Oral evidence

Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday 24 June 2003

Members present:

Donald Anderson, in the Chair
Mr David Chidgey
Sir Patrick Cormack
Mr Fabian Hamilton
Mr Eric Illsley
Andrew Mackinlay
Mr John Maples
Mr Bill Olner
Richard Ottaway
Mr Greg Pope
Sir John Stanley

__________

Witnesses: RT HON JACK STRAW, a Member of the House, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, SIR MICHAEL JAY KCMG, Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and MR PETER RICKETTS CMG, Director General, Political, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, examined.

Q729  Chairman: Foreign Secretary, may I welcome you again on behalf of the Committee and with you Sir Michael Jay, the Permanent Under-Secretary, who we shall be meeting again in a different inquiry this afternoon, and Mr Peter Ricketts, the Director General, Political. We have considerable ground to cover in a short period of two hours and, of course, on Friday we look forward to seeing you, Foreign Secretary, in private session with senior officials. Can I appeal to you, Secretary of State, and to colleagues, that if we are to make progress on the range of ground that we need to cover we need both questions and answers to be reasonably concise. Foreign Secretary, hoping to set a good example can I begin this way, there have been the two dossiers, the September dossier and the early February dossier, we are promised by the Prime Minister another dossier, when will that come?

Mr Straw: You have been promised another dossier by the Prime Minister? When did he make that particular ---?

Q730  Chairman: If I can find the relevant reference, this was on 1 June: "What I have said to people is over the coming weeks and months we will assemble this evidence and then we will give it to people".

Mr Straw: I am quite clear that the Prime Minister has not made a formal pledge to publish, as it were, a third dossier. What he has said is precisely what you have just said in respect of further evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. He also said that this will be made available as and when it becomes available. As I think you know from the evidence which you took last week, in particular from Dr Samore and Mr Taylor, there are reasons why the Iraq Survey Group took some time to get going and it will be some time, I cannot say how long, before there is further evidence to put in the public domain.

Q731  Chairman: Would you expect that to come only at the end of the work of the Iraq Survey Group.

Mr Straw: Not necessarily. Again, I think both those people who gave evidence explained why a running commentary on the evidence which we hope is going to be collected may not be feasible or possible because you will be interviewing one person and you will want to corroborate what they are saying and to check back against other sources. The more likely probability is that this will come at the end of the process. As soon as there is information available which with our coalition partners it is judged safe to put in the public domain it will be put in the public domain.

Q732  Chairman: When that is done in whatever form what lessons will have been learnt about the use of intelligence-based material?

Mr Straw: I spelt that out effectively in both statements I previously made in evidence to this Committee and in some of the questions and answers which I have given. The process which was followed for the first dossier, which was the published on 24 September, was the right process and that was checked and double-checked by senior officials and was not signed off until the Chairman of the JIC was satisfied with it. We have spelt that out. Yes, ministers, officials and special advisers were involved in commenting on it but the veracity and the integrity of the document was very firmly a matter for the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. As you know the arrangements for the production of the so-called second dossier, which effectively was a briefing paper for the press, were not satisfactory, even given the status of the document, and lessons have been clearly learned in respect of that.

Q733  Chairman: What are those lessons?

Mr Straw: As Sir Michael has already made clear to the Committee, instructions were given very quickly after the failure of a proper procedure came to light to ensure that this sort of thing did not happen again. The lessons are very straightforward, you have to follow very clear procedures for any documents of that kind. Let me just explain this, at a time of huge demand for media, 24 hour media coverage of a kind that is more intensive now than at any other time, there are all sorts of background papers being produced at any one time which necessarily are not going to go near ministers or senior officials (quite right too) provided all they are doing is replicating what is already in the public domain. The mistake that was made there was it was a briefing paper which then included intelligence and it was not subject to proper procedures nor proper checking. All that said and notwithstanding the very substantial error that the sources of the document were not attributed at all and that there were changes made, for example "opposition groups" to "terrorist organisations", the accuracy of the document I do not think is seriously at issue but of course it has been an embarrassment to the Government and lessons have been learned.

Q734  Chairman: So far as the first document is concerned, September 24, which went through the proper processes, have any complaints being made by any senior intelligence officials about the use made by those documents?

Mr Straw: None whatever to my knowledge.

Chairman: Thank you.

Q735  Sir John Stanley: Foreign Secretary, one of the central issues is whether the degree of immediacy of the threat from Saddam Hussein's regime that was conveyed to Parliament and to the wider public was justified on the basis of the intelligence information that was available to the Government. Central to this was the references in the September dossier to the 45 minute readiness of WMD to the Iraqi Armed Forces. As you know, Foreign Secretary, in the evidence the Committee has taken so far it has been alleged in Mr Andrew Gilligan's evidence, from the sources to which he referred, that the 45 minute element was a last minute insertion made for political presentations purposes and he associated that with the name of Alistair Campbell (who is before the Committee tomorrow). Would you like to respond to that allegation?

Mr Straw: It is completely untrue, it is totally untrue. I can go into more detail in the closed session, and will obviously be going into more detail before the Intelligence and Security Committee. Chairman, I wonder if I may be allowed to make this point in response to Sir John, so far as we can ascertain by word searches and so on, neither the Prime Minister nor I or anybody acting on our behalf has ever used the words "immediate or imminent" threat, never used those words, in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. What we talked about in the dossier was a current and serious threat, which is very different. The Prime Minister said on 24 September, the day this dossier was published in the House: ""I cannot say that this month or next, even this year or next, that Saddam will use his weapons". What we did say was that Saddam posed a serious threat to international peace and security. That is the exact wording from the Prime Minister's introduction to this document. Interestingly that judgment, not that there was an imminent or immediate threat but that there was a current and serious threat is also shared by the Security Council. Essentially what has been going on here is that some of our critics have tried to put into our mouths words and criteria we never, ever used. We did not use the phrase "immediate or imminent". Impending, soon to happen, as it were, about to happen today or tomorrow, we did not use that because plainly the evidence did not justify that. We did say there was a current and serious threat, and I stand by that judgment completely.

Q736  Sir John Stanley: Foreign Secretary, the Government did refer to the fact that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were available for deployment within 45 minutes of an order to use them and you made that statement yourself in your House speech of 21 February. The question I wish to put you is that the US Government showed no lack of readiness to pick up British intelligence information which they believed would be helpful to their particular case of justifying military intervention in Iraq. As you well know the British information in relation to uranium supplies to Iraq from Africa actually made it into President Bush's State of the Union address in January this year, even though it was subsequently found to be based on forged documentation. You have told the Committee - and all of the evidence we have suggests this is wholly correct - that at no time did the Americans ever touch with a barge pole the 45 minute statement being made by British ministers. That would seem to suggest that within the American intelligence and the political community they thought the intelligence basis for that statement was extremely unsound.

Mr Straw: Can I first of all say on the issue of the uranium yellow cake, the information that was subsequently found to be forged did not come from British sources. A number of people have suggested that it did, it simply did not come from British sources, nor was this information available at all to the British intelligence community at the time when this first document was put together. Of course the words were chosen carefully, we did not say that Iraq had obtained quantities of uranium, what we did say, this is page 6, is that Iraq had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it. As I hope to explain in the closed session on Friday, that information came from quite separate sources. Some background to that was that it is beyond peradventure that Iraq had at an earlier date imported 270 tonnes of yellow cake in the past, not at the time, that was not referring to that. So far as the 45 minutes is concerned I will check but I think that this intelligence was shared with the Americans.

Q737  Sir John Stanley: I did not question whether it was shared. It is striking that in the entire public statements of President Bush's Government there is not one single reference to that very, very important statement being made by the British Government?

Mr Straw: With great respect, I do not happen to regard the 45 minute statement having the significance which has been attached to it, neither does anybody else, indeed nobody round this table, if I say so with respect. It was scarcely mentioned in any of the very large number of debates that took place in the House, evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee, all of the times I was questioned on the radio and television, scarcely mentioned at all.

