The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
290.
In the
concluding section of his speech, Mr Straw asked the critics
of the
Government:
“… whether
they seriously believed that when Saddam Hussein chose
confrontation
rather than
co-operation, he possessed no weapons of mass destruction
following
our
decision on 18 March? Do they seriously argue that Saddam had
disposed of all
his poisons
and toxins and missiles, and then deliberately chosen not to prove
their
destruction
but to go down a path that led to his downfall? …
“Even if we
make the most extreme allowances … how can we possibly
believe
that he
cheated and deceived the international community year after year,
until we
had no
option but military action, and yet that he possessed no weapons of
mass
destruction?
“… Is it
not more likely that Saddam, knowing the game was up and realising
that
we meant
what we said, went to extraordinary lengths to dismantle, conceal
and
disperse
the weapons and any evidence of their existence? … Saddam had
spent
years
perfecting the art of concealment and carried that out so
completely that it will
take some
time to search hundreds of sites, interview thousands of scientists
and
locate and
evaluate what remains of the documentary and physical
evidence.”
291.
In his speech,
Mr Michael Ancram, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, referred to
five
questions
posed by Mr Duncan Smith in a letter to Mr Blair the
previous day.
292.
The questions
posed by Mr Ancram can be summarised as:
•
Whether the
dossier’s original conclusion had been deleted and a
new
preamble,
reportedly written by the Prime Minister, inserted?
•
If the 45
minutes point was not significant, why did the information
appear
three times
in the dossier; why had Mr Blair referred to it in his speech
on
24 September
2002; and was it usual to use single-source
intelligence?
•
A request
for a “categorical assurance that there was no disagreement
between
Downing
Street and the intelligence Services on the handling of
intelligence
information”.
•
What was
the new, but so far unpublished, information referred to by
Mr Blair in
an
interview on 1 June?
293.
Mr Ancram
stated that the Opposition proposed:
“… a
resolution in both Houses of Parliament under the Tribunals of
Inquiry
(Evidence)
Act 1921. That is the most powerful form of inquiry and is
appropriate for
an issue of
this gravity. The tribunal would be chaired by a senior judge
…”
294.
Mr Ancram
also made clear that such an inquiry was required to address the
way
intelligence
had been used. It was “not about the justification for action in
Iraq; nor …
about the
conduct of that action”.
480