Iraq inquiry: 'dodgy dossier' session about to begin
The Iraq Inquiry blogger watches Alastair Campbell face questions.
Reports of Alastair Campbell’s demise have been greatly exaggerated – at least on the basis of this morning’s session.
What some quarters of the media trailed as his day of reckoning has thus far failed to produce, although we are about to move onto the choppier waters of the February 2003 ‘dodgy dossier’ and beyond.
Freedman has been a persistent questioner and we now have a clearer understanding of the ‘uneasy bedfellows’ relationship between the spooks (John Scarlett et al) and Campbell’s presentation team in 2002. Lyne did similar work in the first session when his questions evoked the informal ‘sofa-cabinet’ way in which much of Blair’s inner team seemed to operate. The Blair-Bush letter traffic was interesting too.
Freedman also got Campbell to take ownership of the PM’s dossier foreword and the notorious assertion that intelligence established Iraq’s WMD program “beyond doubt” – despite the fact that, as several witnesses have previously stated, intelligence can rarely if ever reach such levels of certainty. I thought Campbell claiming that leaving out ‘beyond doubt’ would probably not have weakened Number 10’s argument for action was rather disingenuous.
Campbell did concede that with retrospect the inclusion and phrasing of the ’45-minute’ claim could have been handled more clearly and Freedman raised lots of questions about how phrases appeared and disappeared as the September dossier moved from draft to draft.
But the problem for those seeking Campbell’s comeuppance is that he has two major inquiries behind him which concluded that he did not – his words – “question, override, rewrite let alone the ghastly phrase sex up” the intelligence it contained. If the intelligence subsequently turned out to be wrong, he argues, that is a question for JIC and the intelligence community. Blair could only be expected to believe it and act accordingly.
Which has given him several chances to return to his favourite bug-bear – us. For all that he told the Committee he hadn’t worried too much about headlines he didn’t miss a chance to take swipes today. Guardian conspiracy stories, lazy reporters conflating the dossiers, the media in general refusing to accept the outcome of previous inquiries.
Session’s resuming – more later.