Q738  Sir John Stanley: It was highlighted in the foreword by the Prime Minister.

Mr Straw: Of course but so were many other things highlighted in the foreword. This is a perfectly legitimate avenue of enquiry for the Committee but it is quite important for people to appreciate the 45 minute claim that these weapons would be ready to deploy, some WMD would be ready to deploy - no reference to missiles, by the way, as some of your evidence-givers have suggested, none whatever - was part of the case. To suggest that was the burden of the case is frankly nonsense. This has only taken on a life of its own because of the subsequent claims that this particular section of the dossier was inserted in there not as a result of the properly acceptable procedures for intelligence but as a result, as Mr Gilligan claimed, that Alastair Campbell had put that in there apparently from nowhere. That is totally and completely untrue. I also wanted to say this, because it is very important to get this into perspective, the case for seeking the first resolution for the Security Council, which we eventually got on 8 November, then seeking to hold Saddam Hussein to the terms of that resolution and then when he palpably failed to do so, deciding to take military action stood regardless of whether this evidence of the 45 minutes was available or not. It is significant because if you look at all of the statements that were made in the House and elsewhere, certainly in the lead-up to the war, the 45 minute section was not mentioned. Why? Because there was other evidence, overwhelming evidence, open source evidence which was available which was subject to no dispute.

Q739  Sir John Stanley: Can I ask one final question in relation to the second dossier, the dodgy dossier? There are a number of questions I would like to put to Sir Michael perhaps this afternoon if other colleagues do not take them up. Foreign Secretary, when you came before the Committee on 4 March you were asked by Mr Mackinlay: "Who authorised the dodgy dossier in that parlance?" You replied: "On the issue of which ministers approved it it was approved by the Prime Minister". Just for the record, when you gave your response to the Committee in answer to our questions when you said: "No ministers were consulted in the preparation of the document", can you just confirm you meant no Foreign Office ministers were consulted in the preparation of the document?

Mr Straw: I was drawing a clear distinction between the Prime Minister and ministers. No minister in Government was consulted about the document, apart from the Prime Minister.

Q740  Sir John Stanley: Apart from the Prime Minister. We now know that as far as the dodgy dossier was concerned it came very largely off the internet, words were changed to give it more drama and when the Prime Minister made his first reference to the document on 3 February said this in the House: "I hope that people have some sense of the integrity of our security services. They are not publishing this or giving us this information and making it up, it is the intelligence that they are receiving and we are passing it on to people". Everybody who heard that in the House and outside can have been left in no doubt whatever that this second document was an authentic, intelligence-based document, approved by the JIC, when as we now know that was nothing of the case. The question I have to put to you, and you are answering on behalf of the whole Government, because you are the only minister who is appearing - the Prime Minister, regretfully, is not appearing in front of this Committee - I have to ask you this in relation to what the Prime Minister said in the House on 3 February either the Prime Minister seriously misled the House as to the nature of the second dossier, the dodgy dossier, or the Prime Minister was himself seriously misled by his advisers as to the content and the sources of the document? Which was it?

Mr Straw: It was not either, Sir John. I do not accept the nature of that question. There is no question of the Prime Minister acting in the way that you have suggested. There are three parts to this second dossier, the briefing paper, part one and part three were based on further intelligence available to the British intelligence services. As far as I am aware the veracity of what was said in those two sections has not been challenged at all.

Q741  Sir John Stanley: Not JIC approved?

Mr Straw: I have made it clear from the moment I found out about this document, the procedure for putting it together was completely unsatisfactory. Let us put that aside. That is one issue. The second issue is notwithstanding the fact that the procedure was unsatisfactory did this second dossier say things which were not true. The answer to that is so far as the first and third sections were concerned is they said nothing that was untrue, it was both the first and the third sections, although they were not properly attributed, which were properly sourced and based in intelligence. The problem arose in respect of part two, which as everyone now knows was taken from a PhD thesis on the internet and there were some amendments made and this part was not properly attributed. It was not intelligence, it was about a description of the security apparatus of Saddam. A lot of the information even in the first dossier was taken from open sources, including things like UNSCOM and IAEA reports. The changes made should not have been made. If we pick up the key change that was made, where it says on page 9 of the dossier that the external activities of one of the security organisations includes "spying on Iraqi diplomats abroad", I think the original wording was "monitoring and supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes", the original wording was "opposition groups in hostile regimes". Those changes should not have been made but both statements happen nonetheless to be true. In respect of terrorist organisations, the most serious of changes being made, you do not need to go to the internet to know that the Iraqi regime at every level was actively right until the last supporting the Iranian-based but Iraqi-financed and supported terrorist organisation MEK, which everyone in this room voted to be banned as a terrorist organisation three years ago and was actively supporting rejectionist terrorist groups in Israel and the occupied territories, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, again which everyone in this room voted to ban as terrorist organisations.

Q742  Mr Hamilton: Foreign Secretary, can I move us back to March 2002, there was an expectation at that time, and that was partly fuelled by statements from ministers, that the Government would publish a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; in the event nothing was published until the 24 September document. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office itself acknowledged there was a Joint Intelligence Committee dossier at round that time on Iraq in March 2002. On 16 April in the House of Commons in an exchange with you the MP for Halifax, Alice Mahon, said: "Will the Secretary of State say whether he intends to publish the dossier that was in the news a few weeks ago containing the evidence of mass destruction?" I assume she meant weapons of mass destruction. You replied: "No one should be in the least doubt about Iraq's flagrant violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions, we do not have to wait for the publication of a dossier". Then, of course, in September the dossier was published. My question relates to the March dossier itself, and what I wanted to ask you was whether the March paper was based on existing intelligence or had new intelligence come to light round that time?

Mr Straw: I am glad I said that because it was true and it makes the point that yes, of course, we published the September dossier for a reason, which was better to illustrate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. I remember in some of those exchanges at the time I brought to the House to try and convince some of the doubters just over 200 pages of a very public dossier, which is the last report of UNSCOM, published on 29 January 1999. I just have to say that my starting point for getting into this was not the intelligence but it was open source information, plus statements made by many others on the record about the nature of the threat. I cannot recall exactly which document you are referring to but what is the case is that there were a series of assessments in respect of threats to the Middle East, including Iraq, which were coming through in JIC papers and if it were a JIC paper they tried to reflect a current assessment. We can also give you more detail about this on Friday.

Mr Ricketts: In March a draft was produced drawing on JIC material with other material as well, much less detailed than the eventual September dossier but it was decided not to publish at that time and to build up a fuller picture, which eventually emerged in the September dossier.

Q743  Mr Hamilton: If I am not mistaken, Mr Ricketts, ministers really did indicate at the time something would be published and yet there was a decision made not to publish at that time.

Mr Straw: Yes. There was no secret about the fact that we thought we ought to publish a compendium of information at an appropriate stage about the nature of the threat posed by Iraq. When early last year there came to be a significant debate about the Iraqi threat at that stage as well as looking at intelligence papers I started to look at open source information. One of the reasons, it goes back to a question raised by Sir John, if you look through what I have said and the way I have argued this, and indeed the Prime Minister, we have tended to argue it on the basis of a great deal of open source information because there you are not asking people to take on trust what you are saying, you will say this stuff is available, just as in the House much later my main argument was based round the final report from UNMOVIC of 6 March. Yes, there was a discussion about how we brought the information together and at what stage it was appropriate to publish it. I am pleased that we did not publish the matter earlier because at that stage the question of what international strategy should be adopted in respect of the threat posed by Iraq was still itself open to discussion. By 24 September the strategy was very much clearer, the whole of the international community was clear that the first stage of this strategy was to go back to the United Nations Security Council and to get what became Resolution 1441, putting Iraq on notice about active and immediate cooperation.

