The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
the ability
of this Parliament to have effective oversight of agencies and
Ministers
on intelligence
matters.”199
400.
The Opposition
motion was defeated by 299 votes to 200. The
Government
amendment,
agreed without a further vote, stated:
“That this
House … believes that the Intelligence and Security Committee … is
the
appropriate
body to consider the intelligence relating to Iraq; and notes that
this
Committee
has already begun its inquiry.”200
401.
In response to
a written question from Ms Lynne Jones (Labour) on
18 July,
Mr Bill
Rammell, FCO Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, stated that
the assessment
that Iraq
had attempted to procure uranium from Africa was based on
information from
the
intelligence service of another Government. The UK Government could
not pass it to
anyone else
without the express consent of the originator.201
In the
September 2002 dossier on WMD (Iraq’s
Weapons of Mass Destruction. The
Assessment of
the British Government),
the Government
stated that “there is intelligence
that Iraq
has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from
Africa”.202
In his
January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush stated:
“The British
Government
has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant
quantities of
On
7 March 2003, Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the
IAEA, informed the UN
Security
Council that the documents pointing to an agreement between Niger
and Iraq for
the sale of
uranium between 1999 and 2001 were “not authentic” and that those
specific
allegations
were “unfounded”.204
In its
report The
Decision to go to War in Iraq, published
in July 2003, the House of
Commons
Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) stated that the assertion in the
September
2002
dossier should have been qualified to “reflect the uncertainty”
surrounding the
evidence
upon which it was based.205
In its
response to the FAC in November 2003, the FCO stated that: “the
claim in the
September
dossier rested on separate evidence to that judged fraudulent by
the IAEA”,
and that
this intelligence was still under review and had not been shared
with the CIA.206
199
House of
Commons, Official
Report,
16 July 2003, column 305.
200
House of
Commons, Official
Report,
16 July 2003, column 346.
201
House of
Commons, Official
Report,
18 July 2003, column 810W.
202
Iraq’s
Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Assessment of the British
Government,
24 September 2002,
page
25.
203
The White
House, 28 January 2003, President
Delivers “State of the Union”.
204
UN Security
Council, ‘4714th Meeting Friday 7 March 2003’
(S/PV.4714).
205
Ninth
Report from the Foreign Affairs Committee, Session
2002-2003, The
Decision to go to War in
Iraq, HC
813-1.
206
Ninth
Report from the Foreign Affairs Committee, Session
2002-2003, The
Decision to go to War in
Iraq, Response
of the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth
Affairs,
Cm6062.
502