Conclusions Must Be Drawn from Facts in the Interests of Humanity

Workers' Daily Internet Edition: Article Index :

Foreign Affairs Select Committee Report:
Conclusions Must Be Drawn from Facts in the Interests of Humanity

For Your Reference:
Blair's Iraq Dossier
Intelligence? The British dossier on Iraq's security infrastructure
The Absence of Truth – Government Propaganda and the War on Iraq

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee published its report on Monday, “The Decision to go to War in Iraq”.

            Addressing the launch press conference, the chairman of the Committee, Donald Anderson, said that not even shells near to artillery positions had been found that might have contained chemical or biological warheads, and that the committee is giving the government two months to reply as to whether Tony Blair stood by the September dossier. “The jury is still out on the whole affair,” he said.

            On the row between Alastair Campbell and the BBC, Donald Anderson said that the committee was split 5-5, and that he had used his chairman’s casting vote to exonerate the Downing Street Communications Director. The committee had been barred from interviewing the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) chair John Scarlett, and from seeing all of the intelligence documents that they had wished to see.

            On the uranium from Africa claim in the September dossier, Anderson said Foreign Secretary Straw had been asked two weeks ago to provide the date when British intelligence was first informed by the CIA that the claim was based on forged documents. Mr Straw still has not replied.”

            The report says: “We conclude that the 45 minutes claim did not warrant the prominence given to it in the dossier because it was based on a single uncorroborated source. We recommend that the Government explain why the claim was given such prominence.”

            As for the February dossier, the committee concluded that Blair, in comments to the House of Commons, "misrepresented its status and thus inadvertently made a bad situation worse".

            "We conclude that the effect of the February dossier was almost wholly counterproductive. By producing such a document the government undermined the credibility of their case for war and of other documents which were part of it," the committee said.

            It was only by a majority of 6-4 that the committee concluded that “ministers did not mislead Parliament”.

            One feature of the row between Alastair Campbell and the BBC over the “integrity” of the government has been to divert attention away from the fact the dossiers published by the government as a basis for launching aggression against Iraq contained lies and distortions. This was the point made by former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to the Select Committee, that the “intelligence” was false. The situation had been that the government had decided on a course of action, aggression against a sovereign country, and had concocted justifications, including the dossiers, to back up this crime against peace.

            Robin Cook said of Alastair Campbell on Monday, "He has managed to convince half the media that the foreign affairs inquiry is into the origins of his war with Andrew Gilligan (BBC journalist), not in to the war with Iraq.” He continued, "The serious allegation is that they got it wrong, and they should not be allowed to get off answering that issue because Alastair has souped up this controversy." However, with typical British pragmatism, Cook defended the bombing of Iraq in 1998 as “proportionate”.

            The issue, while also diverting attention from the consistent position of the BBC, as with the other broadcasters, as purveyors of the government line and values regarding the invasion of Iraq, nevertheless raises that the government is attempting to deny even them the right to “fair comment”. This is an attempt to insist that if the government denies a particular story, the media should not contradict them. It is part of the trend to ensure that only the ideology of the government in power should have credence, and in particular to further entrench the reactionary British chauvinism that is reflected in the government.

            The spuriousness of Tony Blair’s justifications is also underlined by the fact while the government was speaking about the “threat” of Iraq’s chemical and other weapons, it has carried on trade in chemical weapons technology which is designed to manufacture “toxic chemical precursors”, the sale of which is banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention (John Pilger article in the New Statesman, July 7). This same article points out that under Tony Blair, Britain has reclaimed its place as the world’s second biggest weapons dealer.

            The evidence presented to the Select Committee by Clare Short underlined other deceptions. For example, on March 12 Tony Blair had told Parliament that France “is saying, whatever the circumstances, it will veto a resolution” to invade Iraq. In fact, French President Jacques Chirac had said that if Iraq failed to co-operate with the UN inspectors, “it will be for the security council and it alone to decide the right thing (and) war would become inevitable”. Clare Short’s testimony also not only highlighted the spinelessness of the Cabinet, but also indicated that Cabinet government is itself being replaced by government by the Prime Minister and his advisors. Taken together, this indicates that decisions upon which the lives of millions literally depend are not being taken through the parliamentary machinery, let alone by the people themselves through their representatives. In fact, this whole scandal shows that parliament itself is being used as a mechanism for deceiving the people and giving spurious legitimacy to programmes which reflect the dictate of Washington, the financiers, and other vested interests which stand opposed to the people’s well-being.