Q744  Mr Hamilton: Would it be fair to say that what changed between March and September last year in terms of publishing a dossier was the fact that you had begun to examine all that open source information and were determined that that is what should be included as much as Joint Intelligence Committee assessments?

Mr Straw: It was more the political environment. I will say that I did publish information about the threat from Iraq. I cannot remember exactly when but certainly for some weeks, if not months, I would have had this information and I made it available, because it was a public document. For example a memorandum to the Parliament Labour Party when there were first concerns by colleagues about the nature of the threat.

Q745  Mr Hamilton: Can I move on to September dossier?

Mr Straw: 5 March 2002.

Q746  Mr Hamilton: Moving on to September 24 dossier, a number of assertions were made in here, why were they so rarely repeated in debates and statements by Government ministers between the publication in September 24, 2002 and early 2003?

Mr Straw: Which ones do you have in mind?

Q747  Mr Hamilton: For example we have talked about the 45 minutes. Some of the points that the Prime Minister makes in his opening foreword here were then not subsequently repeated?

Mr Straw: I said in answer to Sir John and to the Chairman the 45 minutes has been given a life of its own, which was not justified from this document nor by the ebb and flow of the political argument about the key issue before this Committee, the decision to go to war. However, this document did reflect our overall concerns about the nature of the threat and the truth is that we did make use of exactly the same arguments. If you pick up the Prime Minister's introductions, this is page 4, he talks about the threat to international peace and security, "when WMD are in the hands of a brutal and aggressive regime like Saddam's is real". He talks about the fact that in an inter-dependent world major regional conflict does not stay confined to the region in question, which is why we use the phrase, "a threat to the United Kingdom's national interests", aside from the fact that the illegal al-Samoud missiles, which we thought existed, identified here, which did indeed exist, with a range of 650 kilometres had a sufficient range to attack our direct assets in Cyprus, because those assets are less than 650 kilometres from the edge of Iraq. If you then go over page one, Mr Hamilton, you will see that the case set out there is exactly the case which we continue to use, namely that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons before; he had developed overt, nuclear and biological capabilities as well; he was very secretive; he concealed these; he was a significant threat to the region and to international peace and security and he was in open defiance of a succession of mandatory Security Council resolutions going back over 12 years to 1991. That was exactly the case he made. Of course we drew on the same arguments. At the same time it is certainly the case that we did not keep referring back to this as though this was the only evidence available, because palpably it was not. As the debate moved on the significance of this dossier was overtaken by other evidence entirely open. Once we got 1441 this judgment was shared by every single other member of the Security Council, including the other three Security Council members with extensive intelligence services of their own, China, France and Russia - Germany came on to the Security Council in January. The issue after 8 November was about Saddam's failure to meet the two tests set in 1441, not this because this pre-dated 1441, those two tests were a complete and accurate disclosure of all of his WMD capabilities and complete and immediate cooperation with the inspectors. He failed both tests.

Q748  Mr Hamilton: Finally, Foreign Secretary, can I ask you, and accepting everything you just said about the way events overtook the publication of this document, did you at any time from the publication of this document until the conflict itself started have any doubts about the accuracy of the information that was published on September 24?

Mr Straw: None whatever, and I said that in answer to questions and answers, nor do I now. Some of what is in here has been proved by events, none has been disproved.

Mr Hamilton: Thank you.

Q749  Mr Chidgey: Foreign Secretary, staying with the dossier I would like to ask you some particular questions about the section dealing with chemical agent production facilities in Part 1.

Mr Straw: Is this 24 September one?

Q750  Mr Chidgey: Yes. I appreciate that your Department were responsible for Part 2 and Part 3, and not for Part 1 but no doubt you are familiar with it and signed it off at the time.

Mr Straw: Which page are you on?

Q751  Mr Chidgey: Page 19. You will note that there is a comment to say that UNSCOM had been responsible for the destruction of the main chemical weapon production facility at al-Muthanna, and it had not been rebuilt but "other plants formerly associated with the chemical warfare programme have been rebuilt", and that included the chlorine and phenol plant at Fallujah 2. It also says, "In addition to their civilian uses, chlorine and phenol are used for precursor chemicals which contribute to the production of chemical agents". I want to make you aware of the language here, if I may, so that we can come back to it further on in my questioning, again in paragraph nine the document talks about other dual-use facilities being rebuilt, new chemical facilities being built, including the Ibn Sina Company at Tarmiyah, where the production of chemicals that were previously imported were now being produced because they were needed for Iraq's civil industry. Then we have a later reference to say that at the al-Qa'qa' complex a phosgene plant had been repaired. There is an important here, it says: "While phosgene does have industrial uses it can also be used by itself as a chemical agent or as a precursor for a nerve agent". On page 21 is perhaps the most balanced comment in this section, where you talk about the problems of dual-use facilities and you say: "Almost all components and supplies used in WMD... are dual-use... any major petrochemical or biotech industry... will have legitimate need for most materials and equipment". Then it says, without UN weapons inspectors it is very difficult to be sure about the true nature of those facilities. At this stage I would like to ask you four discrete questions that might help us on the Committee to understand the relationship between the dual-use and the chemical industry and weaponising. Can you tell me whether there was any assessment made or were you aware of any assessment made of the production of the chemicals chlorine, phenol and phosgene needed to meet the requirements of Iraq's industry? Was there any assessment made of surplus production or devotion of production to the military for their use in WMD? Has any assessment been made that you are aware of or was any assessment made of the quantities of these chemicals that would be needed to produce the sort of stocks of WMD that would have been sufficient to allow the Iraqi Army to mount a sustainable and credible military action against any attack from the coalition forces? If there was what sort of quantities are we talking about? My final question at this point is, was there an assessment made or are you aware of that gave a view on the degree of the threat posed by Iraq's WMD capability to our coalition forces, embracing in all those four questions, were the scientific community involved in making those assessments? Did the Cabinet Committee agree with the assessments made by the scientific community or their contribution?

Mr Straw: My interim answer is fairly short. Because of their technical nature I will have to submit a paper. May I say, this may be for the convenience of the Committee, we will do our very best and we will try to respond very quickly to your questions to get these back by Friday. If it is for the convenience of the Committee I am perfectly happy for the opening part of the evidence session on Friday to be in public to deal with issues like this.

Q752  Mr Chidgey: I will move quickly on because I know other colleagues want to make their contribution. Can I turn back to the dossier, I have just discussed with you this particular part on chemical production facilities, which seem to be fairly even-handed, if we now look at the executive summary the language seems to change to me, if you look at page 5, paragraph 6 we now have a statement that the judgment is that Iraq does continue to produce chemical and biological agents. It has military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons and some of these weapons are deployable - we know about the 45 minutes. My point is that we go from the difficulties of interpreting dual-use into a definite statement that Iraq has these weapons. Then when we move on further towards the front and we look at the foreword we now see that the language is even stronger. We now see that assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons and there is no doubt a threat of serious and current ---

Mr Straw: Which page?

Q753  Mr Chidgey: This is the foreword by the Prime Minister. I am really looking to know, do we know who actually drafted the executive summary from the body of the report and then the foreword because the language does seem to change?

Mr Straw: Is that the question?

Q754  Mr Chidgey: That is the question. Do you see my point?

Mr Straw: Yes. The Prime Minister signed the foreword.

Q755  Mr Chidgey: Is this Number 10? Is this the JIC?

Mr Ricketts: One point, the whole document, including the foreword, was shown to and approved by the Joint Intelligence Committee, so the foreword was not some and separable part of the document that was written elsewhere, it is was all cleared through the Joint Intelligence Committee. What you are seeing in the executive summary is the assessment and the judgment that our intelligence community brought. Having looked at all of the various factors you drew attention to in the body of the document the JIC exist to make a judgment to ministers and that is the judgment they came to.

Q756  Mr Chidgey: There is reference in the foreword to the assessed intelligence, can you tell us how current that intelligence was at the time?

