Tony Blair was sent three intelligence reports in the six months during the run up to the Iraq war, including one that warned him that information on whether Saddam Hussein still held any chemical or biological weapons was "inconsistent" and "sparse". The revelation adds to the mystery of how the Prime Minister could tell Parliament last week that, when war began, he still believed that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed in just 45 minutes. The Independent on Sunday
Tony Blair faces fresh embarrassment over the death of Dr David Kelly as Downing Street officials admitted last night that Janice Kelly, the widow of the weapons expert, has pointedly failed to reply to a confidential offer by the Prime Minister to meet her. ... The Telegraph has learned ... that his closest aide, Alastair Campbell, knew while the dossier was being compiled that the intelligence referred to battlefield weapons rather than strategic missiles. At a private meeting of the Intelligence and Security Committee on July 17 last year, Mr Campbell, the Prime Minister's then communications director, said that he was aware of the distinction before the document's publication. Sunday Telegraph
I do not object to the Government making the most of the intelligence at its disposal. Politicians exhale propaganda in the way that the rest of us exhale carbon dioxide. What is really worrying is that the Prime Minister does not seem to have known what the propaganda referred to. His crime, it appears, was not duplicity but ignorance - a much more worrying shortcoming in a leader taking a nation to war. ... The war is rarely judged on its merits these days. It is treated as a metaphor for the character and the character failings of Mr Blair. For this, the Prime Minister bears a heavy share of the blame. ... As the debate has become more introspective and introverted, the horizons of British politics have narrowed dangerously. The global perspective which followed September 11 has been replaced by a shabby insularity. The threat posed by rogue states and fundamentalist groups is all but forgotten. Sunday Telegraph
The "reliable source" who provided MI6 with the information that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes was an Iraqi exile who had left the country several years previously, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. That fact alone should have prevented the intelligence being used in the Government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The 45-minute claim, repeated four times in the dossier, is at the centre of the dispute over Britain's case for war in Iraq. The Independent on Sunday
The Independent on Sunday leader (8.2.2004):
For nearly a year The Independent on Sunday has argued that Tony Blair either made a calamitous misjudgement in the build-up to the war against Iraq or was highly economical with the truth about what he knew a year ago. If Mr Blair believed the most alarmist intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons he was being spectacularly naive.
Like journalism, a profession that the Prime Minister views with a wary scepticism, intelligence can be unreliable. Sometimes the intelligence agencies are dependent on sources that are poorly placed to provide definitive information. The subsequent results of their investigations are often more speculative than precise. The possibility of prime ministerial naivety is alarming enough, but the alternative is even worse. Could the Prime Minister have known that some of the intelligence overstated the case for war in advance of the conflict? In today's Independent on Sunday we reveal that in the run-up to war Mr Blair was sent three intelligence reports, at least one of which warned him that information on whether Saddam still held any chemical or biological weapons was "inconsistent" and "sparse".The question of what Mr Blair knew came into sharper focus last week. Mr Blair claimed that he did not know that the 45 minutes referred only to battlefield weapons when he published the dossier. As the former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, has pointed out, this was an extraordinary admission, one that almost defies belief. Mr Cook knew that the claim referred to battlefield weapons because he had checked with the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett. Apparently Mr Blair had made no such check. Or is it possible that he knew more about Iraq's limited capability than he conveyed at the time? There is no more serious decision a prime minister can make than sending British troops to war. Mr Blair appears to have done so without checking the facts, or withholding vital information about the scale of the threat posed by Saddam's weapons.
The inquiry into the intelligence, established last week, is superfluous and unlikely to discover much. It has only been set up because President George W Bush got there first, another reminder that Mr Blair has no choice but to dance to America's tunes. As Charles Kennedy states in his article on the facing page, the key questions relate to Mr Blair's political judgements. To take one example, we still do not know for sure when the Prime Minister made clear to President Bush that Britain would support the war. Mr Blair's public statements suggest that he made a provisional commitment a year before the conflict took place, a reckless pledge that gave him little room for manoeuvre in the months that followed. Trapped by a military timetable determined by President Bush, Mr Blair relied increasingly on the intelligence that suggested Iraq posed an imminent threat. Almost a year later he faces the political repercussions. They are likely to be very serious. They deserve to be. The Independent on Sunday
