Document Actions
Foreign Office Freedom of Information request #3
This request followed Foreign Office Freedom of Information request #2 and was a further attempt to establish information concerning the draft dossier produced by John Williams on 9 September 2002. The response was highly significant, suggesting that Williams was asked to produce his draft at one of the planning meetings for the dossier that, according to his evidence to the Hutton Inquiry (Section 189), he attended on 5 and 9 September. The response also confirmed that Williams did not produce the historical sections of the dossier, as many have supposed. This means that the considerable help that he provided towards John Scarlett's draft dossier of 10 September either related to the document as a whole or to sections on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, i.e. the executive summary or the section on "the current position" .
The specific request
- Did any individual or meeting invite or direct Mr Williams to produce his draft of 9 September and if so who? (The premise behind this question is that the definitive "no" in response to the previous request was not supported by any records as I had requested and it seems that such a definitive answer would be justified only by an alternative explanation.)
- Did Mr Williams produce the drafts of the "UN Weapons Inspections" and Regime/Human Rights sections that were sent to (e.g) Mr Peters on 9 September 2002?
- If not, who did produce them?
- Were these draft sections part of Mr Williams' 9 September draft to which I referred in my earlier request? (If so, this may provide information regarding the circulation of that draft, although I accept that it will not necessarily show the time at which the draft as a whole was circulated. If the FCO holds any record of when these draft sections were sent for comment within the FCO, please supply this information.)
- Which was the first draft of the dossier to contain an executive summary as it appeared in the published version, as opposed to the three section format of the June 2002 document.
- Which, if any FCO officials (to include anyone working at the Coalition Information Centre) drafted which sections of the dossier (excluding the UN Inspections and Regime/Human Rights parts but including the executive summary) following Mr Williams' 9 September draft?)
The response
The Foreign Office initially claimed that it had no information relating to the request. However, it subsequently clarified this:
The FCO does not hold any record of any individual or meeting that invited Mr Williams to produce his draft of 9 September. However, information supplied to the Hutton Inquiry by Mr Williams on the afternoon of 14 August 2003 does relate to this question. This can be accessed at www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk
Mr Williams did not produce the drafts of the "UN Weapons Inspections" and Regime / Human Rights sections and we do not hold any information on who did produce them.
We do not have a record of which draft was the first to contain an executive summary, as we do not hold any unpublished drafts that use the same format as the Scarlett draft of 10 September 2002.
Many different people were involved in the work surrounding the dossier over many weeks and there is no recorded information that shows which FCO officials may have been involved in this process.