The Cover-up
As I wait for the Information Commissioner to finalise his badly overdue decision on the missing Williams draft of the dossier, I'm adding new material to the site about the four establishment inquiries that looked at the dossier and how the government misled them.
I recently published a piece on Comment is Free entitled What the Butler didn't see. This looked at how Lord Butler's claim to have seen "no evidence" that the dossier was "explicitly intended to make a case for war" is disproved by the leaked Downing Street documents. I've now added a broader analysis of the Butler Review, showing how wrong Butler to attribute "authorship" of the dossier to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and how utterly unfounded was his claim that, "Strenuous efforts were made to ensure that no individual statements were made in the dossier which went beyond the judgements of the JIC."
Next will be a look at how Alastair Campbell and Jack Straw misled the 2003 Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry.
- Category(s)
- The cover-up