            The method amounts to a fascist method, and Tony Blair is compounding the situation by insisting on standing by all the assertions, including ones which even the Bush administration has admitted to be false, and the criminal programme that they were designed to justify. Indeed, as the opposition by the Iraqi people to their occupation intensifies and the credibility of the government with the people in this country is further lowered, Tony Blair is becoming even more insistent on putting forward a distorted version of reality in order to shore up the programme of occupation. It is up to the working class and progressive people to draw the warranted conclusions from the facts, something which Tony Blair and the government as a whole, are intent on obstructing, and challenge the system that keeps them ever further from decision-making power.

By Richard M Smith, June 30, 2003 (www.computerbytesman.com/privacy/blair.htm)

Microsoft Word documents are notorious for containing private information in file headers which people would sometimes rather not share. The British government of Tony Blair just learned this lesson the hard way.

            Back in February 2003, 10 Downing Street published a dossier on Iraq's security and intelligence organisations. This dossier was cited by Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations the same month. Dr Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, quickly discovered that much of the material in the dossier was actually plagiarised from a US researcher on Iraq.

            You can read Dr Rangwala's original analysis of the dossier from February 5, 2003, at this URL:

            http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2003/msg00457.html

            Blair's government made one additional mistake: they published the dossier as a Microsoft Word file on their Web site. When I first heard from Dr Rangwala about the dossier, I decided to try to learn who had worked on the document. I downloaded the Word file containing the dossier from the 10 Downing Street Web site (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/) and found the following revision log in the file:

Rev. #1: "cic22" edited file "C:\DOCUME~1\phamill\LOCALS~1\Temp\AutoRecovery save of Iraq - security.asd"
Rev. #2: "cic22" edited file "C:\DOCUME~1\phamill\LOCALS~1\Temp\AutoRecovery save of Iraq - security.asd"
Rev. #3: "cic22" edited file "C:\DOCUME~1\phamill\LOCALS~1\Temp\AutoRecovery save of Iraq - security.asd"
Rev. #4: "JPratt" edited file "C:\TEMP\Iraq - security.doc"
Rev. #5: "JPratt" edited file "A:\Iraq - security.doc"
Rev. #6: "ablackshaw" edited file "C:\ABlackshaw\Iraq - security.doc"
Rev. #7: "ablackshaw" edited file "C:\ABlackshaw\A;Iraq - security.doc"
Rev. #8: "ablackshaw" edited file "A:\Iraq - security.doc"
Rev. #9: "MKhan" edited file "C:\TEMP\Iraq - security.doc"
Rev. #10: "MKhan" edited file "C:\WINNT\Profiles\mkhan\Desktop\Iraq.doc"

      Most Word document files contain a revision log which is a listing of the last 10 edits of a document, showing the names of the people who worked with the document and the names of the files that the document went under. Revision logs are hidden and cannot be viewed in Microsoft Word. However I wrote a small utility for extracting and displaying revision logs and other hidden information in Word .DOC files.

      It is easy to spot the following four names in the revision log of the Blair dossier:

P. Hamill
J. Pratt
A. Blackshaw
M. Khan

      In addition, the "cic22" in the first three entries of the revision log stands for "Communications Information Centre", a unit of the British government.

      Back in February, I passed along these four names to Dr Rangwala who then provided them to a number of reporters in the UK. One reporter quickly identified the four individuals as:

Paul Hamill - Foreign Office official
John Pratt - Downing Street official
Alison Blackshaw - The personal assistant of the Prime Minister's press secretary
Murtaza Khan - Junior press officer for the Prime Minister

            During the week of June 23, 2003, the British Parliament held hearings of the Blair Dossier and other PR efforts by the UK Government leading up to the Iraq war. Alastair Campbell of the UK Communications Information Centre was put in the hot seat and had to explain the dossier plagiarism and details of the revision log.

      One of the interesting titbits that came out of the hearings is that John Pratt provided the dossier on a floppy disk to Alison Blackshaw to give to Colin Powell for his presentation before the United Nations. The revision log shows the document being copied from Pratt's hard drive to a floppy disk in revisions #4 and #5.

