We Don't Need to Wait for Chilcot,
Blair Lied to Us About Iraq. Here's the Evidence
With the help of the BBC and Dr David Morrison, I
carried out my own inquiry. The facts are devastating
for Blair, for Parliament and for all of us.
By Peter OborneOctober
30, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Open
Democracy" - Two weeks
ago I found myself in conversation with Dr Hans Blix,
head of the United Nations weapons inspection team ahead
of the Iraq invasion in 2003.
Dr Blix told me that Tony Blair’s
claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass
destruction were simply not an accurate reflection
of the intelligence provided to the British government.
"The big difference in the British
dossier,” Dr Blix told me, “was that they simply
asserted that these items are there. But when Mr Blair
asserts that there were weapons, well that's an
assertion and it was not supported by evidence. Both the
UK and the US replaced question marks by exclamation
marks. I certainly think it was a misrepresentation."
"Both the UK and the
US replaced question marks by exclamation marks. I
certainly think it was a misrepresentation."
—Hans Blix
He was talking about how cautious
assessments were turned into bold statements by Blair
and the UK government. For example, intelligence chiefs
gave this assessment on March 15 2002: “Intelligence on
Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic
missiles programmes is sporadic and patchy.”
Three weeks later, the prime minister
stridently claimed: “We know that he [Saddam
Hussein] has stockpiles of major amounts of chemical and
biological weapons.”
Shaken by the force of his testimony I
eventually said to Dr Blix: "That's devastating. And so
basically you are telling me that Mr Blair
misrepresented the truth, lied indeed to the British
parliament in order to make the case for an illegal
war?"
He paused. Then he said: "Well, I'm a
diplomat, so I'm not using such… such words. But in
substance, yes. They misrepresented what we did and they
did so in order to get the authorisation that they
shouldn't have had".
Lies, delays and a national embarrassment
Dr Blix’s comments were made before
Tony Blair claimed to CNN earlier this week that the
information he had received was “wrong”. As far as Hans
Blix is concerned, Tony Blair misled the British public
and parliament about the intelligence he was given.
My conversation with Dr Blix was the
culminating moment of my search for the truth about how
Britain came to invade Iraq. It is now a matter of days
before John Chilcot will write to David Cameron setting
out the timetable for publication for his long delayed
inquiry into the Iraq war.
One report has suggested that Chilcot
may push back his report as far as 2017 – no less than
seven years late, and a full decade after the last
British troops pulled out of Iraq in 2007. The delay in
his inquiry, commissioned by Prime Minister Gordon Brown
in 2009, has become a national scandal. This is why a
few months ago, I approached the BBC, and asked the
Corporation for permission to carry out my own Chilcot
inquiry.
I pointed out that most of the
testimony to Chilcot was publicly available. I also
suggested that we should call our own witnesses.
The BBC agreed. For the last few weeks
a producer, a researcher and I have been seeking answers
to the key questions about the lead up to the Iraq war.
The results can be heard tonight on
BBC
Radio 4.
What we need to know
As background to our work, I asked my
friend Dr David Morrison to prepare a series of
background narratives on the four crucial
questions. These are published today by openDemocracy
and they address four key questions:
Question 1: Did
Tony Blair enter into a secret agreement with George W
Bush that the UK would support US military action, come
what may?
Question 2: Was
the information presented by the Blair government on WMD
and other matters an accurate reflection of the
underlying facts?
Question 3: Was
the war legal?
Question 4: Did
our military action in Iraq increase the terrorist
threat to Britain?
I have known Dr Morrison for more than
12 years. Back in 2003, I read the devastating evidence
that he dispatched to the Foreign Affairs Committee, as
it made its report into the Iraq war. The Foreign
Affairs Committee ignored the thrust of Dr Morrison's
arguments. However, they did publish his brilliant paper
as a
memorandum to their own report.
His paper and a later
one on the Committee’s findings, which are still
worth reading today, provided devastating evidence that
Tony Blair misled the British public about the threat
from Saddam Hussein in order to make the case for war.
I have not accepted all of Morrison’s
arguments. However, his narratives provided an
invaluable basis for our work, because he has a
remarkable gift for highlighting like nothing else the
key issues.
These documents set out with great
clarity the key facts that everyone will need in order
to assess whether John Chilcot has produced a fair
report. I have summarised Morrison’s most devastating
points here.
