The Iraq Inquiry - Chilcott's Circus Clowns Come to Town

[Jan Klimkowski]

Magda - great find.

The exchange below is highly revealing about the way in which the spooks manipulated ministers by overstating the evidence, whilst leaving mandarin-style "ambiguity" to protect themselves if they were ever summonsed to explain this overstatement.

It seems that Robin Cook was essentially the only minister with both the experience and the integrity to tell British intelligence that they had overinterpreted the available evidence to paint Saddam as more of a threat than he was.

Of course Cook continued complaining about the manipulation of "evidence" in the runup to the war on Iraq, and ended up dead on a Scottish mountain in August 2005.

SIR RODERIC LYNE: Now, one of those experienced Ministers was Robin Cook, and he publicly disputed the view that the Government had formed, based on the intelligence. He did that in the House of Commons.
Did he do that when being briefed by you? Did he challenge this?
SIR JOHN SCARLETT: Well, he questioned me very closely on the assessment and asked for detail. He asked for more detail than other Ministers did. Of course I was doing it individually. Most were in groups. But of course he was an especially experienced minister when it came to the use of intelligence. He
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didn't dispute what I was saying, as it were. Nor did he dispute it subsequently afterwards in public. Where he of course took a different view was on how he interpreted it.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Yes. So he was sceptical about the interpretation, about the weight that the policy makers placed on the intelligence evidence that you were putting forward?
SIR JOHN SCARLETT: As I recall, he was sceptical about the conclusion they drew.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Yes.
SIR JOHN SCARLETT: About what the problem was, and how best to tackle it, which was, I think, a slightly different way of putting it.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: The seriousness and imminence of the threat, effectively.
Do you recall any others questioning you in a similarly close way or from whom you got a sense that they might share his scepticism?
SIR JOHN SCARLETT: No.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: If I go to the reports that went to the Ministers who received JIC reports, in the summaries on your reports -- and busy Ministers often focus very hard on a summary and don't always go into the detail -- there is a tendency for the caveats to disappear.
If I just take as examples the reports of 15 March 2002 and 9 September 2002, both of which we have discussed today, the summaries are written in very categorical terms. 15 March:
"Iraq retains up to 20 Al Hussein ballistic missiles. Iraq has begun development of medium range ballistic missiles. Iraq is pursuing a nuclear weapons progress". Full stop.
"Iraq currently has available a number of biological agents.
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Iraq can deliver CBW weapons."
That's all just from one summary. That's pretty striking stuff if you are reading it quickly and you are a lay person, and similarly, 9 September, first sentence:
"Iraq has a chemical and biological weapons capability and Saddam is prepared to use it."
And so on. You can look at points 4 and 6. I won't read them all out.
When you actually turn to the detail of the report, the very first paragraph of the one I have just quoted from, the September one, it says:
"Recent intelligence casts light on Iraq's holdings ..."
But it then goes on to say, very correctly:
"Intelligence remains limited. Saddam's own unpredictability complicates judgments. Much of this paper is necessarily based on judgment and assessment."
But that caveat, that warning, is not remotely reflected in the summary. I don't know if this has been picked up by other inquiries, Butler or the ISC or others. Is there a problem here?
SIR JOHN SCARLETT: Well, I'm sure Julian will want to come in on this, but actually I have already alluded to this when I was responding to a question from Sir Martin.
These of course are not summaries. They are key judgments, and therefore they are written as judgments. They are not written as summarising what is in the paper.
That's why they are stated as they are, and indeed we have always been at pains to try and make it clear that that is the case. That's why I have said that in March there's reference to sporadic and patchy intelligence, but there were actually quite firm judgments that the JIC was making at that stage, and then those judgments got firmer, as you have just reminded us,
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in September. Of course that is what Ministers were reading, and that's what they were meant to read. That's why the structure had been like that for really quite some time.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: I apologise for calling them summaries. You are quite right saying they are labelled "key judgments", but it actually makes it worse because if that's the bit that Ministers retain in their head, it is absolutely categorical statements that they are being given, and wouldn't it be wiser, actually, in key judgments, against the risk that a busy minister looks at that, retains that, as I would, flipping through a mass of papers in a red box, and have the caveats up on that page?
SIR JOHN SCARLETT: Can I say two points? First of all, this of course is the issue that effectively arose around the drafting of the dossier and the explanation that I offered as to why the caveats weren't there. It wasn't because they had been deliberately left out. It was because of the use of the executive summary as the equivalent of the key judgments, and exactly the same thing happens in the papers themselves.
Secondly, dare I say that this has actually been brought about because after this period, and I think probably after -- certainly after the summer of 2004, all front pages of the assessments have contained a box on the intelligence base. The intelligence base spells out the strengths and the weaknesses of the intelligence, which allows the key judgment to be made, but also flags up the point you are concerned about.
JULIAN MILLER: Just on the September case, my recollection of the discussion of 4 September is that the base document that was in front of the JIC was a draft. It wasn't a full JIC assessment, and it was full of the sort of caveated language because that was the sort of document it was.
In the discussion, the point was made by one of the JIC
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members that at this stage we should, as a committee, be very clear on what we were telling Ministers, and there was a view expressed in terms that, despite the caveats in the document prepared by the assessment staff, the view was that Saddam did possess the weapons and would be ready to use them, and that was the view that was shared around the JIC table, and which the JIC specifically wanted set out in those unambiguous terms as the advice that Ministers should read from their intelligence committee.
So you are absolutely right to distinguish between the body of the paper and the judgments, but it is a distinction which was made consciously and with deliberation.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Okay. The key point that John has made is that there is now more caveating on the front page to reduce the risk that judgments get too hard in people's minds.
SIR JOHN SCARLETT: But that flows from the Butler recommendation.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Yes. That was my question. I thought it might very well have done and I didn't know the answer, and you have given it to me. So thank you very much.