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RELATED REPORTS

  • Surprise witness

  • MoD pressure

  • Susan Watts testifies

  • Gilligan grilled

  • Intelligence concerns




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    The Hutton Inquiry
    Daily transcripts and intelligence documents are posted here.

    Dr Kelly's testimony
    To the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, 15 July.

    The September dossier
    The September dossier on the threat from Iraq, from the Number 10 website.
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    Advertisement

    Document bonanza
    Iraq intelligence



    Published: 22-Aug-2003
    By: Andrew Veitch



    Emails, briefings from mandarins, official letters and minutes of meetings. Over 900 documents - some 6,000 pages of evidence - relating to Dr. David Kelly has been released by the Hutton Inquiry.


    Posted on the inquiry's website only a few hours ago, the documents give more insight into the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly.



    It includes previously unseen evidence which will be referred to in the coming weeks, as well as the full version of documents. Previously, Lord Hutton had only released single pages.



    The documents are here.



    It is an extraordinary collection, and its still not complete - we have yet to see anything signed by the Prime Minister. It will be interesting to see if Mr Blair's documents surface when he is questioned at the Hutton Inquiry on Thursday.



    What we do see is the considerable concern in Downing Street over what Dr Kelly was going to tell the Foreign Affairs Committee when he appeared before them to answer questions about what he told the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan.



    They may not have told him exactly what to say and what not say but he was "briefed" and he was "prepared" - especially not to give the committee his views on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.



    And we now have a summary of Dr Kelly's evidence to the private investigation by the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee - did Downing Street have reason to be fearful?



    In a word, yes.



    He was sure Iraq had a WMD programme - but in his opinion there was only a "30 per cent probability" that they had useable weapons.



    That the claim in the September dossier they could be deployed within 45 minutes was "unwise" and was included in the dossier for "impact".



    Now Downing Street already knew that those were his views, so you can imagine how much they wanted to avoid him saying that in public before the Foreign Affairs Committee.



    Not a great causus belli, you might think.



    There was a rumour that Dr Kelly was being investigated by Special Branch for a suspected breach of the Official Secrets Act.



    This turned out to be a red herring - though if David Kelly knew about it, it can only have increased the pressure on him.



    We see from the documents that he'd earlier been suspected of a leaking a secret document to Andrew Gilligan, but he was cleared of it in early July - in fact his bosses at the MoD delayed interviewing him about the dossier until they were sure he was innocent of the leak of the earlier document.



    As David Kelly said with some feeling, I suspect, in the full version of the letter he sent to his boss when he first confirmed talking to the BBC reporter: "With hindsight, I deeply regret talking to Andrew Gilligan".


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