Tony Blair misrepresented the evidence on
WMD
On February 14 2003, Hans Blix told
the UN Security Council: “Many proscribed weapons and
items are not accounted for. To take an example, a
document, which Iraq provided, suggested to us that some
1,000 tonnes of chemical agent were 'unaccounted for'.
One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist."
Yet less than a month later, on March
18, Tony Blair
told MPs: “When the inspectors left in 1998, they
left unaccounted for 10,000 litres of anthrax; a
far-reaching VX nerve agent programme; up to 6,500
chemical munitions; at least 80 tonnes of mustard gas,
and possibly more than 10 times that amount;
unquantifiable amounts of sarin, botulinum toxin and a
host of other biological poisons; and an entire Scud
missile programme. We are asked now seriously to accept
that in the last few years—contrary to all history,
contrary to all intelligence—Saddam decided unilaterally
to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is
palpably absurd."
There, Tony Blair stated as a fact
that proscribed material deemed “unaccounted for” by
inspectors actually existed. In doing so, he seriously
misled the House of Commons.
Furthermore. Blair neglected to
mention that his own intelligence services had advised
that even if Saddam still had weapons stockpiled, they
would have degraded to the point where they were
unusable.
Tony Blair stated as
a fact that proscribed material deemed “unaccounted for”
by inspectors actually existed. In doing so, he
seriously misled the House of Commons.
According to a 2002 report the
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS),
much of Iraq’s pre-Gulf war stocks of chemical and
biological agents listed by Blair, if they existed at
all, would have degraded to such an extent that they
would no longer be effective as warfare agents. The
government’s own dossier published a few weeks later
referred to the IISS approvingly as “an independent and
well-researched overview”.
Among other things, the IISS report
notes: “As a practical matter, any nerve agent from this
period [pre-1991] would have deteriorated by now …” It
also says: “Any VX produced by Iraq before 1991 is
likely to have decomposed over the past decade …Any
G-agent or V-agent stocks that Iraq concealed from
UNSCOM inspections are likely to have deteriorated by
now. Any botulinum toxin produced in 1989-90 would no
longer be useful".
The prime minister didn’t tell MPs any
of this on 18 March 2003 when they voted to go to war.
What Blair didn’t tell us about Hussein
Kamal
Blair also used vital testimony
selectively in order to build the case for war. On 18
March 2003 he
told MPs:
In August [1995], it [Iraq] provided
yet another full and final declaration. Then, a week
later, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, defected to
Jordan. He disclosed a far more extensive biological
weapons programme and, for the first time, said that
Iraq had weaponised the programme—something that Saddam
had always strenuously denied. All this had been
happening while the inspectors were in Iraq.”
The prime minister chose not to
divulge to MPs that Kamal also told UN inspectors that,
on his orders, all Iraq’s proscribed weapons had been
destroyed.
A transcript of the
IAEA/UNSCOM interview with Kamal came into the
public domain in early 2003. In that interview, he said:
“I ordered destruction [sic] of all chemical weapons.
All weapons – biological, chemical, missile, nuclear
were destroyed”. He described anthrax as the “main
focus” of Iraq’s biological programme and when asked
“were weapons and agents destroyed?” he replied:
“nothing remained”. Of missiles, he said: “not a single
missile left but they had blueprints and molds [sic] for
production. All missiles were destroyed.”
A transcript of a CNN interview with
Hussein Kamal on 21 September 1995 can be read
here. In it, he said ”Iraq does not possess any
weapons of mass destruction”.
The Iraq war made Britain more vulnerable to
terrorist attacks
In the build up to the Iraq war,
Blair’s government was repeatedly warned by intelligence
chiefs that invading Iraq would dramatically increase
the threat of terrorist attacks on UK soil, and act as a
recruiting tool for al Qaida and other extremists across
the world.
Sir David Omand, Security and
Intelligence Co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office from
June 2003 until April 2005, has testified to Chilcot
that the Joint Intelligence Committee [JIC] “judged that
the build-up of forces in the Gulf, in the region, prior
to an attack on Iraq, would increase public hostility to
the west and western interests.
He also said the JIC “warned that AQ
[al-Qaeda] and other Islamist extremists may initiate
attacks in response to coalition military action. We
[the intelligence services] pointed out that AQ would
use an attack on Iraq as justification … for terrorist
attacks on western or Israeli targets. We pointed out
that AQ was already in their propaganda portraying
US-led operations as being a war on Islam and that,
indeed, this view was attracting widespread support
across the Muslim community”.