            The Word version of the dossier was recently removed from the 10 Downing Street Web site, but I archived a copy of the Feb. 6 version here:

            IRAQ - ITS INFRASTRUCTURE OF CONCEALMENT, DECEPTION AND INTIMIDATION
http://www.computerbytesman.com/privacy/blair.doc

            The Blair government learned its lesson well with regard to publishing Microsoft Word documents. Another report on Iraq that was published in June 2003 was only available as a PDF file. PDF files do not contain revision logs or hidden author information.

This paper, produced by Dr Glen Rangwala at the request of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, was written on June 16, 2003. It is reproduced from http://middleeastreference.org.uk/fac030616.html

A. The presentation of the 30 January 2003 dossier

The 19-page dossier, entitled "Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation", was released on 30 January 2003. The document begins with the statement that:

"This report draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material [...]"

The assertion that the intelligence agencies were involved in the production of the dossier was made more explicitly by Prime Minister Blair when he announced the release of the dossier to the House of Commons on 3 February 2003:

"We issued further intelligence over the weekend about the infrastructure of concealment. It is obviously difficult when we publish intelligence reports, but I hope that people have some sense of the integrity of our security services. They are not publishing this, or giving us this information, and making it up. It is the intelligence that they are receiving, and we are passing it on to people."

http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/cm030203/debtext/30203-06.htm

B. A review of the contents of the 30 January 2003 dossier

i. Sources

The bulk of the 19-page document (pp.6-16) is directly copied without acknowledgement from three different sources that are on the internet. The most extensively used source is an article in the on-line Israeli journal, Middle East Review of International Affairs (September 2002), entitled "Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis".

http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2002/issue3/jv6n3a1.html

The author of the piece is Mr Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student then based at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, California, who is completing a doctorate at Oxford University. He has confirmed to me that his permission was not sought; in fact, he didn't even know about the British document until I contacted him on 4 February to enquire whether his permission was given.

In addition to Mr Marashi's work, there is also the use of two articles from the specialist security magazine, Jane's Intelligence Review. On-line summaries of articles by Mr Sean Boyne in 1997 and Mr Ken Gause in 2002 are on the GlobalSecurity.org website, at:

http://globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iraq/

These texts were also amalgamated in part into the UK dossier.

The fact that these sources were copied is most clear from the typographical errors and anomalous uses of grammar in the original pieces that are incorporated into the Downing Street document. For example, Mr Marashi had written:

"Saddam appointed, Sabir 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Duri as head [...]"

There is a misplaced comma after the second word. On p.13, the British dossier incorporates the same misplaced comma:

"Saddam appointed, Sabir 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Duri as head [...]"

Because the texts of these three authors are copied directly also results in a proliferation of different transliterations (for example, different spellings of the Ba'th party, depending on which author is being copied).

ii. Modifications to the original articles

The only exceptions to these acts of copying were the tweaking of specific phrases. For example, most of p.9 on the functions of the Mukhabarat (General Intelligence) is copied directly from Mr Marashi's article. However, Marashi writes of the Mukhabarat's role in:

"monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq".

This becomes in the British dossier:

"spying on foreign embassies in Iraq".

Similarly, on the same page, Marashi writes that the Mukhabarat had a role in:

"aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes"

The British dossier renders this as:

"supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes".

A further example is from the section on "Fedayeen Saddam" (Saddam's Self-Sacrificers). Most of this text is copied from the 1997 article by Sean Boyne. However, Boyne writes that the personnel of this organisation are:

"recruited from regions loyal to Saddam", and refers to their original grouping as "some 10,000-15,000 'bullies and country bumpkins.'"

This becomes in the British government's text, at pp.15-16, a reference to how its personnel are:

"press ganged from regions known to be loyal to Saddam" ... "some 10,000-15,000 bullies."

The reference in Mr Boyne's article to how the organisation was made up of "bullies and country bumpkins" was shorn of its last three words in the UK dossier, perhaps to render a more threatening picture of the organisation than that contained in the original article.

Numbers are also increased or are rounded up. So, for example, the section on "Fedayeen Saddam" (pp.15-16) is directly copied from Boyne's article, almost word for word. The only substantive difference is that Mr Boyne estimates the personnel of the organisation to be 18,000-40,000 (Ken Gause, in another article that was substantially copied, estimates personnel in the region of 10,000-40,000). The British dossier instead writes "30,000 to 40,000". A similar bumping up of figures occurs with the description of the Directorate of Military Intelligence.

iii. Errors

There is at least one serious substantive mistake in the British text, on p.14, about the Iraqi organisation the Military Security Service (al-Amn al-Askari). After an initial two paragraphs copied from Marashi's 2002 article, the remainder of the text is taken from the description by Sean Boyne in his 1997 article of a wholly different organisation called the General Security Service (al-Amn al-Amm). That is, it mixes up the descriptions of two different organisations.

