John Chilcot’s assertion that witnesses will not mislead the Inquiry because it has all the documents requires a lot of trust in the panel members to bring them into play. But this afternoon, time after time, the panel allowed Manning to make claims that are contradicted by what he and others committed to paper at the time. The Inquiry will not publish these papers and – as I have pointed out – the effect of the protocol that the government imposed on the Inquiry is that they can neither be published nor publicly referred to without express permission. The government can control and is controlling what questions the Inquiry can ask.

Manning is the author of a leaked memo to Tony Blair recording that in March 2002 he told the then US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that Blair “would not budge” in his support for regime change. To those of us who are not inclined to believe that the emperor’s nudity is an effect of our lack of sophistication, this is pretty straightforward: Bush wanted rid of Saddam and Blair promised to back him whatever. The fact that another unpublished document from the time – the Iraq Options paper – records that an invasion was the only way to do this doesn’t leave much room for doubt.

The response of government witnesses to this is becoming clear. Let’s claim that regime change didn’t mean getting rid of Saddam but securing Iraqi disarmament. Then every time there is evidence that Bush and Blair were seeking regime change, we will claim that that was perfectly compatible with our claim that we were seeking disarmament. How stupid do they think we are?

Manning spent the whole afternoon claiming that the main thrust of what Blair said to Bush was that we should seek to use the UN to achieve disarmament. This was one of a set of conditions that Blair attached to British support at the famous Crawford summit in April 2002. The panel seemed to believe this but one by one pointed out that the conditions were not met.

After a hugely frustrating afternoon, Sir Roderick Lyne eventually pointed out to Manning that not one of Blair’s “shopping list” of conditions was met. This included , he pointed out, the condition that the UN process would be exhausted. Manning did not disagree, effectively admitting that the UN process was not exhausted at the time that the war began.

As I pointed out on Friday, because Blair agreed in the Spring of 2002 to back an invasion if it came to it, he gave up the right to define when the UN process had been exhausted. Manning pretty well confirmed this. When the US had had enough of the UN route, Blair felt compelled to commit British troops because he had promised to do so. Manning and others wanted more time, even felt that the inspectors might establish that there were no wmd in Iraq, but the US would not allow it. Blair’s condition was circular and pointless.

Neither was there any consideration of whether there was a material breach of UN resolution 1441 or whether it just became essential to claim that there was. It was put to Manning that the UN route was only ended in that it became clear that there would be no second resolution in early 2003 but that the inspection process had not ended. (It was also pointed out that perhaps the reason for this was that other countries saw the US bent on war and did not want to give it the green light) Manning pointed out that once military action became inevitable, the UN inspectors had to be withdrawn.

Chilcot also put it to Manning that once Britain had hitched itself to the UN wagon, we initially had some influence but eventually became a passenger. Manning made a reference to the lack of influence post-war but ducked the most important implication – that Blair had simploy backed himself into a corner pre-war.

Perhaps the Inquiry are grasping the point in spite of themselves – but we simply don’t know. Everyone I have spoken to - as well as the Guardian's Andrew Sparrow - thinks they did very badly today.

Given that the Mail on Sunday has made the running this week, the Inquiry again risks becoming a sideshow.

Scarlett at Iraq Inquiry next week

2009-11-30T18:30:11Z

Sir John Scarlett is to appear at the Inquiry next week - for an hour and a half!

See all next week's witnesses

Hans Blix on Iraq Inquiry Digest

2009-11-24T20:52:31Z

Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has given Iraq Inquiry Digest a summary of the three lessons that he thinks the Iraq Inquiry should learn. This is the gist of what he said in a Sky Television interview on Monday.

Governments should pay attention to what international inspectors say (a recommendation made already by the Butler commission);

A government may calculate its engaging in armed intervention but it is hard to foresee how things may develop. (Cf. today Iran);

Governments should take the UN Charter legal restrictions on the use of force seriously. While the UK did not seek to claim that preventive war was permissible, its justification for joining the armed intervention was thin and unpersuasive. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, did advise that the UK could rest its case on it, in a secret memo (later leaked) he noted that it might not have been accepted by an international tribunal.

So where is Patey's paper?

2009-11-24T18:47:57Z

We learned at the Iraq Inquiry today that William Patey, who used to be in charge of the Middle East at the Foreign Office, commissioned a paper in 2001 that discussed options for Iraq, including regime change.

But the Inquiry website has not published the paper, or much else. How sensitive can it be? Regime change went ahead.

The website does have a page containing "evidence" from the Foreign Office and the MoD on UNSCRs 1900-2001 and the no-fly-zones respectively. Both are recent constructs for the Inquiry, dated November 2009. In the absence of actual contemporaneous evidence, this adds to the feeling that the only version of events that will be published on the Inquiry website is the official one.

Watch the Inquiry at Iraq Inquiry Digest

2009-11-24T10:26:20Z

The Iraq Inquiry Digest is running a live feed from the Inquiry.

Watch here and join in the debate!

Iraq Inquiry witnesses have seen the documents

2009-11-24T09:41:59Z

As the Iraq Inquiry's public hearings begin, the Telegraph has spotted something interesting in the protocol for witnesses:

“[The Inquiry] confirmed that witnesses would be told in advance of the subjects, events and documents about which they would be questioned, although they would not be told the precise lines of questioning.”

