For "a good day to bury bad news", Jo Moore (New Labour's 9/11 coiner of the phrase) could not have asked better than February 18. Last month the information tribunal ordered publication of the "Williams draft" of the dossier on Iraq/WMD. Gordon Brown may have hoped Northern Rock would bury it as news. But even with the help of Mohammed al-Fayed, inventor of a new theatrical genre, the tragi-pantomime, the story features strongly.
The dossier was, indeed, a PR-driven promotion, not an intelligence-led analysis. Caveats were excised. Intelligence analysis such as "sought to develop" became the spin-doctor's "has developed". There was no "45 minutes" claim about Saddam's alleged missile threat to Cyprus, but a hand-written insert to that effect was scrawled on the Williams typescript. The case was, unquestionably, "sexed-up", as the BBC's Andrew Gilligan accurately reported on May 29, 2003.
The typescript, headed "JIC 2 Document Version 24 July, 2002", has that description deleted and replaced with the hand-written words: "John Williams's re-draft." In other words, someone tried to pass off Mr Williams's puff for Blair's war as the creation of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and someone else wasn't having it. Alternatively, the scrawled correction is of recent provenance, possibly the result of the information tribunal's ruling against the government. If so, then Gordon Brown and his ministers must account for it and, in any event, acknowledge finally the truth: the "facts" and intelligence were fixed around a pre-determined policy.
Thomas McLaughlin, Glasgow.
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