21.07.2004

Butler Report: Iraq lies 'nobody's fault'

That one can smile and smile and be a villain... Patrick Presland reviews the Butler report

You can understand why the Morning Star headlined the Butler report as “Another coat of whitewash” (July 16). True, of course, but not the whole truth. Did anyone really expect Butler and his carefully chosen committee of privy counsellors to “name names”? After all, when he was just Sir Robin Butler and as cabinet secretary was Whitehall’s head boy, it was Lord Butler who eased Blair into the business of government after the 1997 election victory. On the committee were also two politicians, Ann Taylor (Labour) and Michael Mates (Conservative) - both safe pairs of hands, who, word has it, stood up respectively for the case that no blame should be apportioned to individual politicians or intelligence officers. Butler reportedly accepted their stipulations and, again allegedly, was on the receiving end of some pretty firm ‘guidance’ from Downing Street to the effect that their should be no direct criticism of the prime minister.

Is this true? We cannot tell. The government would deny it. But surely the whole point is that ever since the war and particularly in the post-Butler climate trust in the government has simply been destroyed. Nobody knows what to believe.

The Butler committee’s remit was deliberately made very tight: to examine the intelligence which was used to justify war against Iraq. But if you study the report’s 196 pages, it constitutes a damning indictment - not just of the obvious equivocations and plain deception surrounding the September 2002 dossier in particular; not just of the way in which the leaders of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) abandoned all their supposed objectivity and professionalism; but of the whole rotten culture of government under Blair, with its arrogant contempt towards his own cabinet colleagues, towards parliament and the people who elected him. Political objectives drove the intelligence, whereas for the establishment it should have been the other way round. In a fateful conflation of assessment and advocacy, the ‘facts’ were made to fit the case, however implausible the case happened to be.

The problem with understanding Butler is that it is written in that sort of Mandarin of which Sir Humphrey himself would have been proud. Forget any democratic notions of public accountability, of elected politicians and the civil service elite being held to account for what they said and did. The document is actually intended to be intelligible only to a tight network of senior politicians and bureaucrats. It needs to be deciphered.

Space does not allow a detailed exegesis of the text, but let us just look at the notorious September 2002 dossier, interleaving Butler’s comments with how we perceive the reality to have been. By the spring of that year it was already clear that Blair and Bush had decided to make war on Iraq. Why they so decided is the subject for another article. By September, Blair needed to present a strong case to parliament in order to bolster the ultimatum contained in the draft of UN resolution 1441. The problem was this: how to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein’s military capability and intentions in relation to weapons of mass destruction presented a real and present danger to UK interests?

In an unprecedented exposure of SIS’s resources and methods, we learn that this multi-million-pound-funded agency, with its swanky new headquarters on the south bank of the Thames and its tremendous reputation for being simply the best intelligence service in the world, had around five sources reporting on Iraq, of whom only two could apparently be considered reliable. Whether any of these were actually living in Iraq remains open to question, but it is clear that the main channel of information came from exiled opposition groups based in London. Rumour has it that the current puppet Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, was a long-term SIS agent.

Given the urgency of the demand from government, SIS was prepared to part with large sums of money to prove that Saddam had WMDs. Not surprisingly, the exiles came up with ‘sources’ - supposedly members of Saddam’s inner circle - who could testify that the Iraqi dictator not only had functional WMDs but was engaged in an active nuclear bomb programme. These sources, soon classified as “established and reliable”, were in fact fabricators, purveying second- or third-hand gossip of no real intelligence value. Butler tells us that all the SIS agents in question were “unreliable”, “seriously flawed” or subject to “serious doubt”, which, translated, means that they were well paid purveyors of duff information to naive (or perhaps not so naive) SIS officers.

To give the service its due at this point, the production and requirements departments at SIS headquarters evidently attached all manner of warnings and caveats to the CX reports in question. They must themselves have known that the intelligence they passed to government at this time was hardly worth the paper it was printed on. It certainly was not good enough for Alastair Campbell, Blair’s closest confidant and arch spin-doctor, and Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s chief of staff. Their sole concern was not the truth, but merely ‘presentation’. Through former SIS career officer John Scarlett, now chairman of the JIC, and Campbell’s “mate”, they conveyed to SIS chief Sir Richard Dearlove the urgent need for something more. Hence Scarlett’s begging email of September 11 2002, with its “last call!” for any items of intelligence which could be included in a dossier which all the key players felt was not strong enough to justify the eventual case for war.