I wrote yesterday about how the Inquiry has so far failed to publish any of the many documents that it has been given. Hutton published nearly all relevant documents. I wondered whether this was part of a plan to avoid witnesses preparing their answers. It would have been a bit pointless as the government witnesses will know about the documents already.

But anyway, the witnesses have seen the very documents on which they will be questioned but the public won’t.

Whose side is the Inquiry on?

Follow the Inquiry at Iraq Inquiry Digest.

Rentoul backs Iraq Inquiry Digest

2009-11-22T11:09:14Z

In a breakthrough this morning, the Independent's top blogger John Rentoul has backed (I think) the Iraq Inquiry Digest, of which I am editor.

Yesterday Rentoul also praised (I think) a piece in the Mail by Peter Oborne, in which Oborne pointed out that the Inquiry has not yet announced plans to question Michael Shipster, the MI6 intelligence agent who brought back intelligence that Iraq didn't actually have wmd.

How gracious of Rentoul, whose version of journalism involves criticising other people without troubling the sum of knowledge himself, to draw attention to the work of others who take a different view! At least I think that's what he was doing...

Iraq Inquiry - get there early

2009-11-19T19:35:32Z

The Iraq Inquiry has announced details of public access to its hearings, which begin next week, and of possible t.v. and internet coverage.

There are 100 places at the venue - the QEII Conference Centre in Westminster - on a first come first served basis.

Read more - and follow the Inquiry's progress - on Iraq Inquiry Digest.

Blair at Iraq Inquiry early

2009-11-13T07:48:52Z

The Iraq Inquiry has released a statement – in the name of Sir John Chilcot – about its first set of public hearings. Grabbing the headlines is the revelation that ministers, “including the former Prime Minister”, will be seen early in the new year, i.e. before the general election. I suggested this in a blog piece last week on Iraq Inquiry Digest.

It seems to me that if Blair admits early on that - as the mass of evidence shows - he agreed in early 2002 to join in the US plan for regime change, the Inquiry will waste a lot less time looking at alleged intelligence failures over weapon of mass destruction.

How independent is the Iraq Inquiry?

2009-11-12T09:48:47Z

Tessa Jowell, minister for the Cabinet Office, has broken the government’s duck and answered a parliamentary question about the Iraq Inquiry. Tory shadow foreign secretary William Hague asked her “how many officials from her Department are seconded to work on the Chilcot Inquiry”. She gave rather more information than had been requested:

“There are currently 19 staff employed in the Iraq Inquiry Secretariat, comprising both full and part-time staff drawn from Government Departments as follows: Cabinet Office, six; Ministry of Defence, four; Foreign and Commonwealth Office, three; Northern Ireland Office, one; Serious Fraud Office, one; Government Communications Headquarters, one; Department for International Development, one. These staff are either on secondment, loan or attachment. In addition, there are currently two temporary staff engaged from outside Government.”

If the Inquiry Secretariat is packed with civil servants – and someone from GCHQ – how independent is it? How hard are the civil servants going to fight for the right to see and publish all the relevant information? Not very hard would be my guess. But we’ll see.

On other fronts, for example questions about which ministers and officials have been asked to appear, the government is still stonewalling.

You can read more about the Inquiry at Iraq Inquiry Digest, which I edit and which has much more information than the official Inquiry website.

I've no idea

2009-11-10T15:38:14Z

Liberal Democrat MP and shadow transport secretary Norman Baker has a knack of asking questions that show how clueless ministers are. He has asked Paul Clark, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department for Transport (about whom I have written before in a blog entitled Stupid and Pointless):

what representations he has received from hon. and right hon. Members of each party in favour of (a) a third runway at Heathrow Airport, (b) a second runway at Gatwick Airport, (c) further expansion of Stansted Airport and (d) a new airport in the Thames Estuary.

Clark replied:

No central records are held on any such representations and to search for the information would involve disproportionate cost.

It's the usual cop-out answer, but does the minister of state really not know how many letters he has received from MPs on each of these issues? Is there not a file or some type of monitoring system? Could someone not have a quick count without incurring disproportionate cost? If these letters are not held centrally, where are they held?

I think we will have to add clueless to stupid and pointless.

What was that all about?

2009-11-09T17:57:41Z

By way of a couple of quick updates on the Iraq Inquiry...

Yesterday, on Comment is Free, I did a blog piece on Thursday's seminar, hosted by the Inquiry on the evolution of international policy up to 2003. It seemed to me that the Inquiry members must now be in no doubt that the war was about regime change, not weapons of mass destruction (wmd). I suggested that if the Inquiry could get Tony Blair to admit this early on, it could save a lot of prevaricating, dissembling and contradiction.

Just posted on Iraq Inquiry Digest is an excellent piece by Brian Jones, formerly of the Defence Intelligence Staff, giving his view on the development of policy up to 2002. He takes the view that post-Gulf war US policy was about a lot more than wmd and increasingly (if not always) about regime change and that UK policy was mainly about keeping onside with the US. Read more here.