On April 7, 2004, The Guardian revealed that the MI6 told the Lord Butler committee that it does not want to be used again in the future by politicians to provide an excuse for going to war. Was Blair lying to Lord Hutton?
On May 18, 2004, we were told that Lord Butler, the former head of the civil service who leads a group investigating the role of the intelligence services in the build-up of the Iraq war, said that he was appalled by the extant of the use of informal procedures introduced at Downing Street after he left in 1998. This could lead to a damaging verdict against the government. It looks to him like most decisions are taken outside normal procedures and are not often even recorded. In other words, confusion is reigning at the top level of British government.
On June 27, 2004, The Observer reported that the Butler inquiry investigating British intelligence failures in the build-up to the war in Iraq will especially focus on Blair's assertion that Saddam Hussein tried to buy some uranium from Niger. This was one of Blair's main reasons to go to war and it later was shown to be based on forged documents. Blair is still pretending that he was right.
On July 14, 2004, Lord Butler published his report on the six months investigation
of what went wrong with the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq.
Tony Blair was left slightly damaged by it but he will survive. The five members
participating in the inquiry blamed the "seriously flawed" quality
of the MI6 intelligence on Iraq used by Downing Street but at the same time,
they said "there was no deliberate attempt on the part of the government
to mislead." It added that Downing Street put the intelligences services
under such "strain" that they could not be neutral as they should
have been. They also found:
Downing Street stretched the intelligence available to "the outer limit."
The claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes
should not have been included in the September 2002 dossier. It looks like
it had been inserted "because of its eyes-catching character."
The September 2002 dossier that justified the invasion of Iraq had "serious
weakness" by not mentioning the dubious nature and limitation of much
of the intelligence available at that time. It was written to give the impression
that the intelligence was "fuller and firmer" that it was in fact.
Britain had only very few "main sources" on Iraq and the quality
of the information they provided has since been challenged by the intelligence
services themselves. A key source was described later on as "unreliable".
However the report does not blame any individuals, rather it absolves all
the people involved saying that it was at the most a "collegial or group"
mistake. Even John Scarlett who, as chairman of the joint intelligence committee,
took paternity of the dossier was cleared and Lord Butler went so far as saying
that he should not loose his new job as head of MI6. Once more, like in the
case of Lord Hutton's report, the most important point for the government,
and Blair did an excellent job of it, is to choose the right person to head
the inquiries. Lord Hutton and Lord Butler are both members of the establishment
and they were not the kind of persons to blame it. They were chosen to whitewash
Blair, its ministers, and the people involved in the writing of the September
2002 dossier; both lords made a good job of it. But, as the leaders of the
Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy
said, who will trust Blair in the future? Other members of the parliament,
quite a few British newspapers, and a large part of the people agreed.
On July 14, 2004, anti-war activists have reacted with anger to Lord Butler's report that exonerated Tony Blair from any wrongdoing in the lead-up to last year's invasion of Iraq. They labelled the report a "whitewash" and say it has left the British leader with little credibility. The report found major holes in pre-war intelligence but spared the British prime minister any personal responsibility. It was the fourth investigation in a year into the government's justification for war from which Blair has escaped with little more than a slapped wrist. The report concluded Iraq almost certainly did not possess significant stocks of weapons of mass destruction before the conflict, despite government claims. But it said Blair was not responsible for the failures of British intelligence and did not intentionally lie to the British people. The Stop the War Coalition spokeswoman added: "Tony Blair should resign and make a full apology to the British and Iraqi people. Troops should also be pulled out of Iraq. For his part, Ahmed al-Sheikh, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, said that Tony Blair's political judgment should have been the subject of the inquiry. "Even if the prime minister did not intentionally lie, his political judgment was lousy." "Thousands of innocent people have been killed in Iraq.
On July 15, 2004, Downing Street let it known that they would not apply all of Lord Butler's recommendations although Blair said in Parliament that he accepted in full the conclusions of the report. In particular he will not go back to the old style of Cabinet government as he intend to keep his own way of high-speed informal political machine. In this way, decisions are taken by a small group of people close to Blair with the other cabinet ministers left out. He will not either follow Lord Butler's recommendation to appoint a independent, qualified, and strong person as head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He prefers to appoint a friend so he can manipulate again. He will also confirm Mr Scarlett as head of MI6. This, Lord Butler agreed, but the opposition parties and some Labour members of the Parliament object to. He is behaving more and more like an US president, believing that nobody can throw him out of 10 Downing Street where he can do what he wants and how he pleases. Of the two by-elections held that day, both constituencies held by Labour until now, he lost one in Leicester South to the Liberal Democrats and held the one in Birmingham by a majority reduced from above 10,000 to 460. This could be a sign that he and his party cannot ignore.
On July 15, 2004, Hans Blix the former head of the UN weapon inspectors in Iraq just before the war accused Blair of misleading the British people by failing to "think critically about the evidences at hand." He was surprise that the Butler's report was so "surprisingly" critical of the British government, even if it whitewashed the prime minister saying that he acted in good faith! The report, he said, shows that the government failed to take into account what his team of inspectors found in Iraq that is that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. This shows that Blair, like Bush, were not interested to know if such weapons existed and that they only wanted to invade Iraq. This explains perhaps why he was not given more time to show without doubt that there were no such weapons and that the had no legal justification. He agrees with Blair that the world is better without Saddam Hussein, but the war in Iraq and the occupation of the country the way it has been done has not made the region, or the world, safer.
Strange enough, the Butler's report released on July 14, 2004, supports the
late Dr Kelly's allegations passed to the BBC:
That Downing Street put pressure on the intelligence officers to harden -or
to sex-up, as Gilligan said- the September 2002 dossier.
That some intelligence officers were unhappy with the content, in particular
about the claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within
45 minutes.
According to Gilligan's notes, Dr Kelly said that the dossier was "transformed
weeks before its publication to make it sexier."
Downing Street insisted to include real but unreliable information in the
dossier against the wish of the intelligence people.
In his report of July 14, 2004, Lord Butler said that Tony Blair oversold
the case for war with Iraq, claiming there was "fuller and firmer"
intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein than really existed.
Lord Butler refrained from criticising the prime minister or any other individual,
saying there had been "collective responsibility" but the Conservatives
said the prime minister had been shorn of all credibility over the affair.
The committee also criticised the way decisions on the "vital matter
of war and peace" were taken by a "small circle" of ministers
and advisers around Mr Blair without proper cabinet consultation. The committee's
196-page verdict was far milder than the report published last week in Washington
by the US Senate intelligence committee.