28 Apr 09 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Chris Ames
Earlier this month I pointed out the acute double standard that the government applies to disclosing ‘confidential’ information. By way of a quick update, I can report that it is actually worse than it looked.
The gist of the story then was that the Cabinet Office had succeeded in censoring part of a document that it was forced to disclose under the Freedom of Information Act, even though Jack Straw had already published the document in full when he was Foreign Secretary. The missing part of the document revealed that former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix had commented on an early draft of the September 2002 Iraq dossier and Straw used it to divert attention from the withdrawal of the notorious 45 minutes claim.
I have since obtained the letter that Straw’s private secretary sent Blix before Straw published the document. It shows that Straw did not actually obtain permission to publish Blix’s comments in the way that he did. Instead, he warned him that he might have to refer to one comment — that the dossier ‘did not exaggerate the facts, nor revert to rhetoric’ –– and sought to ‘check’ that he would have no objection.
In a piece yesterday for Comment is Free, I quoted from the letter that Blix sent Straw’s private secretary in response. I show how Straw ignored Blix’s clear statement that he had not seen the intelligence on which the dossier based its claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and so ‘obviously’ was not endorsing those claims. In spite of this, Straw told parliament that:
‘The evidence that we put forward was a view that was widely shared at the time by other foreign intelligence agencies, as well, as it happened, by Dr Blix.’
The net effect of what Straw did here is probably worse than what the Cabinet Office warned against when censoring Blix’s comments. Anyone planning to trust the British government with confidential information is likely to assume not only that the information may be disclosed at some future date but that it might also be seriously misrepresented.
What the government will not do of course is to disclose ‘confidential’ information –– unless it suits its purposes to do so.
08 Apr 09 | Comment, Middle East and North Africa, United Kingdom
Why is British government trying to censor documents relating to the Iraq war it has already published, asks Chris Ames
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25 Mar 09 | Middle East and North Africa, Uncategorized
Newly released documents reveal the very real need for an Iraq inquiry, says
Chris Ames
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13 Mar 09 | Uncategorized
This is a guest post by Chris Ames
The new revelations about Tony Blair’s Iraq dossier are pretty devastating. Emails revealed intelligence experts veering from despondency about exaggerated claims to black humour about Doctor Frankenstein while policy officials asked for unhelpful caveats to be removed. Surely this is why the documents have been hidden for so long.
I first asked for these papers in June 2005, nearly four years ago. The Cabinet Office delayed for as long as it could before turning down the request, at which point I appealed to the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas. Last September, nearly three years on, Thomas ordered that the papers should be released, hinting along the way that they would provide ‘evidence that the dossier was deliberately manipulated in order to present an exaggerated case for military action’.
The Cabinet Office then quietly appealed the case to the Information Tribunal. Given recent tribunal decisions, such as the cabinet minutes case, they can’t have had much hope of achieving anything other than a further delay.
It’s not clear that the Cabinet Office even intended to fight the case. At the beginning of last week, as it was due to submit skeleton arguments, it told the tribunal that it was withdrawing. This looks like a scandalous waste of time and public money.
The Cabinet Office promised the tribunal that it would give me the papers ‘as soon as practicable’. But no-one told me this until I went to the scheduled hearing on Monday this week. The Cabinet Office was still reluctant to tell me what was happening. Eventually it was claimed that they had been put in the post on Monday night (9 March). [UPDATE: I have just received the documents in the post (Friday morning, 13 March). They package is dated Wednesday 11 March]
Whether this really happened remains to be seen. I have still not received the hard copies. Yesterday morning the Cabinet Office emailed me electronic copies and I learnt that they were going to publish them at midday. This is what government departments usually do with freedom of information requests, discouraging journalists from thinking that they will get much of an exclusive.
In spite of these apparent attempts at news management, the media have woken up to what the documents show. The Iraq dossier was deliberately sexed up, against the wishes of the intelligence community. The case for war was heavily spun.