The result is a confusion that renders the description incoherent. The description of the Military Security Service (al-Amn al-Askari) begins by relating how this organisation was created in 1992 (in a section copied from Marashi). It then describes how the Military Security Service moved headquarters in 1990 (in a piece copied from Boyne on the activities of the General Security Service), two years before the organisation was even created.

Later in the same section, the UK dossier claims that the head of the Military Security Service is Taha al-Ahbabi. This is from Boyne's description of the General Security Service. In fact, the Military Security Service was headed by Thabet Khalil when the dossier was released.

C. Further comments

The information in the UK dossier is presented as being an accurate statement of the current state of Iraq's security organisations. However, it may not be anything of the sort. Mr Marashi -- the real and unwitting author of much of the document -- refers in his article to his primary source as being the documents captured by Coalition forces in 1991, and which are now retained by the Massachusetts-based organisation, the Iraq Research and Documentation Project. His own focus is the activities of Iraq's intelligence agencies in Kuwait in the period from August 1990 to January 1991, as this is the subject of his thesis. As a result, much of the information presented as relevant to how Iraqi agencies are currently engaged with UNMOVIC is 12 years old.

When the document was first released as a Microsoft Word document, I checked the properties of the text in the File menu. It revealed the authors of the text as P. Hamill, J. Pratt, A. Blackshaw, and M. Khan. Those names were removed within hours from the downloadable file. However, in collaboration with journalists, I have since checked who these individuals are. The identity of the authors is as follows:

·          Paul Hamill, a Foreign Office official;

·          John Pratt, a junior official from the Prime Minister's Strategic Communications Unit;

·          Alison Blackshaw, Alastair Campbell's personal assistant;

·          Mustaza Khan, news editor of the 10 Downing Street website.

D. The ordering of the dossier

The dossier is ordered as follows:

p.1 is the summary.

pp.2-5 consists of, firstly, a repetition of the comments of Hans Blix, Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC, to the Security Council in January on the difficulties they were encountering. Further claims about the activities of al-Mukhabarat follow. These claims are not backed up, and have in some cases been specifically denied by Hans Blix. For example, the UK dossier claims on p.3 that:

"Journeys are monitored by security officers stationed on the route if they have prior intelligence. Any changes of destination are notified ahead by telephone or radio so that arrival is anticipated. The welcoming party is a give away."

This can be contrasted with the assessment of Hans Blix on 14 February 2003 that:

"Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400 inspections covering more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming."

http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/blix14Febasdel.htm

Similarly, the UK dossier claims on p.3 that:

"Escorts are trained, for example, to start long arguments with other Iraqi officials ‘on behalf of UNMOVIC’ while any incriminating evidence is hastily being hidden behind the scenes."

By contrast, Dr Blix relates in the same presentation of 14 February that:

"we note that access to sites has so far been without problems, including those that had never been declared or inspected, as well as to Presidential sites and private residences."

p.6 is a simplified version of Mr Marashi's diagram at: http://cns.miis.edu/research/iraq/pdfs/iraqint.pdf

p.7 is copied (top) from Mr Gause (on the Presidential Secretariat), and (middle and bottom) from Mr Boyne (on the National Security Council).

p.8 is entirely copied from Mr Boyne (on the National Security Council).

p.9 is copied from Mr Marashi (on al-Mukhabarat), except for the final section, which is insubstantial.

p.10 is entirely copied from Mr Marashi (on the General Security Service), except for the final section, which is insubstantial.

p.11 is entirely copied from Mr Marashi (on Special Security), except for the top section (on General Security), which is insubstantial.

p.12 is entirely copied from Mr Marashi (on Special Security).

p.13 is copied from Mr Gause (on Special Protection) and Mr Marashi (Military Intelligence).

p.14 is copied from Mr Marashi (first two paragraphs) and then wrongly copied from Mr Boyne (on Military Security). The last section, on the Special Republican Guard, is copied from Mr Marashi.

p.15 is copied from Messrs Gause and Boyne (on al-Hadi project / project 858).

pp.15-16 is copied from Boyne (on Fedayeen Saddam).

p.16: The final section, on the Tribal Chiefs' Bureau, seems to be copied from Anthony H. Cordesman, "Key Targets in Iraq", February 1998, http://www.csis.org/stratassessment/reports/iraq_targets.pdf, pg. 8

pp.17-19 make general claims about human rights in Iraq.