Mr Ricketts: This document drew on the most up-to-date intelligence that was available to us.

Q757  Mr Chidgey: We have already received evidence from previous witnesses to say it was very difficult to get current intelligence from Iraq.

Mr Straw: It was on the most up-to-date intelligence available, I promise you that.

Q758  Mr Chidgey: My final series of questions is again referring back to chemical production and what has happened since the conflict to try and resolve these issues, we have already had the confirmation of the problems of dual-use in the petrochem and biotech plants in regard to WMD production. The dossier highlights the new facilities at Tarmiyah. The point is this, the new facilities are critical, as we understand it from the evidence that we have taken, that is because the trace elements of any WMD production remain for a considerable period on the site. Clearly plants that were previously dismantled by UNSCOM would still be contaminated even though production had not taken place for some years. With a new site and a new plant if WMD production had taken place in that new plant that could be confirmed quite readily by the trace elements that exist. These are the questions for you, if I may, have inspections and testing been launched since conflict at Tarmiyah and the other new plants? If so, what progress has been made and what has been found? When are the full results expected? Did the UN inspectors visit Tarmiyah in the months immediately before the conflict? If so, what did they find?

Mr Straw: Again, Mr Chidgey, I will get you written answers as quickly as possible.

Q759  Chairman: Do you think you could get those to us by Friday?

Mr Straw: I hope so. I will not know until I make enquiries. May I just make this point, Mr Chidgey, as far as I know, and again I will take scientific advice on this, your categorical statement that evidence exists where there has been CBW for a long time is not necessarily supported, it depends to what extent the facilities have been cleaned up.

Q760  Mr Chidgey: I appreciate that.

Mr Straw: Either Dr Samore or Mr Taylor were very clear in their evidence that with these dual-use facilities, which the Iraqis were unquestionably operating during the period of the UNSCOM inspections, they were adept at completely cleaning these facilities so they were sterile in between the production of CBW agents.

Q761  Mr Chidgey: That is not the opinion of all the experts. Can I ask you one final question: have any inspections been undertaken of those sites that I mentioned post-conflict?

Mr Straw: We will find out and come back to you.

Q762  Mr Olner: Can I ask, basically on a similar theme to Mr Chidgey, why do you think Saddam did not either provide evidence of destruction of weapons of mass destruction in accordance with UN demands or once military action had started why did he not use them?

Mr Straw: The most credible explanation as to why he did not comply was that this was consistent with his previous behaviour of lying to and cheating the international community in order that he preserved his capability, and that the most rational judgment made on the basis of Saddam's behaviour by the middle of March was that the anxieties of the international community about the fact that he had concealed chemical and biological weapons programmes and was beginning to try to put together a nuclear programme were indeed very well-founded. I know everybody here, with the exception of Mr Chidgey, voted for the Government resolution on 18 March, but I have to say that the question for those who took a different view is what position would we now be in if with all this evidence of non-compliance and of covert programmes, only revealed as a result of defections and the most intensive subsequent inspections, and with the incontrovertible evidence we also knew of the building up of their missile programme in the period after the inspectors had left, if we had suddenly walked away and allowed the inspections to dribble away, which happened before and would have happened again once the military pressure was off, what would have been the position now in the Middle East? You would have had an emboldened Saddam causing immense disruption to regional peace and security there. Your second question, Mr Olner, was why did he not use chemical and biological weapons during the campaign? We do not know is the answer. The assumption was that he would use those and, as I think either Mr Taylor or Dr Samore said, since the assumption was that he was likely to use them, the provenance of these weapons would be found during the course of the military campaign. I can only speculate why he chose not to do it. It may have been that having made serious undertakings to some people in the international community that he did not have this material, he decided not to use it and to continue to have it concealed, but am I satisfied about the basis for the judgment that the Security Council made on 8 November and that we made on 18 March? Yes.

Q763  Mr Olner: How confident are you that the interrogation of Iraqi personnel will produce these concrete results in the weeks and months ahead?

Mr Straw: I am hopeful but ---

Q764  Mr Olner: --- But not confident?

Mr Straw: I say hopeful. You choose your words, I will choose mine, and I am hopeful. First of all, what we are looking for is further corroborative evidence. The case was justified on 18 March on the basis of evidence then available, let's be clear about that. Again, as some of your witnesses have explained, there are immense difficulties, particularly at this time, in creating a safe, secure and confident environment in which the right people feel confident about talking about their involvement in programmes. I am told by people from Iraq that the sense of fear that Saddam could still be somewhere is very strong. There is a real anxiety by people that if they offer information they could still be subject to intimidation or worse by people still loyal to Saddam. I also have to say that arrangements have not finally been made to offer immunity to appropriate people in return for evidence and of course where you are offering immunity you also have to make sure that it is done in a sensible and sensitive and relatively transparent way otherwise the evidence could be the subject of concern that it has been tainted the other way, in other words, the people giving evidence are simply providing what their interrogators want to hear in return for immunity, so these are complex issues.

Q765  Mr Olner: How far away are we from that immunity being granted?

Mr Straw: I cannot give you a precise answer just now. I will try and get you one for Friday.

Q766  Mr Olner: Can we try and move on a little bit because it is well documented that the Iraq Survey Group got off the ground a little bit slowly, given that there were other priorities that I agree needed to be attended to first. Now it is up and running, how many personnel are there and what type of skills have they got? Is this a big operation or just an add-on operation?

Mr Straw: It is up to 1,300 people now and I will bring in Mr Ricketts in a second, mainly US with some UK and Australians.

Mr Ricketts: The total number is going to be 1,300, they are building up to that now, of which there will be at least 100 British personnel with a wide range of skills necessary for looking for WMD.

Q767  Mr Olner: Foreign Secretary, how much importance do you think the Government should attach to having plans and things in place to ensure that the verification of any weapons of mass destruction finds are done completely away from and completely independently and completely transparently of the global community?

Mr Straw: If we are talking about physical evidence, It is obviously very important that any evidence that is found is subject to rigorous, independent examination. Of course we all recognise that. That said, I think the recent events show that the concern by the coalition is simply to arrive at the truth and nothing else and that is what we are seeking to do. It is as frustrating for us as it is for everybody else. There is a separate issue about the direct involvement of the IAEA and in particular UNMOVIC. As you will be aware, the terms of Resolution 1483, the latest Security Council Resolution on Iraq, said words to the effect that the Security Council would re-visit the role of UNMOVIC and the IAEA in Iraq, and again your two witnesses Dr Taylor and Dr Samore gave you quite good explanations as to why they thought the current environment was not an appropriate one for the civilian inspectors.

Mr Olner: Thank you, Chairman.

Q768  Mr Illsley: Foreign Secretary, you just mentioned that the issue after 1441 was disclosure and non-co-operation as opposed to the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. Are you now telling the Committee that the decision to take military action was based on disclosure and co-operation rather than the threat?

Mr Straw: I did not put it in that way. If I may say so, that is the wrong way of looking at it. It was because the international community said there was a threat from Iraq to international peace and security posed by its proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, its missile systems and its failure to comply with a succession of Security Council resolutions, that it then imposed new obligations on Iraq which were the inspections. The two key tests under 1441 were a complete disclosure, which they failed to provide on 9 December, and then full, active and immediate co-operation with the inspectors, which they also failed, but of course, as events moved on, the focus came on these two tests because they were the tests under operational paragraph 4 of what amounted to a "further material breach". You will remember that under op 4 "further material breach" was a failure of disclosure and other failure "actively, completely and immediately to comply." In the absence of their meeting these two tests under operational paragraph 13 the Security Council had warned Iraq that they faced further serious consequences.

