"Authorship" of the dossier

The Inquiry’s finding on the "question of authorship" was that:

"The Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator (Sir David Omand) and the Chairman of the JIC took the view that the JIC should be responsible for the production of the dossier, to ensure that its content properly reflected the judgements of the intelligence community and did not prejudice national security. This was agreed at the outset. From then on, the dossier was in the ownership of the JIC generally and of its Chairman in particular, drawing on the members of the Assessments Staff and the wider intelligence community who had drafted the classified JIC assessments on this subject." (Main text, para 320)

Clearly, this is entirely innaccurate. The JIC was never responsible for the dossier and did not have ownership. The JIC did not discuss the dossier at the meeting on 4 September 2002 that immediately followed Tony Blair's announcement that a dossier would be published. It was decided on 5 September that JIC chairman John Scarlett and his deputy would be "in charge" of the dossier. The JIC was subsequently asked to comment on but not approve the dossier. Although the JIC assessment staff did originate the core section of the dossier on Iraq's "current" weapons of mass destruction, the first full draft was written by Foreign Office spin doctor John Williams. The Cabinet Office claims not to know who produced the dossier's executive summary, which put forward its "judgements".

"Strenuous efforts were made to ensure that no individual statements were made in the dossier which went beyond the judgements of the JIC."

The full paragraph was:

Strenuous efforts were made to ensure that no individual statements were made in the dossier which went beyond the judgements of the JIC. But, in translating material from JIC assessments into the dossier, warnings were lost about the limited intelligence base on which some aspects of these assessments were being made. The Government would have seen these warnings in the original JIC assessments and taken them into account in reading them. But the public, through reading the dossier, would not have known of them. The dossier did contain a chapter on the role of intelligence. But the language in the dossier may have left with readers the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgements than was the case: our view, having reviewed all of the material, is that judgements in the dossier went to although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available. The Prime Minister’s description, in his statement to the House of Commons on the day of publication of the dossier, of the picture painted by the intelligence services in the dossier as 'extensive, detailed and authoritative' may have reinforced this impression.

A comparison of the dossier's claims with those of the JIC assessments on which it was supposed to be based shows this statement to be laughably inaccurate. It is not clear what the basis for the assertion in the first sentence was. It appears merely to replicate assertions given to Butler.

But the claim that "judgements in the dossier went to although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available" is contradicted by Butler himself. On the dossier's claim of the alleged ongoing production of chemical and biological weapons/agents, which was the subject of new intelligence between the 9 September 2002 JIC assessment and the dossier, Butler criticised the unnecessary exclusion of the Defence Intelligence Staff from the process, which resulted in:

a stronger assessment in the dossier in relation to Iraqi chemical weapons production than was justified by the available intelligence. (Para 577)