The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
the
perception of Ministers and senior officials. The report should
have been
treated
with caution.
658.
The
withdrawal after the conflict of three streams of reporting
underpinning
the
judgements in the dossier on Iraq’s chemical and biological
warfare
capabilities
and intentions, including the reports of 11 and 23 September and
the
“45
minutes” report, is addressed in Section 4.3.
659.
The Inquiry
has identified a number of lessons which arise from the
way
in which
the dossier was produced at the end of this Section.
660.
The details of
the JIC Assessments on Iraq’s WMD between December 2000
and
September
2002 demonstrate that the JIC consistently stated in those
Assessments
that the
intelligence on most aspects of Iraq’s activity in relation to
chemical, biological
and nuclear
weapons programmes was limited, and that many of its judgements
were
inferential.
661.
The
intelligence on Iraq’s ballistic missile programmes was more
extensive,
but there
were still significant uncertainties about Iraq’s
capabilities.
662.
In relation to
the concerns expressed by the DIS, Lord Hutton
concluded:
“… the
concerns expressed by Dr Jones were considered by higher echelons
in the
Intelligence
Services and were not acted upon, and the JIC … approved the
wording
in the
dossier. Moreover, the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
section of
the Defence
Intelligence Staff, headed by Dr Brian Jones, did not argue that
the
intelligence
relating to the 45 minutes claim should not have been included in
the
dossier but
they did suggest that the wording in which the claim was stated
was
too strong
and that instead of the dossier stating ‘we judge’ that ‘Iraq has:
– military
plans for
the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against its
own Shia
population.
Some of those weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an
order
to use
them’, the wording should state ‘intelligence
suggests’.”352
663.
The Butler
Report stated that the 9 September JIC Assessment had been
“written
to inform
military and other contingency planning” but its “precautionary
judgements”,
which were
appropriate for that purpose:
“… were
subsequently taken up into the dossier, and were taken up in
an
abbreviated
form in which points were run together and caveats on the
intelligence
were
dropped …
“…The same
was true of the 21 August and 15 March Assessments …
352
The
National Archives, 28 January 2004, Report of
the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding
the Death
of Dr David Kelly [“The Hutton
Report”], paragraph 228.
240