Produced by Alan Simpson MP and Dr Glen Rangwala for Labour Against the War, 3 July 2003. It is reproduced from http://middleeastreference.org.uk/latw030703.html

LATW believes the war on Iraq was launched on the basis of deceit, with claims about weapons used to provide the justification for an invasion that was already settled policy. The fact that there appears to have been no extensive programme for the development of these weapons, nor the stockpiling of large quantities of those weapons, should indicate how British policy towards Iraq was misguided in its overt purpose and misleading in its presentation.

The government released two dossiers on Iraq to make its case for war. The first one, "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: the assessment of the British government", was released to much fanfare, on 24 September 2002. The second, "Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation", was presented by the Prime Minister to the House of Commons on 3 February 2003 as an "intelligence report". 12 of the 19 pages of that second dossier were plagiarised from 3 different on-line sources, with sections from those different sources cobbled together to make some parts of that dossier incoherent.

I. The Prime Minister’s Dossier of 24 September 2002

According to the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman, "It was important to understand the purpose of the dossier. It was asking two questions: Had the threat increased? If so, did we have to deal with it? The answer to both questions was yes." (23 September 2002).

Jack Straw characterised this "threat" as "a severe threat to international and regional security" (speech to the House of Commons, 12 March 2002), and he claimed that Iraq was "uniquely dangerous" (speech to the Commons, 24 Sept 2002). These claims about a threat from Iraq were elaborated on with a series of claims:

CLAIM: The September dossier detailed places in Iraq that were "capable of being used" for producing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

FACT: All these sites were visited by weapons inspectors soon after they entered Iraq on 27 November 2002.

The sites mentioned in the dossier, and the date on which they were visited by UN inspectors:

Fallujah II (p.20: for the production of "chlorine and phenol") - 9 Dec 2002 Ibn Sina, Tarmiyya (p.20: for the production of "chemical agents") - 11 Dec 2002 al-Qa Qaa (p.20: a "phosgene production plant") - 9 Dec 2002 al-Sharqat (p.21: to "produce nitric acid") - 2 Jan 2003 Fallujah III (p.22: "can be used in the production of ... ricin") - 8 Dec 2002 al-Dawrah (p.22: "involved in biological agent production") - 28 Nov 2002 Amariyah (p.22: "biological warfare") - 15 Dec 2002 al-Rafah / Shahiyat (p.29: "medium range ballistic missiles") - 27 Nov 2002

• At none of these sites were any traces of prohibited weapons found.

One journalist from the al-Dawrah Institute wrote:

"By the time the inspectors left the plant today, after four hours, they had concluded that the plant was no longer operational -- not for the production of toxins, and not for animal vaccines either. Reporters who were allowed to wander through the plant after the inspectors left found the place largely in ruins. Apparently, it had been abandoned by the Iraqis after 1996, when the weapons inspectors took heavy cutting equipment to the fermenters, containers and pressurized tubing and valves used in the toxin production."

("Inspectors Find Only Ruins at an Old Iraqi Weapons Site", New York Times, 29 November 2002).

• Is it possible to hide the production of weapons of mass destruction? No, according to the government's senior scientists. In testimony before the Foreign Affairs Committee on 18 June 2003, Dr Thomas Inch, former Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Ministry of Defence scientist, was asked whether chemical weapons production could be concealed at any site. He said:

"I do not believe that you can hide the fact that you had been making some toxic chemicals on that site. If a site had been declared as a chemical weapons producing site, [..], then I believe that the trace analysis and so on of certain residues would probably give confirmation of whether or not that was a correct statement."

UN inspectors, with the most sophisticated equipment for tracing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, could not find any traces of prohibited weapons at any site in Iraq.

CLAIM: The dossier claimed that "there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa".

