What the Butler didn't see - The Guardian U.K.

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What the Butler didn't see

Chris Ames

March 19, 2007 7:30 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/chris_ames/2007/03/what_the_butler_didnt_see.html

Four years after the Iraq war began, the truth about the September 2002 dossier is emerging. One casualty could be the reputation of Lord Butler, whose Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction let Tony Blair off the hook. Having pulled his punches, Butler recently called Blair "disingenuous", on the basis that Blair's claims "could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him". But the Butler Review also claimed to have seen "no evidence" that the dossier was "explicitly intended to make a case for war". One might equally ask how Butler reached this conclusion based on the material before him - a stack of evidence that the dossier was always part of the plan for war.

The fact that the first draft of the dossier was actually written by Foreign Office spin doctor John Williams - as I have established - shows that Butler's attribution of the dossier to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) was wrong. It appears that the draft was withheld from Butler, who accepted the government's claim that the dossier was drafted by the JIC's assessments staff. I am hoping that the Information Commissioner will this week order the Foreign Office to release the document under the Freedom of Information Act.

In the meantime, it is worth looking at the documents that we know Butler did see - and from which he quoted selectively. A batch of documents originally leaked to the Sunday Times proves that, by spring 2002, Blair had agreed the UK would join the war the US was determined to bring about to depose Saddam Hussein, and that going to the United Nations on the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a ploy to justify war, not avoid it. These documents, remain available on dedicated websites and have been widely discussed - not least by Henry Porter - in this context. But they also prove that the dossier was explicitly intended to make a case for war.

The earliest document is an options paper prepared by the Cabinet Office in March 2002. A JIC assessment dated March 15 was attached to it, and included the comment that "intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme is sporadic and patchy".

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http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/chris_ames/2007/03/what_the_butler_didnt_see.html

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