Q769  Mr Illsley: At the end of the day I think you said the same thing, that the two tests, the two key issues, were disclosure and non-cooperation, as opposed to the evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Straw: If you look at the resolution of the House that was agreed by a very big majority on 18 March, it was carefully drafted, as it were, to take people through a series of propositions. We recalled the terms of 1441, the fact that it posed this threat, we noted that 130 days since 1441 Iraq had not co-operated as required and was, therefore, in further material breach and had rejected the final opportunity to comply, and then we went on to deal with other issues. That was the sequence. Inevitably, as an argument evolves the current issue changes. What is crucial here, Chairman, is whether Saddam had capacity, was rebuilding his capacity, for chemical and biological weapons production and was seeking to re-establish his nuclear programme was simply not an issue by this date, the Security Council had accepted that. I attended five successive Security Council debates and that was not an issue. France and Russia did not stand up and say, "Oh, they have not got this stuff". When President Chirac gave his celebrated interview on 10 March he accepted that they had chemical and biological programmes, that was not an issue. The issue by the beginning of March was what do we do about the fact that - again, it was not an issue - he was in further material breach of 1441 and it then became an argument about containment versus military action, that is what it came down to.

Q770  Mr Illsley: Just coming back to the intelligence evidence and a very general question. How satisfied were members of the Government with the intelligence that they had in relation to Iraq? I ask this because one of the themes which seems to run through the evidence we have received so far is that there were requests for the evidence to be "sexed-up", there were perhaps suggestions that some of this evidence was quite old and, in fact, the 'dodgy dossier' had been initially written based on materials available in 1991. That was an historically based document. How happy were ministers with the quality of the raw intelligence data and the assessments from that data?

Mr Straw: First of all, let me make it clear that there was never any request for the so-called "sexing-up" of either dossiers, certainly not of the first dossier, none whatever.

Q771  Mr Illsley: Is there any truth in the fact that it was sent back six or seven times to the intelligence community to be rewritten?

Mr Straw: To give you chapter and verse on it, and I have been doing the same thing with the Intelligence and Security Committee, to give you exact numbers I would have to come back with the information on Friday. It is not about these things being sent back, it is an iterative process where various drafts are shared. All the time documents go through all sorts of drafting. I made comments, other ministers made comments, officials made comments. It is not a question of anybody saying, "This must go back. This will not do", the process was not remotely like that. It was here is a document, does it present the best case on the evidence which was being sourced and adjudicated by others, namely the JIC? That was the process. Was I satisfied with the intelligence?

Q772  Mr Illsley: Were you happy to use it?

Mr Straw: I was satisfied that the available intelligence justified the judgments that were made. Would I, in an ideal world, have preferred more intelligence? For sure, because the only reason we had to rely on intelligence was because of the highly secretive and mendacious nature of the Iraqi regime. That meant that we were reliant on a series of sources, but let me say, and again I will go into more detail about this on Friday, from time to time I would say in respect of a piece of intelligence that I had received, "What is the background to this? I want to know more about the nature of the source". On occasions, I would talk to the seniors of those people directly involved and so on. I think I have been reading and taking account of intelligence now for long enough, and anyway have a questioning mind, not just to take stuff that is put in front of me. Can I put this last point which is a really important part of our system. The reason why we have a Joint Intelligence Committee which is separate from the intelligence agencies is precisely so that those who are obtaining the intelligence are not then directly making the assessment upon it. That is one of the very important strengths of our system compared with most other systems around the world. Mr Ricketts can tell you more about that because he was Chairman of the JIC until two years ago.

Q773  Mr Illsley: Just coming back to the 45 minutes claim, and I know this has been done to death over the last few days. You said yourself that this has taken on a life of its own. I think one of the reasons for that is the prominence given to it by the Prime Minister in the foreword where it is highlighted in a very vague way, and this is why I come back to the quality of the intelligence, that weapons could be deployed in 45 minutes. There is no explanation of which weapons, whether they were weaponised, whether the weapons would have to be weaponised, what the term "deployment" means, whether that means deployed on a battlefield or from the battlefield or transported to the battlefield. There is a complete vagueness there. At the end of the day the suggestion is that if weapons could be deployed in 45 minutes they could be found pretty quickly during a battle or during the investigations afterwards. It has been suggested to us that the reliance on this 45 minutes claim tends to suggest that it would have been very easy to find such weapons if they actually existed, if they could be deployed in such a short space of time.

Mr Straw: With respect, Mr Illsley, I think that is with the benefit of some hindsight. People reading this document when it came out treated the 45 minutes claim in the way which was intended, as part of the evidence, but in no sense the whole burden of the case, not remotely. I would just refer to the fact that when the blessed Mr Andrew Gilligan gave a report on this document on, I think it was, the Today programme, he said "To be honest, the document is rather sensibly cautious and measured in tone as a whole". He then goes on to say "There are a couple of sexy lines designed to make headlines for the tabloids, like the fact he can deploy within 45 minutes if the weapons are ready and he could reach British bases on Cyprus", both of which we actually knew, so they were not deployed because they were sexy lines. What Mr Gilligan was saying here was that in any event this information was known. I personally did not know it but then, of course, my sources are not quite as good as Mr Gilligan's it turns out.

Q774  Mr Illsley: I am coming on to that.

Mr Straw: It was news to me. Historians looking at this - I guarantee - when they go from September through to March, the decision to go to war, will make a judgment about what was in the minds of people and as at each stage people were shifting their opinions, in this particular example I gave in favour of going to war, and they will say, "Look, the fact that he had developed weapons, some of which were deployable within 45 minutes, was part of the overall case but in no sense the absolutely key element for it", not at all. The key element for me was much bigger than whether he could deploy them in 45 minutes, 60 minutes or 15 minutes. In any case, if he has got the weapons - it is a statement of the obvious - they are deployable within a certain period. The key thing for me was this guy had developed chemical and biological weapons and a nuclear programme against the will of the international community, he had used chemical weapons against his own people, he had hidden a biological and nuclear programme and then stayed in defiance effectively having pushed out the inspectors at the end of 1998, even though there remained this much unanswered business for the inspectors. Having done that, there was important evidence that he had not stopped his programmes but used that pause in terms of surveillance by the international community to build up his programmes. That was the argument, and then we gave him chance after chance after chance before we took military action to comply peacefully, and he failed to take those chances.

Q775  Mr Illsley: Finally, Foreign Secretary, were you concerned about the evidence the Committee received recently about the easy accessibility journalists seemed to have to intelligence sources?

Mr Straw: The first thing I would say is that our intelligence services, the security service and the secret intelligence service - MI5, MI6 and GCHQ - have people at every level in them of the highest integrity and professionalism, and I have no evidence whatsoever to suggest that anybody in those agencies is other than totally loyal to the Crown and committed to their job.

Q776  Chairman: That was not the question.

Mr Straw: I thought it was, I am sorry.

Chairman: The question was are you satisfied ---

Andrew Mackinlay: Telephone numbers of journalists, that sort of thing.

Q777  Mr Illsley: It is the ease of access that journalists have to intelligence sources. I am not questioning the loyalty of intelligence services or whatever, although that is obviously a question.

Mr Straw: It remains to be seen, I would rather not speculate about Mr Gilligan's sources, but that was the answer to the question.

Chairman: We will pursue that further in private.

Q778  Mr Maples: Can I take you back for a couple of minutes to the so-called "dodgy dossier" and when that was first published on the internet. The names of the authors were given and I would like to take you through who they were and what their functions were. They were somebody called Alison Blackshaw, who is Alastair Campbell's PA; is that correct?

Mr Straw: I am sorry?

Q779  Mr Maples: There were four authors named in the file when the document was first put onto the internet. They were taken off pretty quickly afterwards but I want to take you through who they are and establish what their functions are. Alison Blackshaw was named as one. Is it correct that she is Alastair Campbell's PA?

Mr Straw: She is Alastair Campbell's PA, sure.

Q780  Mr Maples: Mutaza Khan was another. I understand he is the news editor of the Downing Street website and he works as part of the Strategic Communications Unit.

Mr Straw: I do not know him but I believe so.

Q781  Mr Maples: So he works essentially for Alastair Campbell as well?

