The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
•
intelligence
providing a “fuller picture of Iraq’s plans and capabilities”
and
showing
that Saddam Hussein did “not regard them only as weapons of
last
resort”; he
was “ready to use them … and determined to retain them”;
and
•
intelligence
allowing the JIC to judge that Iraq had “continued to
produce
chemical
and biological agents”; and that Saddam Hussein and his son
Qusay
had “the
political authority to use” WMD.
450.
The draft
included a new Chapter 1 on the role of intelligence, which
stated:
“Intelligence
rarely offers a complete account of activities which are designed
to
remain
concealed. And the nature of Saddam’s regime makes Iraq a difficult
target
…
Nonetheless, we have been able to develop a range of well
positioned sources.
The need to
protect and preserve these sources inevitably limits the detail
that
can be made
available. But intelligence has provided important insights into
Iraqi
programmes,
and into Iraqi military thinking. Taken together with what is
already
known from
other sources, this builds our understanding of Iraq’s capabilities
and
adds
significantly to the analysis already in the public
domain.
“Iraq’s
capabilities have been regularly reviewed by the … JIC, which has
provided
advice to
the Prime Minister on the developing assessment on the basis of
all
available
sources … [T]his paper includes some of the most significant
views
reached by
the JIC between 1999 and 2002.”
451.
The text on
Iraq’s programmes was significantly expanded. As well as more
detail
on Iraq’s
attempts to procure material that could be used for prohibited
programmes,
and judgements
from JIC Assessments, changes to the previous text
included:
•
a box
describing the effect of detonating a 20-kiloton nuclear warhead
over
a city;
•
the
addition of statements that: there had been “recent production of
chemical
and
biological agents”; intelligence confirmed that Iraq continued to
produce
chemical
agents; and “we know from intelligence that Iraq has continued
to
produce
biological warfare agents”;
•
a statement
that intelligence had provided “Confirmation”
that chemical and
biological
weapons played an important role in Iraqi military
thinking;
•
two
separate statements that the Iraqi military “may be able to deploy”
chemical
and
biological weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do
so;
•
the
replacing of the judgement that, if Iraq obtained fissile material,
it would take
at least
two years to make a working nuclear device, by a statement that it
would
be “much
shorter” than the five years Iraq would require to produce a
nuclear
weapon once
sanctions were lifted or became ineffective, and,
“depending
on the
effectiveness of Iraqi weapons design”, that could be “between one
and
two years”;
and
198