[A-List] UK state: Iraq crisis

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

A half-truth may not be a lie, but it is still dishonest

No matter what Lord Hutton says, the prime minister has been deceitful

David Clark
Monday February 2, 2004
The Guardian

Having been so emphatically acquitted of any wrongdoing by Lord Hutton, Tony
Blair must be dismayed by the barrage of headlines and opinion polls
suggesting that the country at large is far from impressed. A good cover-up
requires at least a veneer of plausibility. In failing to provide one,
Hutton has not only tarnished his own reputation, he has provoked a backlash
far stronger than the one that would have greeted a more qualified
government victory.

Blair may have cowed the BBC into a grovelling apology, but at what cost?
Many now feel that he has used up a lifetime's supply of benefit of the
doubt and that's a dangerous position for a prime minister to be in.

The chain of reasoning that produced this skewed outcome requires some
explanation. It arose because Hutton, in assessing the charge that the
government "sexed-up" the September dossier, relied on a definition of the
term so extreme that he couldn't fail to acquit the government of it -
namely, that it inserted information it knew to be false. I have never met
anyone who actually believed that to be true. Andrew Gilligan didn't believe
it even as the accusation stumbled from his lips at 6.07am on May 29. That's
why it was omitted from later reports. To set that as the sole test of the
government's integrity was quite illogical, not least since it formed no
part of Downing Street's original complaint.

Hutton considered and dismissed one other definition of the phrase
"sexed-up": that the wording of the dossier had been changed to make it as
strong as the available intelligence would permit. That would have been
entirely legitimate and, as Hutton pointed out, was not in any case what
Gilligan had alleged. However, there was a third possible interpretation
that Hutton chose not to consider: that the dossier contained real
intelligence, but was presented in such a way as to be deceitful and
misleading.

A half-truth may not be the same as a lie, but it is dishonest nevertheless.
That is why witnesses in court cases are under obligation to tell the "whole
truth" and not just the truth. I had assumed that a judge of Lord Hutton's
experience would appreciate the distinction. And what of the rest of us?
Remember how we hooted with derision when Alan Clark denied that he had lied
during the last Iraq scandal and had simply been "economical with the
actualité". Remember how we shook our heads at the depravity of such a view.
Can anyone fail to be struck by the parallel?

It may be impossible to pin the prime minister down to a straight lie, but
it isn't necessary either. We know from Hutton (the inquiry, not the report)
the numerous ways in which Downing Street officials subtly altered the
dossier to make Iraq seem a bigger threat than they knew it to be. A
sentence revealing that Saddam could not attack Britain was simply deleted.
The key judgment that Saddam would be prepared to use chemical and
biological weapons "if he believes his regime is under threat" was altered
by the removal of those words after Blair's chief of staff spotted the
obvious difficulty they posed. A defensive intention thus assumed the
appearance of an offensive threat. Even the original title of the document,
Iraq's Programmes for Weapons of Mass Destruction, was made to sound more
menacing with the removal of "programmes for".

The notorious 45-minute claim was indeed "the classic example" of this
process of distortion. Blair was entitled to include it in his dossier since
even Dr David Kelly believed that it was a valid piece of intelligence. But
in doing so he also had an obligation to share with us the knowledge that it
referred to battlefield weapons only, and had come from a single source. His
decision to withhold that information was an unforgivable act of dishonesty
for which he ought now to apologise.

All of this matters, not least because it has a direct bearing on a debate t
hat is about to happen. The mounting pressure created by the admission of
David Kay, the outgoing head of the Iraq Survey Group, and Condoleezza Rice,
the US national security adviser, that weapons of mass destruction may never
be found means that the government will soon have to abandon the pretence
that it was right all along. Some expect Blair to do this as early as
tomorrow, when he appears before the Commons liaison committee. He will
admit that some of the intelligence was faulty, but insist that it was
presented in the sincere belief that it was accurate.

The sell-by date for this argument expired with the government's gloating
reaction to the Hutton report last week. I fully accept that the government
believed that Iraq possessed WMD. I believed it myself, although I also knew
that the threat was insufficiently strong to justify a pre-emptive war. If I
feel strongly about this it's because I spent four years reading
intelligence assessments on Iraq. The picture fed into Downing Street by the
intelligence services was one with which I was familiar: Iraq was thought to
have a residual capability in the form of a few short-range chemical and
biological weapons and an ongoing research and procurement network.

Iraq, on this basis, might have become a real threat in the long term. But
that wasn't good enough. Blair needed a reason why the world couldn't afford
to give Hans Blix the time he needed to complete his work, because President
Bush simply wouldn't wait. So Downing Street transformed the dossier to
confect a threat that was "serious and current". The fact that the chairman
of the joint intelligence committee, Sir John Scarlett, acquiesced in this
process is of no consequence, except in making him complicit in a shameful
fraud. Real responsibility lies with Blair.

It has become something of a cliche to observe that for the prime minister
the line between deception and self-deception is blurred to the point of
non-existence. In this charitable view the process of distortion arose
subconsciously (to borrow a phrase from Hutton) from an evangelical
conviction that Saddam must be a threat. It is not difficult to see the
attraction of this explanation: it is so much more reassuring than the
alternative. But it is impossible to understand how any serious person could
regard it as mitigation for a man charged with the decision to go to war.
The fact remains that Blair's conduct fell woefully short of the standards
we are entitled to expect of someone in his position.

The most dispiriting experience of last week was watching ministers and MPs
demean themselves and the reputation of a great party with the most
extravagant displays of self-satisfaction. We know only too well what they
would have said if the Hutton inquiry had been set up to investigate that
actions of a Conservative government that had taken Britain to war on such a
dishonest basis. I am not prepared to feel differently about it because it
happened to be a Labour government instead.

· David Clark was special adviser to Robin Cook in the foreign office from
1997 to 2001