Mr Straw: I think so.

Q782  Mr Maples: John Pratt, who I understand is a junior official in the Number 10 Strategic Communications Unit.

Mr Straw: If you say so, I do not know these people.

Q783  Mr Maples: He presumably works for Alastair Campbell as well. And a Foreign Office official you maybe can tell us about called Paul Hammill who at that time was working for the CIC which was at that time reporting directly to the Head of the Strategic Communications Unit as well, so all these four people were one way or another working for Alastair Campbell?

Mr Straw: One way or another, yes.

Q784  Mr Maples: Would it be fair to assume that Mr Campbell knew what they were doing?

Mr Straw: You will have to ask Mr Campbell that but he was supervising the operation of the CIC in his office.

Q785  Mr Maples: So he was supervising the production of this dodgy dossier?

Mr Straw: Mr Maples, there is a key problem about your question which is that as far as I know these four people were not involved in the production of the dossier.

Q786  Mr Maples: Then why were their names published with the original document as authors?

Sir Michael Jay: I do not know the answer as to why their names appeared on the website when the document was published. If I could just say a word about how the document was produced, Mr Maples. A group called the Iraq Communications Group, which is a group of senior officials which Mr Campbell chairs, commissioned a briefing paper for use with the media from the Communications Information Centre, the CIC, during the course of January. The CIC was charged with putting that document together and in order to do so sought information from different parts of the Whitehall machine, and that document was then put together by the CIC within the CIC.

Q787  Mr Maples: But you told us in answer to our questions that it reported to the Head of the Strategic Communications Unit, which is Mr Campbell, is it not?

Sir Michael Jay: The CIC reports to Mr Campbell.

Q788  Andrew Mackinlay: What does CIC stand for?

Sir Michael Jay: It stands for Communications Information Centre.

Q789  Sir John Stanley: Might I help Mr Maples on this very precise point. I am most surprised, Sir Michael and indeed Foreign Secretary, that, as I understand it, you have denied authorship by or the involvement of these four people. Just for the record may I say I have this morning before the meeting of this Committee spoken personally to Dr Rangwala whose memorandum is before the Committee ---

Mr Straw: I have a copy of it, yes.

Q790  Sir John Stanley: And he has informed me that in the few hours before the authors of this document were erased from the internet the computer names under which this document was saved, it was saved in the first instance under the name of Mr Paul Hammill, the Foreign Office official, then by Mr Pratt, then by Alison Blackshaw and then by Mr Khan, and he has hard copy evidence of that.

Mr Straw: I have seen that, Sir John, however in terms of the detailed operation of the CIC but these are questions you will have to ask Mr Campbell.

Q791  Mr Maples: We will. I just want to put this to you because I think it is terribly important it goes to fundamental subjects which I want to raise with you. Mr Hammill presumably you do know about because he is a Foreign Office official?

Mr Straw: I do not know Mr Hammill personally.

Sir Michael Jay: He is a Ministry of Defence official.

Q792  Mr Maples: He is not a Foreign Office official?

Sir Michael Jay: I understand he is a Ministry of Defence official who was working in the CIC.

Q793  Mr Maples: He is described on the FCO website as the Head of Story Development, which seems an appropriate title. One is tempted to ask why does the Foreign Office need a Head of Story Development, or the Ministry of Defence for that matter?

Sir Michael Jay: I imagine this was a function that he held within the CIC.

Q794  Mr Maples: The CIC needed a Head of Story Development?

Sir Michael Jay: The CIC is a group of officials drawn from a number of government departments.

Q795  Mr Maples: If that was his function it seems to me they got the right guy to do the job! The reason I raised these, Foreign Secretary, is when people like me read this dossier on weapons of mass destruction we believed it. We thought the Government is putting this out, it is based on JIC material, and we believed the Government. Even your opponents believe you when you say things like that. Then when we find the same Government, or the official closest to the Prime Minister, is capable of producing what can only be described as an amateurish, irresponsible and, quite honestly, fraudulent document in the dodgy dossier, do you understand why it then makes us suspect every single little difference in wording in these documents?

Mr Straw: Mr Maples, I understand why you make the claim; I do not accept what you say. I have already said that the way in which this document was produced was unsatisfactory and it should not have happened in this way, and it should have been subject to proper procedures. It is an episode which has been a very great embarrassment to the Government precisely because it has enabled those - not you, may I say - those who opposed military action in any event to seize on the idea that somehow the other evidence, which was the burden of the case, was not entirely accurate. But what I just invite you to say is leaving aside for the second the fact that the provenance of the document was not made clear, which was one of a number of aspects of the unsatisfactory nature of its production, can you point to parts of the second dossier which were and are now factually inaccurate?

Q796  Mr Maples: Yes, according to Mr al-Marashi, whose thesis was stolen for most of this document, on page 40 of his evidence he says there was a clear misunderstanding of the military security service, and in fact what is being described in the document as the military security service is something else. So, yes, I can point you absolutely to something where he, who is the expert whose evidence was used, says you are wrong. "Where it says, "Military Security Service", this section is wrong. The Military Security Service described here is actually the Iraqi General Security Service". So, yes, I can point to something that is absolutely wrong.

Mr Straw: That does not sound to me to be a hanging offence, if I may say so.

Q797  Mr Maples: Can I move on.

Mr Straw: Excuse me.

Q798  Mr Maples: All I wanted to raise this for is to say why people like me suspect every little difference in the wording of the main document. I want to come to a couple of those. In November 1998 the Foreign Office wrote letters to all Members of Parliament before Desert Fox and attached to it what was obviously an intelligence assessment and on the last page of it, paragraph 9, it says: "The Iraqi chemical industry could produce mustard gas almost immediately and amounts of nerve agent within months. Saddam almost certainly retains some WMD equipment." Dame Pauline Neville Jones and an official of the Australian intelligence agency told us said that that sounded like the kind of material that JIC produced, it is "could", "might" "maybe", and it has got ambiguities in it. When we come to this document that you published at the end of last year, it says: "We judge that Iraq has continued to produce chemical and biological agents. Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes". All those shadings of doubt and ambiguity have gone. To make the leap from one to the other there must surely have been some new piece of intelligence in those four years that led you to go from "could" and "would" and "might" to "has" and "does". I want to know if you saw a piece of intelligence between November 1998 and September last year which led you to make that, frankly, fairly radical reassessment of the information that you published.

Mr Straw: I can go into detail on Friday about the flow of intelligence which I saw over a period. This document, I think, is very corroborative of the case that we made on 24 September and subsequently. It was signed by Derek Fatchett and Doug Henderson, and I understand approved by my predecessor and consistent with other things my predecessor was saying at a much later date, including in the early part of ----

Q799  Mr Maples: I am not arguing whether it is true or not, I am just saying the language is completely different.

Mr Straw: The headline above paragraph eight says, emphatically - you said this comes from intelligence, I take your word for this - "Saddam will rebuild his WMD unless he is stopped".

Q800  Mr Maples: Four years later you are saying he has.

Mr Straw: Palpably four years later he has certainly not been stopped. Indeed, far from stopping the building ----

Q801  Mr Maples: I was being very precise in my question to you.

Mr Straw: I am being precise in my answer.

Q802  Mr Maples: No, you are not actually, or you are answering a different question. Your document says that he is capable of doing these things and he will do it unless he is stopped. Four years later you are saying he has done it, he does have the capability. I am asking you if you saw a piece of intelligence which justified the move from somewhat tenuous conclusions to absolutely unambiguous conclusions.

Mr Straw: What we saw over a period was intelligence evidence which arrived at an assessment which was then accurately reflected in this document.

Q803  Mr Maples: Are you saying that the JIC document used language like "Iraq has continued to produce chemical and biological agents", it did not say "may have done" or "has the capability to"?

Mr Ricketts: This document was drafted in the JIC structure and approved by the JIC, so responsibility for it was taken by the Chairman of the JIC. This is certainly drawing on JIC judgments and, as I said earlier, the point here is this is a judgment, it is a clear statement of our judgment.

