by Mark Curtis
From the Hutton inquiry emerged various emails from Downing Street officials, described by the Guardian as 'a frantic attempt to produce a dossier that will justify aggressive action against Saddam Hussein. Within the space of a fortnight and with almost no new evidence – other than the now infamous "45 minute warning" – Mr Blair's aides turned British policy towards Iraq upside down'.29
One Downing Street press official wrote that:
Much of the evidence we have is largely circumstantial so we need to convey to our readers that the cumulation of these facts demonstrates an intent on Saddam's part - the more they can be led to this conclusion themselves rather than have to accept judgements from us, the better.30
He also wrote that 'the more we advertise that unsupported assertions (eg Saddam attaches great importance to the possession of WMD) come from intelligence the better'. This should 'add to the feeling that we are presenting real evidence'. A Downing Street press officer similarly wrote: 'Can we show why we think he [Saddam] intends to use them [WMD] aggressively, rather than in self-defence?' The Guardian also reported that Julian Miller, John Scarlett's deputy, was having meetings with Downing Street media staff to ensure that everyone was 'on the right track'.31
In the material intended for public consumption, the government transformed possibilities about Iraqi capabilities into certainties and removed vital caveats. To give three examples in the process of drafting the September dossier:
The dossier stated that Iraq 'continued to produce chemical and biological weapons'. Yet the JIC 'did not know what had been produced and in what quantities', according to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.
A draft of Blair's foreword to the dossier read: 'The case I make is not that Saddam could launch a nuclear attack on London or another part of the UK (he could not)'. This was omitted from the final document.
An email from Jonathan Powell commenting on a draft of the dossier stated that the claim that Saddam would use chemical or biological weapons only if his regime was under threat posed 'a bit of a problem'. So the passage was redrafted and all reference to Saddam's defensive use of such weapons was taken out, leaving the impression that Britain was 45 minutes from attack.32
Brian Jones, a former senior Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) official, stated that 'the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier' which resulted 'in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities'. It is 'the intelligence community leadership . . . that had the final say on the assessment presented in the dossier', he noted. Jones told the Hutton inquiry that his staff had told him 'that there was no evidence that significant production had taken place either of chemical warfare agent or chemical weapons'. But 'the impression I had was . . . the shutters were coming down on this particular paper [i.e., the September dossier], that the discussion and the argument had been concluded'. An MoD civil servant similarly said that 'the perception was that the dossier had been round the houses several times in order to try to find a form of words which would strengthen certain political objectives'.33
The case against Iraq was indeed 'sexed up' both by No. 10 staff and some senior 'intelligence' officials. According to the Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor, John Scarlett was 'hopelessly seduced by Blair's coterie. Under Scarlett's control, drafters of the dossier put things in at Downing Street's suggestion. They also took things out'. Robin Cook noted that 'John Scarlett was only too consciously aware that the Prime Minister expected him to come up with a justification for war'.34
Alastair Campbell suggested more than a dozen separate changes to the draft dossier on Iraq; Scarlett responded by saying the language had been 'tightened'. Crucially, Campbell suggested that the word 'may' was weak and be substituted for the word 'are' so that when the dossier was published the assertion was that Iraq possessed weapons that 'are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them'.35
Campbell also suggested another significant change to the dossier. The September 5th draft stated that after the lifting of sanctions 'we assess that Iraq would need at least five years to produce a [nuclear] weapon. Progress would be much quicker if Iraq were able to buy fissile material'. In a memo on September 17th Campbell wrote to John Scarlett that the Prime Minister 'like me, was worried about the way you have expressed the nuclear issue. . . Can we not go back, on timings, to "radiological device" in months; nuclear bomb in 1–2 years with help; 5 years with no sanctions'. The final document stated that: 'Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon in between one and two years'.36
45 minutes
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the 45-minute claim is that anyone fell for such transparent hype. David Kelly apparently 'just laughed about the 45 minute claim', believing it 'risible'.37 If journalists had done the same thing, the government's case for invading Iraq might have collapsed.
Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon admitted that when the dossier was published he knew that the claim that Iraq could launch weapons within 45 minutes referred only to 'battlefield munitions' such as shells; i.e., that they could be used by Iraq only in response to an invasion. Many press reports (dutifully reporting propaganda as fact) assumed that the claim related to strategic or long-range missiles; one paper suggested they could reach bases in Cyprus. Clare Short told a parliamentary inquiry that in the numerous verbal and written briefings she received from the intelligence services, the 45-minute allegation was never a feature.38
It was JIC chairman John Scarlett who told the Hutton inquiry that the claim was meant to refer only to short-range battlefield weapons. According to the Guardian's citation of well-placed sources, both Scarlett and Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, assumed that the 45-minute warning referred to short-range battlefield weapons when they read the intelligence report at the end of August.39 Hutton's report would have us believe that Blair, reputedly an avid consumer of 'intelligence', did not know this.
