John Baron MP criticises Chilcot Inquiry

Thursday, 26, Nov 2009 12:00

Following the first week of the Chilcot Inquiry, below is John’s response which was requested and published by The Evening Standard [25th November 2009].

“The Chilcot Inquiry’s terms of reference have been deliberately restricted by a Government running scared of the truth. The inquiry is flawed from top to bottom: some sessions will be held in secret; the evidence will not be given under oath; and it will not cover the West’s support for Saddam Hussein prior to 2001.”

“If Sir John wants to get to the bottom of how the Government came to present an exaggerated case for war, he has to look again at the drafting of the September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

“This dossier was not “the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee and the JIC alone”, as Blair claimed. It is clear that spin doctors were closely involved in influencing decisions about content from inside the process. It was a Foreign Office press officer, John Williams, who produced a preliminary draft a few days before John Scarlett’s official draft was circulated, and the two are remarkably similar.”

“The carefully nuanced judgments of intelligence experts on Iraq’s military capability were turned into stronger assertions that went beyond the available evidence. This process needs closer scrutiny. Meanwhile, there were no plans for post-war reconstruction at least in part because the Government wanted to keep its plans for war secret for as long as possible.”