4.2 |
Iraq WMD assessments, July to September 2002
390.
Mr Scarlett
stated that he remembered Mr Bassett being at the meeting
with
Mr Campbell,
but he did not remember what Mr Bassett had said and he did
not
remember
taking any notice of it.190
Mr Scarlett
added:
“… the
general advice that I took away from Alastair Campbell, from nobody
else …
was that
the … draft … needed, ideally, to have more detail in it, needed to
be less
assertive,
less rhetorical … And indeed the 16th September draft was clearly
striking
a slightly
different tone in its language.”
391.
Asked about
the views expressed in the emails and their impact,
Mr Campbell told
the
Inquiry:
“That may
have been their honestly held opinions, but I didn’t agree with
them.
I actually
thought that the paper that John Scarlett produced on September 10
was
… a very,
very good piece of work. So, as I said at the Hutton inquiry, they
are all
perfectly
entitled to make those points, if that’s their opinion, but,
ultimately, it would
not be
their decision …”191
392.
Mr Blair
told the Hutton Inquiry that he was aware of the process
for
producing
the dossier, and his view was that it was “important that it
made
the best
case we could make subject, obviously, to it being owned by the
Joint
Intelligence
Committee”.
393.
There is no
evidence that Mr Blair saw the emails on the issue
between
officials
in No.10.
394.
Asked, in the
light of the comment that No.10 had wanted the dossier “to be
as
strong as
possible within the bounds of available intelligence”, whether he
was aware
that
process (the email exchange) was going on, Mr Blair told the
Hutton Inquiry that he
had been
aware of that, and “it was important that it [the dossier] made the
best case we
could make
subject, obviously, to it being owned by the Joint Intelligence
Committee”.192
395.
Mr Blair
added that, as Parliament was being recalled and he would be
presenting
the
dossier, he had been concerned to make sure the dossier made the
“best case”:
“Provided
that is clearly understood as meaning that it is only if the
intelligence
agencies
thought both that the actual intelligence should be included and
that there
was not
improper weight being given to any aspect of that
intelligence.”193
190
The Hutton
Inquiry, public hearing, 23 September 2003, page 151.
191
Public
hearing, 12 January 2010, page 83.
192
The Hutton
Inquiry, public hearing, 28 August 2003, page 6.
193
The Hutton
Inquiry, public hearing, 28 August 2003, page 7.
187