Lo and behold, on the very next day, Dearlove delivered a report from a so-called reliable senior military source in Iraq, conveying the startling information that Iraq had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons capable of delivery within 20-45 minutes. Just the ticket, and how convenient. With Scarlett’s active connivance, all reports were stripped of their numerous caveats; words like ‘may’ and could’, which Powell thought presented a bit of a problem, were changed to ‘will’ and ‘can’. Nothing was said about the fact that, even if Saddam did possess such a current capability, it related only to battlefield munitions such as gas shells. Scarlett and Dearlove both knew that the technical experts in the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) would find the dossier’s assertions incredible because they were unsupported by any reliable intelligence and, frankly, were incredible. So the DIS was simply locked out of the distribution chain.

On September 24 2002 Blair got on his feet and presented the dossier, suggesting then and repeatedly afterwards that the information was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”, when it was none of those things. Was he lying? Did he know that the dossier was based on duff intelligence, massaged by the SIS/JIC/Downing Street cabal to fit his political requirements, or, as Butler kindly puts it in various euphemisms, “the judgements in the dossier went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence”; “Language in the dossier and used by the PM may have left readers with the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence than was the case”; “more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear”. All Sir Humphrey-speak for saying that the September dossier was worthless. Maybe Campbell and Scarlett decided not to trouble the PM with the sordid details, but it is surprising that he did not ask his sofa cabinet of cronies, ‘Are you sure about this?’ Perhaps they lied to him. Who knows?

Even at the time, as we now know, members of the Blair cabinet like Robin Cook, who subsequently resigned over the matter, were convinced that the dossier’s claims were false. By July 2003 SIS finally had to come clean and take the rare step of ‘withdrawing’ the reports which had provided the September dossier with all its meat. Guilty conscience? Forget it. Just the expediency which comes from acknowledging that you’ve been taken for a ride - or been found out. All the same, credit to Dearlove for having some guts, however late in the day. Everyone apparently knew about this ‘withdrawal’ - everyone except Tony Blair, we are told, who only learned about it when he read the Butler report. Now we know that Tony lives on the Olympian heights, where mundane matters are not permitted to cloud his sublime reflections, but it stretches credibility to breaking point to suggest that nobody, simply nobody, bothered to tell him that the basis on which he had gone to war, the ‘justification’ for the deaths of thousands of people, was just conveniently fabricated, politically motivated guff.

Certainly, as a matter of record nobody saw fit to mention this trifling matter to Lord Hutton during their testimony at his enquiry. It also slipped their minds when addressing the Commons Intelligence and Security, and Foreign Affairs Committees - those supposed watchdogs over the activities of ‘our’ special services. The politicians have not graced us with an explanation for this surprising oversight on their part - the spies are putting it about that the matter was “too sensitive” to raise in such fora. Do they by any chance mean “too embarrassing”? The other day we marked the anniversary of the death of David Kelly, who told us the truth. Vindicated, but tragically too late.

There is so much more that could be said about this sickening affair. God knows, we have no illusions in that pathetic thing called parliamentary democracy, but the depth of the equivocation, the chicanery and the sheer deception revealed to us, albeit in the obscure language of the Butler report, still comes as a shock. Read it carefully for yourselves. Are we really being governed by such pathetic and moronic shits? In a few days time John Scarlett is due to take up his post as the new chief of SIS, an appointment that vividly reflects Blair’s arrogant disregard for what is going on around him. Even Tories like Iain Duncan Smith, Malcolm Rifkind and William Hague have made it clear that Scarlett should not get the job. The unspoken basis of their position is that Scarlett (and Dearlove, for that matter) have totally discredited the ‘good name’ of the SIS, and destroyed its standing in the intelligence community and the credibility of its product. If Scarlett does become the next ‘C’, he will be an albatross around SIS’s neck.

When the dust has settled, you can expect massive increases in SIS’s official budget, not to mention its secret take from various other government sources like the MOD. In what must be the most pathetic and incredible excuse of all, SIS claimed that the failures revealed by the Butler report were due to a lack of resources and underfunding. Yes, really. Across the river, the Security Service is in the process of recruiting some 3,000 extra spies to keep an eye on us in the name of the ‘war on terror’. For the first time since World War II they are talking about establishing regional offices with Security Service staff working alongside (ie: directing the work of) the local special branch. Their Millbank offices will be far too small. How long before Eliza Manningham-Buller imitates Stella Rimington and delivers a Dimbleby lecture about the global terrorist threat and the urgent need to increase the Security Service’s budget?

The intelligence services are a microcosm of the system which rules over us. Undemocratic and unaccountable. With their worthless charters and their ‘legal’ status in terms of acts of parliament, they will always be with us. They are the avowed enemies of our class and of all that we as communists and revolutionaries fight for.