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Sexed
up: How London sold its war on
Iraq
By David Isenberg
Aside from
jointly invading another country, it appears that the
United States and Great Britain have another thing in
common as a part of their "special relationship". They
both twisted and distorted 
intelligence to suit
their political needs. That this has happened in the US
is now well known, but the British equivalent has not
been well appreciated outside of the UK. That is about
to change.
Political careers are on the line
with the imminent release, on February 28, of the report
of the Hutton inquiry, chaired by Lord Hutton, set up
last year to conduct an investigation into the
circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly.
Geoff Hoon, the Minister of Defense, is
considered the odds on favorite to be the fall guy, with
Prime Minister Tony Blair also expected to have some
hard explaining to do - which he has promised once
Hutton's report is finally released. The Independent
newspaper has reported that at least six people
associated with Blair's government could be in for
criticism. The daily said that these six had sent late
written submissions to Hutton, following letters from
him saying that they faced possible criticism.
Kelly was a scientist, a leading British
government expert in chemical and biological warfare,
and a former United Nations weapons inspector who was
the source of information for the assertion by BBC
reporter Andrew Gilligan, who in a 6:07 am Today program
last May 29 claimed that the British government had
"sexed up" the dossier it released on September 24, 2002
regarding the purported threat of Iraqi unconventional
weaponry. Gilligan claimed that the dossier was
transformed against the wishes of the intelligence
agencies. He also said that the government knew the
claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction
within 45 minutes was false. As it turned out Gilligan,
admitted that it was he, and not Kelly, who first
uttered the phrase "sexed up"; Kelly merely repeated
back to him the phrase that Gilligan first said.
On July 15 last year, Kelly testified before a
televised hearing of the House of Commons Foreign
Affairs Committee about an unauthorized interview he had
given to Gilligan. Although he was told by his employer,
the Ministry of Defense, that it wouldn't take any
disciplinary action, Kelly, by all accounts, a deeply
private man, found the publicity excruciating. On July
17 he killed himself by slitting his wrist.
But
none of this should be taken to mean that the British
government was innocent of deception. As Cambridge
academic Glen Rangwala noted: "A member of the defense
intelligence staff ... wrote just before the dossier's
release to Tony Cragg, then the deputy chief of defense
intelligence, to express formal reservations about the
dossier. According to Martin Howard, Mr Cragg's
successor, the reservation was partly that 'the language
was too strong on the continued production of chemical
and biological agents'."
Neither the senior
intelligence official nor Kelly accepted that Iraq had
continued to produce prohibited weapons. The ongoing
production of weapons was a crucial element of the case
for a threat from Iraq, because most of its chemical or
biological agents produced before 1991 would have become
useless.
The suspicion that the intelligence
community focused on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) potential rather than existing weapons is
increased by changes to the text visible in the limited
excerpts released so far during the Hutton inquiry from
earlier drafts of the September dossier.
The
draft of the dossier from September 10, two weeks before
its release, concludes: "Intelligence confirms that Iraq
has covert chemical and biological weapons programs, in
breach of UN Security Council Resolution 687." This is
changed in the final version of the dossier to:
"Intelligence shows that Iraq has covert chemical and
biological weapons programs, in breach of UN Security
Council Resolution 687, and has continued to produce
chemical and biological agents."
On the same
page is the only allegation that Iraq actually has such
weapons: "Iraq has chemical and biological agents and
weapons available, either from pre-Gulf War stocks or
more recent production." In the final version of the
dossier, this is strengthened to: "Iraq has chemical and
biological agents and weapons available, both from
pre-Gulf War stocks and more recent production."
Similarly, the claim that weapons could be used
within 45 minutes was strengthened between the draft of
the dossier dated September 16 and that published eight
days later. The earlier version raised a possibility:
"The Iraqi military may be able to deploy chemical or
biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do
so." The version released to the public lost the element
of uncertainty: "Military planning allows for some of
the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use
them."
According to the BBC's Panorama program
shown last week in Britain, Kelly believed that Saddam
Hussein's arsenal posed an immediate threat to Western
interests, but could not have been deployed within
minutes, as the British government claimed. The program
also accused the BBC's own managers of badly mishandling
the row over the Blair government's justification for
war against Iraq, and concluded that Britain's top spy
chiefs had improperly acted as tools of the ruling
Labour Party government.
Robin Cook, British
foreign minister before resigning over the UK's decision
to participate in the war against Iraq, wrote: "When the
cabinet of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's
government discussed the dossier on Hussein's WMD, I
argued that I found the document curiously derivative.
It set out what we knew about Hussein's chemical and
biological arsenal at the time of the 1991 Gulf War. It
then leaped to the conclusion that Hussein must still
possess all those weapons.
"There was no hard
intelligence of a current weapons program that would
represent a new and compelling threat to our interests.
Nor did the dossier at any stage admit the basic
scientific fact that biological and chemical agents have
a finite shelf life, a principle understood by every
pharmacist. Go to your medicine chest and check out the
existence of an expiration date on nearly everything you
possess. Nerve agents of good quality have a shelf life
of about five years and anthrax in liquid solution of
about three years. Hussein's stocks were not of good
quality. The Pentagon itself concluded that Iraqi
chemical munitions were of such poor standard that they
were usable for only a few weeks."
Furthermore,
public evidence to the Hutton inquiry has already
revealed a number of discrepancies in the role of the
intelligence agencies. For example, when Sir Richard
Dearlove, the head of MI6, officially known only as "C",
emerged from secrecy to give evidence, he insisted that
the compilation of the September dossier had been
perfectly proper, but also revealed some damning
information. When asked whether the dossier had given
undue prominence to the 45 minutes claim, Dearlove
replied:
Dearlove: Well, I think given
the misinterpretation that was placed on the 45 minutes
intelligence, with the benefit of hindsight, you can say
that is a valid criticism. But I am confident that the
intelligence was accurate and that the use made of it
was entirely consistent with the original report.