Q804  Chairman: Were any of the ambiguities altered in the progression from the JIC initial report to what ultimately appeared?

Mr Ricketts: This document was drafted in the JIC and, as far as I am concerned, this is the judgment that the JIC came to.

Q805  Mr Maples: We had evidence from a former Chairman of the JIC, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, that this is not the kind of language that a JIC assessment would use, that actually it is strengthened up considerably. What is more, for instance in the body of the document it says: "The JIC concluded that Iraq had sufficient expertise to produce biological warfare agents", but in the summary you say: "It has produced biological warfare agents." In the bit about 45 minutes, it says: "Intelligence indicates that the Iraqi military are able to deploy" and in the summary it says: "These weapons are deployable within 45 minutes".

Mr Straw: Hang on a moment, it does not say that, Mr Maples, it says that: "As a result of the intelligence, we judge that Iraq has ..." and then goes on to say some of these weapons. The qualification for those is very clear. You made a very large claim a moment ago that what was in the second dossier published at the end of January was substantially inaccurate and that has damaged confidence in the Government, but the only thing you have been able to point to ----

Q806  Mr Maples: You challenged me to point to anything and I instantly pointed to one thing.

Mr Straw: I just say this: some of those things, like the references to "opposition groups" should not have been changed to "terrorist organisations", but it happened, they have been changed to "terrorist organisations". That document, in that respect, was 100 per cent accurate. If the only factual inaccuracy that you can point to is that where it said "military security service", it should have said "Iraqi general security service", then I rest my case.

Q807  Mr Maples: You challenged me to find anything.

Mr Straw: I would have thought -----

Q808  Mr Maples: I am coming to this document and saying, for instance, it seems that where you say about biological weapons "JIC concluded...", that seems to me to be stronger than what it says about the 45 minutes which is: "Intelligence indicates that the Iraqi military are capable of deploying within 45 minutes". It says that on page 19. Those seem to me to be different. That has a ring of truth about it, that is the kind of thing an intelligence assessment would say, but that is not reflected in the summary. The summary is much more certain and draws no distinction between the nature and the quality of the intelligence assessment on those two things.

Mr Ricketts: Perhaps if I could just respond in my capacity as another former Chairman of the JIC, Mr Maples. I do not find anything in the language of this at all surprising in terms of the judgments that the JIC reach. I do notice at the end of the Executive Summary there is a clear statement in paragraph seven: "These judgments reflect the view of the Joint Intelligence Committee." That seems to me to be absolutely clear, the JIC take responsibility for the judgments set out in the Executive Summary.

Mr Maples: I have to say "reflects the views" is exactly the kind of wording which high quality officials like yourself and Sir Michael use in documents when we know that does not actually mean these are the words of JIC or this is a document that they have produced. I am afraid I am running out of time but there is lots more.

Q809  Chairman: Can you respond in answer to what "reflects the views" means?

Mr Ricketts: I feel entirely confident that the JIC took ownership of this document, took responsibility for it and stand by it.

Q810  Mr Pope: Foreign Secretary, in respect of the September dossier you told us a little while ago that it was an iterative process, that drafts were going backwards and forwards, ministers would put little notes on, small changes would be made, it was an updating process. Mr Gilligan told us when he came before the Committee last week that his source, who he also told us was involved in drawing up the September dossier, said that the dossier was "transformed" in the week prior to publication, so between 17 September and 24 September the dossier was transformed. Was that the case?

Mr Straw: It went through a number of drafts. To say it was transformed ---- As I said, where documents like this have been prepared, a core is prepared and it then goes out for comment. There had been previous drafts and this particular draft, which I think started its life sometime in early September, went out, it went out for comment and I had a look at it. The thing I can say perfectly publicly is that I thought it should make more reference to earlier inspections because having read this document I thought it should have a wider audience, referring to UNSCOM's final report of uncompleted disarmament tasks through late 1998, things like that, suggestions. I think one of my colleagues suggested that there should be a foreword. That is what happens. I think the implication of what Mr Gilligan was saying was that the judgments were changed, but that was not the case.

Q811  Mr Pope: The implication is worse than that. Can I just read you what he said. He said: "My source's claim was that the dossier had been transformed in the week before it was published, so I asked 'how did this transformation happen' and the answer was a single word, the word was 'Campbell'." What I want to know is, is that true? Can you refute that?

Mr Straw: Yes.

Mr Ricketts: What that implies is that the entire Joint Intelligence Committee would accept that their judgments, set out in earlier drafts, would be transformed at the request of a single official and then still regard the document as their own, and that certainly does not reflect anything that I know about the integrity of the Joint Intelligence Committee process.

Q812  Mr Pope: Could I Just move on to the decision-making process in the run-up to the conflict because Clare Short gave us some quite interesting evidence last week. She told the Committee that: "There was never an analysis of options, there was never an analysis on paper before any Cabinet Committee or any meeting, it was all done verbally. It is quite a collapse of normal British procedures for decision-making". That seems quite a damning indictment from somebody who was a member of the Cabinet at the time.

Mr Straw: That was not the case. I have set out in answers to the further series of questions, which I think you have had this morning, the degree of examination and debate that took place in Cabinet. Contrary to what Clare said first of all, it is not the case, as I think she said, that the Cabinet had gone into deep freeze between the end of July and mid-October, that was not the case at all. When Parliament was recalled for 24 September there was a special session of the Cabinet on 23 September which dealt with a couple of current items but the discussion was dominated by Iraq. In addition to that, I have also set out that she made a point, or I think Dame Pauline Neville-Jones did, about the fact that DOP had not met since June 2001. That is correct but in its place there is a ministerial committee with wider membership, which I think met 28 times between the beginning of the military conflict and the end of April. Can I just come back on this. Nor is it the case, as Clare claimed, that all the discussions which were held in smaller ministerial groups (some of them, yes, relatively informal) were without papers and, for example, it is simply untrue that there were no papers that analysed the military options. Of course what is the case, can I just explain this, which is a reconciliation between what Clare was saying and what I have just told the Committee, is that some of these decisions had to be and some of the discussions had to be very tightly held, and there was a reason for that, which is that we were involved in very intense diplomatic activity throughout the period from the middle of July and if you were involved in intense diplomatic activity to start with, and it was with our partners in the United States and with other partners in the Security Council, you have to ensure that these discussions are tightly held. The communications you have with diplomatic partners itself are almost always confidential and often secret. In addition to that, we had to ensure that the military options were very tightly held too, not least so that none of its detail could filter its way to Saddam, so that was the reason.

Q813  Mr Pope: One of the things that Clare said to us was she described it as an entourage in Number 10 (comprising Sally Morgan, Jonathan Powell, Alastair Campbell, David Manning) that was in charge of day-to-day policy-making, and what I am putting to you in light of the written answers you have supplied to us this morning is there was a gap between when the DOP last met, which was two years ago, and when the War Cabinet, the ad hoc Ministerial Committee on Iraq, started meeting, which was on 19 March this year, so we have got this very long period of time when there was no Cabinet committee meeting and what Clare was suggesting was in that period of time the day-to-day decisions were being made by an unelected cabal of people in Number 10.

