The Report of the Iraq Inquiry

673. Asked by the Iraq Inquiry whether, in the light of the view expressed at the JIC

meeting on 4 September that the 9 September Assessment needed to make clearer

where there were remaining major gaps in the UK’s knowledge and understanding of

Iraq’s capabilities, he had felt that this should have been an integral part of the dossier,

Sir John Scarlett replied:

“… there was no sort of discussion or conscious decision made to leave out

references to limited intelligence. There was no deliberate intention to do that.

“The reason it happened may be because of the way the dossier was structured,

and the fact that it began with an Executive Summary, which was explicitly a

collection of judgements, as opposed to a sort of listing of intelligence.

“The place where it could have happened would have been in the introduction

[Chapter 1: The Role of Intelligence], where we were talking about the nature

of intelligence …”364

674. Sir John added:

“But … the judgements and confidence in the judgements [in the 9 September

Assessment] was high, in spite of the areas where we didn’t have knowledge.

So it was the gaps in detailed knowledge, rather than [gaps] in confidence about

basic judgements.”

675. Mr Miller added:

“The intelligence was not all encompassing … What we tried to do in the

Assessment and in the dossier was to describe the intelligence as directly as

we could, and then set out clearly and distinctly the judgements which had been

reached.

“… We felt it was right that the firmness of the judgements that had been expressed

in the classified Assessment [of 9 September] should be echoed in the published …

[dossier].”365

676. Subsequently, in response to a question about the absence of caveats in the

Key Judgements of Assessments, which were what Ministers were “meant to read”,

Sir John Scarlett told the Inquiry:

“… this is… the issue that effectively arose around the drafting of the dossier … it

wasn’t because they had deliberately been left out. It was because of the use of the

Executive Summary as the equivalent of the [JIC’s] Key Judgements.”366

364 Private hearing, 5 May 2010, pages 71-72.

365 Private hearing, 5 May 2010, pages 72-73.

366 Private hearing, 5 May 2010, page 86.

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