FACT: According to the US State Department, the country in question that they claimed Iraq was trying to import uranium from was Niger, in West Africa. On 7 March 2003, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, revealed to the Security Council that the allegations were centred a round "documents provided by a number of States that pointed to an agreement between Niger and Iraq for the sale of uranium between 1999 and 2001." After reviewing the evidence extensively - including "correspondence coming from various bodies of the Government of Niger" - and "compar[ing] the form, format, contents and signatures of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation", ElBaradei gave his assessment of the reliability of this information:

"the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents - which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger - are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded."

ElBaradei concluded: "There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990."

Months after the forgeries were revealed, UK ministers have started to claim that the claim in the September 2002 dossier was based on different evidence for Iraqi attempts to import uranium from Africa. The IAEA in March 2003 had not received any evidence about Iraqi attempts to import uranium. The UK has an obligation under Security Council Resolutions to give material to the IAEA on Iraqi attempts to illegally import weapons material. So either the UK was violating its obligations under the same Security Council Resolutions it claimed Iraq was violating, or it was relying on forgeries to make its case for war.

CLAIM: Accompanied by large photos, the dossier claimed that:

"According to intelligence, Iraq has retained up to 20 Al Hussein missiles [..] They could be used with conventional, chemical or biological warheads and, with a range of up to 650km, are capable of reaching a number of countries in the region including Cyprus, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel."

FACT: The weapons inspectors found no sign of these missiles. But perhaps the decisive evidence comes not only from the fact that they weren't used against US/UK forces (whilst other short-range missiles were), but most importantly because finding them does not seem to be a priority for the US/UK. The dossier claims that Qusai Hussein (Saddam's son) has authority to use chemical and biological weapons: he is still at large. If the UK really believed that there were 20 hidden missiles capable of hitting Cyprus or Israel with chemical or biological warheads, and that these missiles were under the control of someone who is still not found, then surely finding and destroying them would be the highest priority?

Instead, this is what Tony Blair has had to say in Poland on 30 May 2003:

"We have only just begun the process now of investigating all the various sites. [...]. It is not the most urgent priority now for us since Saddam has gone."

Either this policy is exceedingly reckless, or the Prime Minister considers no longer his original claims about Iraq's missiles valid.

CLAIM: "Iraq has chemical and biological agents and weapons available [..] from pre-Gulf War stocks". p.23 In other words, Iraq has managed to retain stockpiles of these weapons for 12 years.

FACT: According to the weapons inspectors. Iraq produced 4 sets of chemical agents (1. VX, 2. sarin, 3. tabun, 4. mustard) and 3 sets of biological agents (5. anthrax, 6. botulinum toxin, 7. aflatoxin) in bulk that it weaponised before 1991. All of these, except mustard, would have degenerated within 5 to 10 years. These are the relevant quotes from the 173-page report of the weapons inspectors, entitled "Unresolved disarmament issues" (6 March 2003), which is at http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/documents/6mar.pdf :

1. "VX produced through route B must be used relatively quickly after production (about 1 to 8 weeks), which would probably be satisfactory for wartime requirements." (p.82) [NB: Iraq produced the 1.5 tonnes of VX referred to on p.16 of the dossier using the method the inspectors called "route B". There are other ways to produce VX, but the quantity of VX that the government is referring to was produced in this unstable form] 2. "According to documents discovered by UNSCOM in Iraq, the purity of Sarin-type agents produced by Iraq were on average below 60%, and dropped below Iraq’s established quality control acceptance level of 40% by purity some 3 to 12 months after production." (p.72) 3. "documentary evidence suggests that Tabun was produced using process technology and quality control methodologies that would result in the agent being degraded to a very low quality through the action of a resulting by-product." (p.68) 4. mustard produced before 1991 would still be viable today. 5. anthrax can only be stored for ten years or more if it is dried. But the weapons inspectors recorded: "UNMOVIC has no evidence that drying of anthrax or any other agent in bulk was conducted." (p.120) 6. "any such stockpiles of botulinum toxin, whether in bulk storage or in weapons that remained in 1991, would not be active today." (p.101) 7. on aflatoxin: "Such stocks would have degraded and would contain little if any viable agent in 2003" (p.105).

In summary, all chemical and biological agents that Iraq produced before 1991 - with the one exception of the chemical agent of mustard gas - would have degenerated by now. In particular, the claim that Iraq could still have biological agents left over from 1991 -- a claim that the document does make -- is contradicted by the findings of the weapons inspectors.

