I know that Tony Blair knew there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before Britain and the United States launched their invasion of Iraq.
I know because I was told on the authority of his press secretary Alastair Campbell before the war started.
The revelation came in a bizarre encounter in a spartan, windowless room in the basement of the Ministry of Defence headquarters in Whitehall. The meeting with the Government’s expert on Iraq’s WMD capacity was arranged by Campbell.
What followed in that hour is chilling. If what I was told was correct, it can have only one unavoidable conclusion: the Prime Minister lied his way into war; and now that the non-existence of WMD is officially accepted, the PM is attempting to lie his way out of war.
The facts as set out to me, then a political correspondent for a national newspaper, make a mockery of Blair’s attempt to hide behind an apology for the “wrong intelligence”.
It means that Blair was never told by the intelligence services that Saddam Hussein was sitting on stockpiles of WMDs ready to be used at minutes notice.
The PM’s claim that Iraq was within 45 minutes of launching WMDs – a central plank of his case for war and a clinching factor in the House of Commons vote approving military action – fell apart earlier this week with the formal withdrawal by the Foreign Office of the infamous claim.
At conference in Brighton, Blair told delegates: “The problem is I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can’t – sincerely, at least – apologise for removing Saddam.”
But it was not the intelligence that was wrong. What was wrong, constitutionally, politically and morally was what was done to the evidence and how it was used.
Time after time in the run-up to war, Blair asserted Saddam’s imminent threat through WMD. In his own introduction to the “sexed-up dossier” in September 2002, which first made the case for war, Blair said: “The document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them. I am quite clear that Saddam will go to extreme lengths, indeed has already done so, to hide these weapons and avoid giving them up.”
That’s not the version Alastair Campbell’s chosen messenger told me. The meeting under the MoD followed a chat with Blair on a Prime Ministerial flight from South Africa during which he sounded less than convincing on Iraq’s WMDs. I informed Campbell that I did not believe the PM and he informed Blair.
After a telephone discussion at the “highest level”, my then editor agreed that he shared my doubts. Campbell then organised a briefing by the country’s “foremost” intelligence analyst working on weapons of mass destruction.
The MoD was expecting me when I turned up at the appointed time – Campbell had made sure of that. I was accompanied by a military press officer in full uniform to the subterranean room where the expert was already waiting.
The bearded, scruffily dressed expert was introduced as the leading expert on WMD in Iraq. It was made clear that, while Number 10 and Campbell had authorised the briefing, the identity of the expert must remain a secret.
For the record, it was not the late Dr David Kelly, just one of the thousands of victims of the great deceit over WMD.
I was astonished at what I was told, and from what I could tell so was the Army press officer listening in.
After an hour’s detailed questioning, I said incredulously: “You seem to be telling me that Saddam has no capacity in any of the categories of WMD.”
We had gone through all of them: nuclear, biological, chemical. I asked for a further five minutes to check through my notes in case
I had missed something.
“There’s no need”, said the anonymous expert. “That’s what I am telling you.”
He said Iraq’s nuclear capacity, if Saddam got started, was 25 years away. Biological and chemical: non-existent. If Saddam had components for a WMD programme, they were not in any state to be transformed into weapons.
The Army press officer seemed as stunned as I was as we eventually left the room. “You don’t seem to have got what you came for”, she said, assuming, as I had, that Campbell’s purpose was to bury my doubts under a deluge of intelligence evidence which proved the Saddam threat.
“No, but I think I may have been given the truth”, I replied, not knowing then the portent of my own words.
There were, according to the best intelligence and expert advice Number 10 could muster, no WMD then. And there are none now. So what happened in between to convince Blair that they were there?
That MoD meeting took place 18 months before the sexed-up dossier appeared. Could the MoD have changed its mind? Perhaps the information relayed to me was wrong and corrected later when it was found that Saddam did, in fact, have stockpiles of WMD? Unlikely.
Unlikely, too, that in the intervening months between that briefing and Blair’s WMD claims, Saddam could have built up an arsenal of the type the PM was busy alarming MPs and the country about. Even more risible is the possibility that he could have made them all disappear in time again for the US/British invasion.
Nor is it possible that the PM, as head of the security services, would have been denied the same intelligence given to me. Which part of “there are no WMDs” did he not understand? And how did that translate into Saddam definitely has WMDs with which he is threatening British security?
Blair cannot make a full apology, as is being demanded by Peter Kilfoyle and other MPs. To do so honestly would entail a confession that he knew all along that the claimed threat was bogus.
Instead he ducks and dives and gives other reasons for the war, which were not the stated ones at the time.
I do not know what the constitutional rules are on impeachment. Nor do I feel comfortable with the concept of dragging a Prime Minister – and a Labour Prime Minister at that – into a legal quagmire of a process which implies guilt before it starts and therefore taints the office and its holder whatever the outcome.
A lack of trust in the incumbent is implicit. And that is the problem. Blair has lost the nation’s trust over the reasons for going to war over Iraq, and we have not had the truth.
In the face of brazen effrontery, impeachment may be the only way to get it.
This article was published in the Tribune November 13 2004 issue
