Briefing from the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman on: Iraq/WMD.
Iraq/WMD
Asked if the Intelligence and Security Committee expected the Prime Minister to announce an inquiry by them tomorrow in the House, the PMOS said that the Committee was obviously important and the Government valued the oversight role they played in this area. Given its remit, people shouldn’t be too surprised if the Committee already had this issue in hand. Unlike other Committees, they did not tend to make announcements in the same way about their work or provide a running commentary on it, given its unique and sensitive nature. We would have to wait for tomorrow. Asked if the Committee decided its work programme or was asked by the Government to look at issues, the PMOS said that it would depend. Following the terrorist atrocity in Bali, for example, we had asked the Committee to carry out an investigation. It went without saying that there was a dialogue between them and the Government in relation to intelligence issues and any other matter they might wish to look at. Asked if the Prime Minister would use his Statement on the G8 Summit in the House tomorrow to clarify what sort of inquiry the Committee might undertake, the PMOS said that discussions had been continuing between the Government and the Committee. The picture might become clearer in due course. He could not say a huge amount more today.
Asked if the Committee’s report would be censored and intelligence blacked out before it was published, the PMOS said that as we had underlined from the outset, the dossier had been based on intelligence which had not been ‘got up’ either by politicians or the intelligence community. The evidence had not been doctored or invented. If people wanted to accept a version of events from an anonymous source which had been dripped into this particular debate and which went against everything we had been saying, there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. There were obvious common sense reasons why reports from the Committee were redacted in order to protect intelligence sources. It would be odd if they weren’t. Put to him that this might not persuade anyone, the PMOS said that the test concerning the whole issue of WMD would be the evidence which would be brought forward in due course. The Prime Minister had said many times over the past few days that he was totally confident of the case we had been mounting. It was not unreasonable to ask people to exercise a little patience. Equally, given the strictures which Saddam had visited on his own country, there was a huge job to do there regarding humanitarian and reconstruction work. Quite understandably, that was where we were focussing our attention at the moment. Of course that was not to suggest that the issue of WMD was not important and did not need to be addressed. On the contrary. However, it was not our top priority at this time. It was clear that a lot of people had very strong views about the conflict. Many had made a number of doomsday predictions about the consequences if we went to war. They had suggested, for example, that the Middle East peace process wouldn’t get off the ground, that the Arabs street would rise up, that we would never take Baghdad, that we would get bogged down in Iraq for years and that the Coalition forces wouldn’t be welcomed. None of these had come to pass. There was a process to be gone through. An international survey team was due to start work in Iraq shortly. Obviously there would be many sites to visit and many people to talk to - hence the need for people to be patient. We lived in a world where answers were required immediately. However, things did not work that way in reality. The WMD dossier had been produced on the basis of material from the Joint Intelligence Committee. It had been their work and their judgements. No one had doctored anything. As the Prime Minister had said in an interview on Sunday, there was no doubt that Saddam had had WMD and had been continuing to manufacture them. If that hadn’t been the case, what had been the point of the numerous UN Resolutions relating to him and his continuing defiance of them?
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