CLAIM: "What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons ... I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on WMD, and that he has to be stopped." (Prime Minister’s opening to the dossier)

FACT: The assessments of the UN weapons inspectors are strikingly different:

IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, statement to the Security Council, 7 March 2003:

"After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq."

UNMOVIC working document, "Unresolved Disarmament Issues" (6 March 2003), p.15:

"In general, there is little evidence of change in the chemical and biological disciplines beyond that noted above. No proscribed activities, or the result of such activities from the period of 1998-2002 have, so far, been detected through inspections."

UNMOVIC Executive-Chairman Hans Blix, interview with the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel, 23 May 2003:

"I am obviously very interested in the question of whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction and I am beginning to suspect there possibly were not."

II. The Weapons Inspections

CLAIM: According to one of the few original sentences in the "dodgy dossier" of February 2003:

"Escorts are trained, for example, to start long arguments with other Iraqi officials 'on behalf of UNMOVIC' while any incriminating evidence is hastily being hidden behind the scenes."

FACT: In the words of Hans Blix, head of the UN weapons inspections body, on 14 February 2003:

"Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400 inspections covering more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming. [..] we note that access to sites has so far been without problems, including those that had never been declared or inspected, as well as to Presidential sites and private residences."

Over the next month, the assessment of the inspectors became more positive. Hans Blix hold told the Security Council on 7 March that Iraq was taking "numerous initiatives...with a view to resolving long-standing open disarmament issues", and this "can be seen as 'active', or even 'proactive'" cooperation. Iraq had destroyed 72 of its 120 medium range missiles on the request of the inspectors, and was ahead of the timetable to destroy the entire stock. The regime had passed a law prohibiting the production or retention of any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, as the inspectors had asked. They had verified that they had destroyed bombs containing anthrax in 1991 by excavating the destruction site. Could it be that the main fear of the US and UK governments was not Iraq's weapons, but that the inspectors would declare Iraq clean of prohibited weapons before they had the chance to invade?

III. Claims about post-war Iraq

CLAIM: Standing alongside President Bush on 8 April 2003, Tony Blair said: "On weapons of mass destruction, we know that the regime has them, we know that as the regime collapses we will be led to them."

FACT: Like so many of the certainties expressed by the Prime Minister, the idea that British forces would be "led to" Iraq's weapons when "the regime collapses" has been shown to be false. Twelve weeks on from the end of the war, and despite the numerous lucrative offers made to individuals inside Iraq to tell the occupying army about Iraq's alleged hiding places for weapons, no weapons have been found. British ministers have had to resort to referring to finds of chemical protection suits of an unknown age, probably to be used in defence against potential Iranian attacks, and mobile vans, which the scientists working on claimed were for the production of hydrogen for artillery guidance balloons (sold by the UK to Iraq in the 1980s).

CLAIM: "The United Kingdom should seek a new Security Council Resolution that would affirm ... the use of all oil revenues for the benefit of the Iraqi people." Tony Blair to the House of Commons on 18 March 2003.

FACT: The UK sponsored a resolution to the Security Council, which was passed to become Security Council Resolution 1483, that deductions would be made from Iraq's oil revenues to pay as compensation for the invasion Kuwait. The UN has already determined that it should pay a further $26bn in reparations, and governments and corporations have claimed over $200bn more. That amount is 20 years worth of Iraq's entire oil income at present levels.

CLAIM: In his speech of 18 March, Tony Blair pledged following the overthrow of the Iraqi regime, "the oil revenues, which people falsely claim that we want to seize, should be put in a trust fund for the Iraqi people administered through the UN."

FACT: The UK-sponsored resolution created a "Development Fund", into which Iraqi oil revenues are placed after the deduction for compensation. It then states (paragraph 13) that "funds in the Development Fund for Iraq shall be disbursed at the direction of the Authority". As the resolution defines it, the Authority is the "unified command" of the "United States of America and the United Kingdom ... as occupying powers". So in direct contrast to the government’s claims, oil revenues are effectively seized by the US and UK.

Promises in respect of a post-war Iraq have been disingenuous. The claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, however, and its threat to international security, all turned out to be false. Britain was misled into a war on no valid legal or security grounds. The central issue at stake is not whether one individual lied or not. It is the absence of truth that has to be accounted for. To take a country into war on the basis of a series of manufactured falsehoods throws the whole credibility of government authority into question. No amount of diversionary attacks on the BBC can duck this central issue.