When asked in parliament on how many occasions between January and May 2003 the 45-minute claim was raised with him, the Prime Minister replied: 'as far as I am aware, none'. This tallies with what Geoff Hoon told the Defence Committee inquiry, that in the run-up to the invasion he briefed the Prime Minister regularly and:
Had this [i.e., the 45-minute claim] been a significant issue in terms of the decision to take the country to war, I am sure that this issue would have arisen in conversation between us, but, as I emphasise, it was not a significant issue.40
Hoon is probably being honest – it was never a significant issue since it was understood to be false; it appears to have been intended simply for public relations. The Butler report referred to 'suspicions' that the claim had been included in the September dossier because of its 'eye-catching character'.41
We also know that the 'intelligence' on this claim, which miraculously appeared at the end of August 2002, just before the government began drawing up its dossier, was extremely vague. The source – an Iraqi brigadier-general – said that Iraq had a command, control and communication system that would have enabled Saddam or his close associates to contact commanders in the field within 45 minutes authorising the use of WMD. This does not mean deploying WMD or even having them ready. Rather, there was 'no specific intelligence of their [Iraqi] plans as to how/when/with what they would do', the press reported.42
Moreover, the Iraqi general who is thought to have acted as this source – Nizar al-Khazraji – was living in exile in Denmark and received his information from another Iraqi officer serving in the army. Al-Khazraji had neither any means of checking the assertion himself nor any documentary evidence. Furthermore, he was considered by the CIA to be a possible replacement for Saddam if the army staged a coup, and so had a vested interest in the invasion taking place.43
If the 45-minute claim had been perceived as real, one might have expected the March 2003 JIC report to refer to it, rather than stating that any chemical weapons 'remained disassem-bled'. We might also have expected the government to refer to it in the deba
tes on the eve of war.
Today reporter Andrew Gilligan's broadcast on 29 May 2003 – the source of the fierce argument between No. 10 and the BBC – was largely accurate, and surely one of the best media discoveries on Iraq, which may explain the attack on him and the BBC by Alastair Campbell. Gilligan correctly noted that the dossier had been 'sexed up' against the wishes of some intelligence officers, and that his unnamed source, David Kelly, refuted the government's 45-minute warning. (Kelly also told Newsnight reporter Susan Watts that the 45-minute claim 'just got out of all proportion' and that 'they were desperate for information'.)44
Kelly was not the only source for Gilligan's story. The editor of the Today programme, Kevin Marsh, had two other sources: Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, along with two of his colleagues; and Clare Short. According to The Times, Marsh interviewed Dearlove and interpreted his words:
as meaning that the intelligence did not support the case for war against Iraq . . . that hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would never be found. This, it is said, struck him [Marsh] as an odd conclusion if, at the time the September dossier was published, these weapons were being held at 45 minutes' readiness.
Then, also before Gilligan's report, Marsh met Clare Short who told him that 'no intelligence had been produced which conclusively demonstrated that Iraq was an imminent threat'. According to The Times, 'her words helped to persuade the programme to believe Mr Gilligan's apparent scoop: that Downing Street inserted a claim, against the wishes of experts, that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes'.45
Gilligan's assertion that the government 'probably knew' that the 45-minute claim was false but still included it in the report is also essentially correct. He appears to have been wrong in suggesting that Alastair Campbell was responsible for inserting the claim. But the dossier's first mention that Iraq had WMD ready for use within 45 minutes appears in a paragraph concerned with Iraq's 'goal of regional domination' and just after the claim that Saddam 'has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme'.45 Thus the government at worst encouraged, and at best did nothing to correct, the view that the 45-minute claim referred to long-range weapons. Yet Hoon, Scarlett and Dearlove all knew it referred to battlefield rather than long-range strategic weapons.
