MY BLAIR DOSSIER

ALREADY years late, Sir John Chilcot will write to the Prime Minister in the next few days, setting the timetable, at last, for publication for his inquiry into the iraq War. it is feared that will not be ready until 2017 — no less than seven years late and a full decade after the last British troops pulled out of iraq.

The delay in the inquiry, commissioned by prime minister Gordon Brown in 2009, has become a national scandal. The relatives of the 179 servicemen who died in iraq — in many people’s view an unnecessary and futile war — should not be kept waiting a minute longer.

For the past three weeks, i have been working with a BBC team to produce our own iraq report. Our findings are based on the testimonies and evidence that has already been offered to Chilcot — as well as on our own interviews with key players involved in the run-up to the war. We have set out to answer the four central questions that Chilcot and his team have yet to deliver on . . . and they make chilling reading.

QUESTION 1

WAs the information presented by the then Labour government on saddam Hussein’s so-called ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and other matters that led Tony Blair to take Britain to war in 2003, a reflection of the true facts?

EARLIER official reports into the invasion of iraq have cleared Blair from the charge that he had misled Parliament or twisted the evidence.

However, there is devastating evidence proving that as prime minister he deceived the House of Commons and the British people over the threat from Saddam.

The most powerful testimony of all was provided by Dr Hans Blix, Chief Weapons inspector for the United Nations at the time of the build-up to the iraq War.

He described to us how some of Blair’s claims about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD) in his famous ‘dodgy’ dossier of September 2002, were based on ‘a misrepresentation’.

The dossier followed Blair’s press adviser alastair Campbell prevailing on his friend, the intelligence chief John Scarlett, to strengthen the language in the document so that the suggestion that the iraqis might be able to deploy missiles within 45 minutes was changed to ‘are able’.

Speaking to us from his native Sweden, Blix said: ‘The big difference in the British dossier was that they simply asserted that these items are there. But when Mr Blair asserts that there were weapons, well, that’s an assertion and it was not supported by evidence.

‘Both the UK and the U.S. replaced question marks with exclamation marks. i certainly think it was a misrepresentation.’

Dr Blix went on to say that Blair’s deception of the British people was not confined to the notorious 2002 dossier. He says Blair also misled Parliament in his key, eve-of-invasion speech in March 2003 before MPs voted on the issue.

The respected weapons expert challenged Blair’s claims that Saddam possessed up to 1,000 shells and bombs filled with mustard gas.

He said his UN team had only ‘cited them as unaccounted for’, while Blair ‘implied that they existed’.

Dr Blix continued: ‘We had explained in our report that the iraqis had told us that most [weapons] had been destroyed in 1991 and that there were also inaccuracies in their calculation of how much they’d had, and i think that was a plausible explanation.

‘There was no trace of that, if i remember rightly, in Mr Blair’s statement in Parliament.’

Dr Blix also questioned whether MPs would have voted for British troops to invade iraq if they had known the truth. He said the Blair government’s claims were ‘ not really sustainable’.

Shaken by the force of his testimony, i asked whether he thought Blair had misrepresented the truth and had lied to Parliament in order to make the case for an illegal war.

Dr Blix paused. Then came this devastating response: ‘Well, i’m a diplomat, so i’m not using such . . . such words, but in substance, yes, they misrepresented what we [the UN inspection team] did and they did so in order to get the authorisation that they shouldn’t have had.’

We had this assertion that Blair misled the British people over intelligence reports concerning the existence of WMD corroborated by a key British diplomat.

Carne ross was Britain’s foremost expert on iraq at the United Nations, handling British relations with the weapons inspectors and the iraqi government in the run-up to war.

He told us he was ‘ intimately involved’ with the dossier on WMD. Speaking from his office in New York, ross said that ‘in draft after draft, the evidence was massaged to say things that it didn’t really justify . . . What i saw was that we were suddenly making claims for which i didn’t think we had any justification — for which i hadn’t seen any evidence.’

We have also discovered that Blair’s No 10 team even went so far as to traduce the then French President, Jacques Chirac.

They tried to set him up as a public hate figure among those who wanted iraq invaded.

Sir Stephen Wall, Downing Street adviser on European affairs at the time, told us that Blair and alastair Campbell agreed to brief the pro-war Sun newspaper into publishing a story that Chirac ‘ had made it clear that in no circumstances was he prepared to go to war against Saddam Hussein’.

The truth, though, was that Chirac had not completely ruled out backing the resolution (which could not be passed without the agreement of the French). instead, he had only ruled it out for the time being.

CONCLUSION: Blair misled the British people about the threat from Saddam.

QUESTION 2

DID the invasion of iraq increase the threat to Britain from Al Qaeda?

THIS question is central to Chilcot’s investigation as the case for going to war depended in part on the claim that an invasion would actually reduce the threat.

For, if not removed, it was feared that Saddam might easily join forces with international terrorists such as al Qaeda and launch an attack on the West.

as the invasion of iraq began in March 2003, Blair told the Commons: ‘ Should terrorists obtain these weapons, now being manufactured and traded around the world, the carnage they could inflict to our economies, our security, to world peace would be beyond our most vivid imagination.’

Who better to explain the truth about possible links between Saddam and al Qaeda than Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was head of Mi5 at the time.

She told the Chilcot inquiry that contrary to the claims that, if not tackled, Saddam might link up with al Qaeda, Downing Street had been told by the intelligence services that an invasion of iraq would risk increasing the al Qaeda threat.

When questioned whether an invasion would increase the overall threat from international terrorism, Baroness Manningham-Butler told Chilcot: ‘Substantially.’

indeed, she went on to say that, by 2003, she found it necessary to ask the PM for a ‘doubling of our [Mi5] budget’ in order to cope with a sharp increase in the threat from al Qaeda and international terrorism. as a