“Coalition attacks would, we said,
radicalise increasing numbers… [and] that the threat
from AQ would increase at the onset of any attack on
Iraq and that we should all be prepared for a higher
threat level to be announced and for more terrorist
activity in the event of war.”
In addition, Eliza Manningham Butler,
head of MI5 at the time, has testified to Chilcot that
the Iraq war “substantially” exacerbated the overall
terrorist threat MI5 and fellow services had to deal
with. She said there was hard evidence for this, for
instance “numerical evidence of the number of plots, the
number of leads, the number of people identified, and
the correlation of that to Iraq and statements of people
as to why they were involved, the discussions between
them as to what they were doing”.
"Coalition attacks
would, we said, radicalise increasing numbers… [and]
that the threat from Al Qaeda would increase at the
onset of any attack on Iraq."
—Sir David Omand
She added: “By 2003 I found it
necessary to ask the prime minister for a doubling of
our budget. This is unheard of, it's certainly unheard
of today, but he and the Treasury and the Chancellor
accepted that because I was able to demonstrate the
scale of the problem that we were confronted by.”
In the build up to war, Blair’s
government was very keen to bring intelligence
assessments of the threat from Iraq’s “weapons of mass
destruction” to public attention, but it kept silent
about the pre-war intelligence assessments that the
al-Qaeda threat to Britain would be heightened by
British participation in military action against Iraq.
Had MPs been aware of these assessments on 18 March
2003, they might not have given a green light to
military action.
On that day, Tony Blair did not tell
them that al-Qaida activity in Britain would likely
increase with murderous effect if they voted for war. On
the contrary, he told them that a vote for war was a
vote to combat al-Qaida; that the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein would prevent a future alliance between him and
al-Qaida, as a consequence of which al-Qaida would be
armed with “weapons of mass destruction”.
'Go blame the French'
On March 18 2003 Tony Blair claimed
that France had undermined support for a second UN
resolution, which would have authorized the use of force
to disarm Saddam. He told the House of Commons: “Last
Monday [10 March], we were getting very close with it
[the second resolution]. We very nearly had the majority
agreement... Then, on Monday night, France said that it
would veto a second resolution, whatever the
circumstances.”
In fact, France said no such thing. On
the contrary, in an interview that Monday night,
President Chirac made it very clear that there were
circumstances in which France would not veto a
resolution for war. Early in the interview, he
identified two different scenarios, one when the UN
inspectors report progress and the other when the
inspectors say their task is impossible – in which case,
in his words, “regrettably, the war would become
inevitable”. That portion
reads:
“The inspectors have to tell us: ‘we
can continue and, at the end of a period which we think
should be of a few months’ - I'm saying a few months
because that's what they have said – ‘we shall have
completed our work and Iraq will be disarmed’. Or they
will come and tell the Security Council: ‘we are sorry
but Iraq isn't cooperating, the progress isn't
sufficient, we aren't in a position to achieve our goal,
we won't be able to guarantee Iraq's disarmament’. In
that case it will be for the Security Council and it
alone to decide the right thing to do. But in that case,
of course, regrettably, the war would become inevitable.
It isn't today.”
From that, it is plain as a pikestaff
that there were circumstances in which France would not
have vetoed military action, namely, if the UN
inspectors reported that they couldn’t do their job.
They had never reported this. By contrast, as Hans Blix
told the Chilcot Inquiry in 2010, inspectors were given
access to every site they asked to visit and inspect:
“on no particular occasion were we denied access”.
Tony Blair gave
Alastair Campbell “his marching orders to play the
anti-French card with the Sun and others”.
This is not the story the British
public was told. The day after Chirac’s interview, on 11
March 2003, Blair took a decision to blame France for
the US/UK failure to persuade more than two other
members of the UN Security Council (Spain and Bulgaria)
to vote for war. We know this from
evidence given to the Chilcot inquiry on 19 January
2011 by Stephen Wall, who was Tony Blair’s EU adviser
from 2000 to 2004. He confirmed that on that day he had
witnessed Tony Blair in a Downing Street corridor give
Alastair Campbell “his marching orders to play the
anti-French card with the Sun and others”.
Over to Chilcot
On the basis of the evidence before
Chilcot, there is little reason to doubt that the Blair
government misrepresented the intelligence to parliament
and to the British public in order to make the case for
an illegal war in which 179 British soldiers and
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died.
The invasion of Iraq was intended to
deal with international terrorism. It is plain that the
terrorist threat to Britain has increased beyond measure
as a result of the decision to go into Iraq.
Let’s see if John Chilcot agrees.