Lord Hutton: Would you just elaborate
what you mean by the misinterpretation placed on the 45
minutes claim?
Dearlove: Well, I think
the original report referred to chemical and biological
munitions, and that was taken to refer to battlefield
weapons. I think what subsequently happened in the
reporting was that it was taken that the 45 minutes
applied, let us say, to weapons of a longer range.
This exchange surely validates Gilligan's claim
that the dossier had been "sexed up". Furthermore, Iraqi
battlefield weapons with chemical and biological
warheads, even if they did exist, presented no threat to
the stability of the Middle East, still less to Britain
and the US.
Documentary evidence provided to the
inquiry has also demonstrated that senior figures inside
Downing Street knew the evidence about Iraqi WMD was
weak. An email sent to John Scarlett, chairman of the
Joint Intelligence Committee, from Jonathan Powell,
Blair's chief of staff, shortly before the dossier was
published, said: "The document does nothing to
demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat, from
Saddam ... We will need to make it clear in launching
the document that we do not claim that we have evidence
that he is an imminent threat." But this is exactly what
the final version of the dossier claimed.
As
Clare Short, the international development secretary who
resigned from Blair's cabinet in May 2003, said: "... as
a result of the Hutton inquiry, we now know that two
defense intelligence officials wrote to their boss to
put on record their disquiet at the exaggeration in the
dossier. Moreover, one official asked his boss for
advice as to whether he should approach the Foreign
Affairs Select Committee after the foreign secretary had
said that he was not aware of any unhappiness among
intelligence officials about the claims made in the
dossier."
In fact, the Hutton inquiry is
expected to confirm that while members of the defense
intelligence staff protested at many of the claims in
the dossier, they were ignored - not by Downing Street,
but by top intelligence officials. However, the inquiry
has already revealed that Blair's closest advisers,
including Alastair Campbell, his communications chief,
and Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, put pressure on
senior intelligence officers, and they succumbed.
Aside from the misuse of intelligence, it
appears that the British government also resorted to
outright propaganda. In late December 2003, the British
government confirmed that the Secret Intelligence
Service, MI6, had run an operation to gain public
support for sanctions and the use of military force in
Iraq. It had organized Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign
to plant stories in the media about Saddam's weapons of
mass destruction.
And finally, there is the case
of a second "dodgy dossier" published by Downing Street
in February last year. In its annual report published on
June 10, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC)
was heavily critical of the February dossier: "We
believe that material produced by the [intelligence]
agencies can be used in publications and attributed
appropriately, but it is imperative that the agencies
are consulted before any of their material is published.
This process was not followed when a second document was
produced in February 2003. Although the document did
contain some intelligence-derived material, it was not
clearly attributed or highlighted amongst the other
material, nor was it checked with the agency providing
the intelligence or cleared by the JIC [Joint
Intelligence Committee] prior to publication."
Downing Street has apologized for failing to
admit that much of the dossier came from published
academic sources, including an article by a California
PhD student. The bulk of the 19-page document (pages
6-16) was directly copied without acknowledgement from
an article in the September 2002 edition of Middle East
Review of International Affairs, entitled "Iraq's
Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and
Analysis". The author was Ibrahim al-Marashi, a
postgraduate student at the Monterey Institute of
International Studies. But the question remains, who
authorized its release in this format, and why?
Officially, Blair has remained confident that
evidence of proscribed Iraqi weaponry would be found,
and has even hinted that some of the evidence has
already been accumulated. In a television interview at a
Russia-European Union summit at the end of May 2003,
Blair said that he had already seen plenty of
information that his critics had not, but would in due
course: "Over the coming weeks and months we will
assemble this evidence and then we will give it to
people ... I have no doubt whatever that the evidence of
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction will be there. Those
people who are sitting there saying 'Oh it is all going
to be proved to be a great big fib got out by the
security services, there will be no weapons of mass
destruction', just wait and have a little patience. I
certainly do know some of the stuff that has already
been accumulated ... which is not yet public but what we
are going to do is assemble that evidence and present it
properly."
But to date, no evidence has been
released.
In reality, however, it seems likely
that Hutton and other reports to come will continue to
produce shades of grey, rather than the conclusive
outcome for which many, especially in the media, are
looking. Hutton is unlikely to imply that Blair has lied
or was responsible for Kelly's death. But Downing Street
is open to criticism over the dossier on Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction that was presented to parliament in
September 2002.
And public opinion is liable to
swing further against Blair, depending on how critical
Hutton is. One poll for The Guardian found that 63
percent of Britons want the 50-year-old prime minister
to resign if Hutton says that he lied about revealing
Kelly's identity.
And to a greater degree than
US President George W Bush, Blair sold the Iraq war to
the British public by warning of the dangers of Saddam's
pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and
the risk of those weapons falling into the hands of
global terrorists.
The inquiry is also sure to
continue for some time. It was reported in The Times of
London last week that a British coroner is prepared to
open a new inquest into the death of Kelly. Nicholas
Gardiner, the Oxfordshire Coroner, believes that the
Hutton inquiry was unable to examine all the evidence.
At least five witnesses refused to release their
statements to the Hutton inquiry, and police handed Lord
Hutton only 70 of the 300 witness statements they took
during their inquiries, the newspaper said.
David Isenberg, a senior analyst with
the Washington-based British American Security
Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in
arms control and national security issues. He
co-authored the recently released report, Unravelling the Known Unknowns: Why no
Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found in
Iraq.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times
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