Document Actions
The 45 Minutes Claim
The dossier's claim that Iraq's military could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so is the most controversial and notorious of all the claims. It is controversial because it soon became apparent that if it were true such weapons would have been quickly found and because it was cited in a BBC report as an example of how the dossier was "sexed-up" by the government's spin doctors. The report by Andrew Gilligan in May 2003 quoted a source (now known to be Dr David Kelly) as alleging that the claim was not in the original draft of the dossier and that the government knew it was wrong, or unreliable when it put it in the dossier.
What we now know about the 45 minutes claim
- It was, as alleged, based on a single source.
- It does not appear in the draft of the dossier, produced by John Williams, the Foreign Office's top spin doctor.
- It was included later in the process, after the government's spin doctors got involved. It was included after the formal JIC paper (p163) in which it was first cited was discussed at a meeting (Para 77) packed with spin doctors.
- It was not set out as a "judgement" in the formal JIC paper (p163) or on its first appearance in the dossier. It was upgraded to the status of judgement when the dossier's executive summary was crassly reworked in a later draft, probably by one of the government's spin doctors.
- In the formal JIC paper (p167), it was made clear that the intelligence was believed to relate to battlefield "munitions" rather than long range weapons of mass destruction. This wording was changed when the claim was first added to the dossier.
- The prominence given to it in the dossier - and particularly its status as a judgement - was bitterly disputed from within the "intelligence community" at the time.
- It was withdrawn by SIS/MI6 in July 2003.
So the evidence not only points to the government's spin doctors being responsible for the inclusion of the claim and its upgrading to be a "judgement", it shows that they were told that the claim was unreliable but nevertheless insisted on it continuing to be made.