The link with al Qaeda and the February 2003 dossier
A further unsound claim by the government intimated links between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. Before this campaign began, Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw had told parliament in both January and April 2002 that 'I have seen no evidence which demonstrates that an al Qaeda network exists in Iraq'. By late 2002, however, this was the wrong story; now the new Foreign Office minister Mike O'Brien was saying that 'we believe that there are al Qaeda operatives in Iraq'. On 5 February 2003, Tony Blair told the House of Commons that:
It would be wrong to say that there is no evidence of any links between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. There is evidence of such links. Exactly how far they go is uncertain . . . There is intelligence coming through to us the entire time about this . . . It is not correct to say that there is no evidence of any links between the Iraqi regime and a] Qaeda.47
Later, government ministers denied ever having made such direct links between Baghdad and al Qaeda. Yet, contradicting this, even in June 2004, a Downing Street spokeswoman was claiming that the Prime Minister 'has always said Saddam created a permissive environment for terrorism and we know that the people affiliated to al Qaeda operated in Iraq during the regime'. The Butler report concluded that in the intelligence presented to ministers 'the JIC made clear that, although there were contacts between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, there was no evidence of cooperation'.48
This suggestion of a link was scuppered by intelligence sources quoted in the press who, asked whether Saddam had any connections with al Qaeda, said 'quite the opposite'.49 Downing Street then hit on an ingenious new formula: 'Terrorism and rogue regimes are part of the same picture', Jack Straw started saying around the turn of 2002/2003, a framing often repeated by Blair. The reason was that 'the most likely sources of technology and know-how for such terrorist organisations are rogue regimes', Straw said.
The alleged al Qaeda link was simply a case of making-it-up- as-you-go-along, perhaps the clumsiest of the propaganda fabrications in this period.
A close rival for this accolade, however, was the second government report released in February 2003, which has become known as the 'dodgy dossier' (though in content it hardly seems dodgier than the first). Blair misled parliament in passing this off as 'an intelligence report'; it was later revealed that much of the document had been directly copied from a source on the Internet. Indeed, the dossier was not checked by any of the intelligence agencies before publication.50
The authors of the dossier were close to Alastair Campbell, who oversaw the project, which was intended mainly as a briefing for the media. The dossier exaggerates the original text in a number of places, changing, for example, Iraq's 'aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes' to 'supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes'.51
Uranium from Niger
The government claimed in the September dossier that Iraq was seeking to procure uranium from Niger for use in its nuclear programme. On 7 July 2003 the Guardian, under a headline of 'Britain "knew uranium claims were false"', wrote that 'British officials knew there had been no secret trade in uranium from Africa to Iraq seven months before such claims were raised in the September dossier released by Downing Street', according to the retired US ambassador who investigated the issue for the CIA. The Guardian repeated the following week that 'Joe Wilson, an envoy sent by the US to Niger to check the documents, has said that Britain knew there was no secret trade in uranium months before publishing the claim in the September dossier'.52
Note that this report carries the same message as Gilligan's – that the government knew something was false but invoked it anyway. That there has been so much less furore about this claim is further evidence of how the media in effect allow the government to frame their agenda.
In March 2003, Mohamed El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the UN Security Council that the Niger uranium documents were fakes. US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, noting the British propaganda campaign on Iraq in the late 1990s, writes that these documents were initially circulated by the British, although it cannot be ascertained whether MI6 actually forged them. One member of the IAEA told Hersh that 'these documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency'. One letter was signed by a minister in Niger who had been out of office for the past 11 years. Meanwhile, the government has admitted that 'just before the dossier was published, the CIA offered a comment noting that they did not regard the reference to the supply of uranium from Africa as credible', but Britain went ahead anyway based on its own 'reliable intelligence', which, it says, came from more than a single source.53
Even this might all be beside the point. As Professor Norman Dombey of the University of Sussex has pointed out, 'so what if Iraq sought the supply of uranium from Africa? Iraq already has hundreds of tons of uranium at its disposal. Without enrichment facilities this material is useless for nuclear weapons'.54
The Butler report rejects most of this evidence and concludes that the government had intelligence from several quarters that indicated that the Iraqi visit to Niger was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Yet it fails to mention evidence from Joseph Wilson and its only reference to the CIA is to state: 'The CIA advised caution about any suggestion that Iraq had succeeded in acquiring uranium from Africa, but agreed that there was evidence that it had been sought'.55
Once the invasion had taken place, and the pretext of an Iraqi threat had served its purpose, ministers began to backtrack on their earlier claims. In an interview in April 2003, Blair said that 'we were never going to be able to find them [WMD] until the conflict is at a stage where th
e Iraqi scientists and experts working on these programmes are prepared to talk about them'.56 Jack Straw's comment that the government never regarded Saddam as an imminent threat has been detailed above. Straw said at one point that it was 'not crucially important' to find weapons of mass destruction, despite their elimination being the official rationale for the operation.57
Straw also told a parliamentary inquiry that 'I do not happen to regard the 45 minute statement having the significance which has been attached to it' – and this despite Blair's emphasis on the claim in the foreword to the dossier and associated media briefings. Straw was also asked whether he still stood by the 45-minute claim. Rather than simply replying 'yes' Straw first said 'it was not my claim. I stand by the integrity of the JIC. The most he could say was '1 accept the claim but did not make it'.58