Mr Straw: It is untrue. There has always been an entourage in Number 10 for as long as Number 10 has existed and people need to chill out about that. At any time there are people who are not in Number 10 who get concerned about the entourage. That is true if you look at recent history with Mrs Thatcher and also if you go back to the staff in Number 10 at the time of Harold Wilson, Harold Macmillan, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, and so it goes on. As far as the Cabinet was concerned, Robin Cook provided the complete answer to what Clare was saying which was that there was the most intensive discussion week by week by week. I have given the answers here. The Cabinet discussed Iraq at every Cabinet meeting between 23 September 2002 and 22 May 2003, which is 28 meetings. In addition to that, I do not think Parliament has ever been more closely involved in a process leading up, as it turned out, to military action than this Government has involved Parliament on this occasion. I have done a list and I am happy to put it before the Committee, but leaving aside routine opportunities for interrogation of Ministers like first order Questions and Prime Minister's Questions, I took part in five debates or statements or evidence sessions between September and the end of November on Iraq and then seven before military action took place. It really was the subject of the most intensive scrutiny. The implication of what Clare was saying was that somehow there were decisions being made without reference to Ministers. That is simply untrue. Apologies, Mr Chairman, for taking a little bit of time on this but I think it is important to see the sequence of things here. In July, as the issue of Iraq had become a much bigger issue in the international arena, the question before Ministers was how do we get this issue before the United Nations, and that required the United States President to make that decision. There was not actually any argument, whatever position people subsequently took, about whether we went to war or not, there was nobody inside Cabinet nor in the country that did not think it was a sensible approach. There was a very intensive level of diplomatic and other activity to secure that. However, by 12 September President Bush went to the General Assembly and made this very fine speech at which he committed himself to the UN route. The next stage was delivering that Security Council Resolution. Again there was no argument about this, everybody wanted this. There was very intensive discussion to get the Security Council Resolution; we got it by 8 November. Then there was the issue of getting the Iraqis to comply. You know the story there, but alongside that there was the issue of military deployments. Of course what happened, as would happen in any government I guess, is, yes, we looked at military deployments and these were additional considerations made in meetings in which some or all of the people you mentioned were present. They included Number 10 officials plus others including the Chief of Defence Staff, the Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary and myself, often heads of agencies, sometimes Mr Ricketts or Sir Michael Jay as well. Then those decisions were reported to Cabinet. Then - and this is in a sense the defect in Clare's analysis - as soon as decisions were ready, announcements were made to the House of Commons. On 18 December there was an initial announcement made by Geoff Hoon in the House of Commons about potential military deployments and he made a series of further statements as well.

Chairman: Mr Pope, would you make this the final question please.

Q814  Mr Pope: My final question is on a different topic and it is questioning you in your role as the Minister responsible for some of the intelligence services. Mr Gilligan told us that it was a commonplace for people in the intelligence services to give information to a variety of newspapers and to himself. I put the question to him do people who work in intelligence services on a regular and widespread basis brief journalists and is that an on-going process and he said: "That does seem to be the fact of the case." Is that the fact of the case and are you happy as the Minister responsible that there appears to be widespread briefing by members of the intelligence services to journalists?

Mr Straw: I do not believe that to be the case. I know a number of people personally who are members of the intelligence services, aside from those I am responsible for more widely. They are people who go to immense lengths to ensure that the trust that is invested in them is not compromised. It is true, as Mr Gilligan confirmed he knows this to be true, that because of the intense interest that the public and the media have in intelligence agencies, they have some arrangements which are entirely official for ---

Q815  Mr Pope: --- These are unofficial. Maybe they are the rogue elements that have been talked about.

Mr Straw: --- for the briefing of the press, and of course we take seriously any allegations of this kind. I just want to put on the record that having been responsible over the last six years first for the security service MI5 and now over the last over two years for SIS, MI6 and GCHQ, I think the overall level of the quality of staff, their integrity and their commitment to their work is second to none.

Q816  Chairman: When you see us on Friday perhaps you could provide the instructions to personnel in respect of contacts with the press.

Mr Straw: I am happy to do so.

Q817  Andrew Mackinlay: I want to ask you this: you said that the dodgy dossier was an acute embarrassment to the Government; it was also an acute embarrassment to those of us who supported the Government in the division lobbies, and would do so again tonight for other reasons. But it was an acute embarrassment and therefore we are legitimately angry. I thought we rather stopped Sir Michael's flow because he was opening out just what was the genesis of this document, who handled it and I really want to go back to that, either through you, Foreign Secretary or Sir Michael, directly. Who handled this, who were the authors, and did it go to the Prime Minister in his Red Box to be signed off? Did the Prime Minister see it?

Mr Straw: I think the short story, a perfectly obvious point and I will bring Sir Michael in on the particulars, is there are people who believe there is some kind of conspiracy behind this document which, as I say, was unsatisfactorily produced but, as I say, which is also very important, nothing in it of any seriousness is inaccurate but, yes, of course it is still an embarrassment.

Q818  Andrew Mackinlay: Of course, I understand.

Mr Straw: : There was no conspiracy behind it. It was not remotely in the Government's interest to produce a document with this provenance. To put it in the vernacular, it was a "complete Horlicks" in terms of the way it was produced.

Q819  Andrew Mackinlay: So how did it come to be produced?

Mr Straw: It should not have happened.

Q820  Andrew Mackinlay: How?

Mr Straw: It happened because it happened.

Andrew Mackinlay: I want to know who did it, why, who commissioned it and to whom did it go?

Q821  Chairman: A simple question.

Mr Straw: Mr Campbell commissioned it, I understand. The request went into the system and then it went back to him.

Q822  Andrew Mackinlay: Did it go to the Prime Minister? Do we know that?

Mr Straw: He will have to tell you. It was authorised by the Prime Minister. The other important thing to bear in mind about this, and in a sense this is the foundation of the error, is that it started its life as a briefing paper, as a background briefing paper, and, frankly, if what had happened to it was that in addition to parts one and three, whose provenance was clear, they said "Here, by the way, off the Internet is a PhD thesis from this fellow, we think it is correct but for a wider audience, here it is", end of story. At the time it got remarkably little coverage. It was touched on by the newspapers but, as far as I know, not covered at all by the broadcast media.

Q823  Andrew Mackinlay: I think, Foreign Secretary, you miss a narrow but important point and it really goes back to Sir John's question. Let us assume for the purpose of our discussion for the next minute or two that the broad thrust of it was correct, but it is the status it was given, the trailer he gave it in Parliament. Sir John said either the Prime Minister misled Parliament or he was misled, and you said it was neither and went on to say that broadly the contents were correct, so I want to put that aside. What was the Prime Minister told? Did he sign it off?

Mr Straw: I was not present. As you know, this did not come to Foreign Office ministers so I was not present when it was "signed off".

Andrew Mackinlay: Was Sir Michael?

Q824  Chairman: Who was it?

Mr Straw: Neither was Sir Michael.

Q825  Andrew Mackinlay: He might know. Presumably somebody asked.

Mr Straw: You can ask Mr Campbell tomorrow.

Q826  Andrew Mackinlay: Foreign Secretary, you must have said to the Prime Minister - I can imagine it - because you meet him regularly, "We have a problem on the 'dodgy dossier'", he would have put his hands behind his back, gone back in his chair, as he does, because I have seen his body language, and he would have said, "But, Jack, I made the assumption that it came up through the normal channels". Am I right?

Mr Straw: I cannot recall that conversation with him.

Q827  Andrew Mackinlay: Precisely.

Mr Straw: I cannot recall that conversation but I think it was an entirely reasonable assumption by him if he made that assumption that it had come through the normal channels. He, after all, is the Prime Minister. Just as I made that assumption. You must wait to see Mr Campbell's statement which I hope to be with you later on today, and his evidence.

Q828  Andrew Mackinlay: What does Sir Michael want to say?

Mr Straw: As I say, it was a series of innocent errors, nothing venal at all.

Q829  Andrew Mackinlay: That was really good but let us hear from you, please, Sir Michael.

Sir Michael Jay: I do not have a great deal to add to what the Foreign Secretary has just said.

Mr Straw: You are a good man.

Sir Michael Jay: I am sure that Mr Campbell will be able to give you more detail tomorrow on exactly what the mechanism was on which the document was produced. What I would just like to stress is that it was commissioned as a briefing note, a briefing paper to be used with journalists, and it was prepared on that basis. The Foreign Secretary has said, even prepared on that basis, clearly when it was put together in the CIC, as it was put together in the CIC, then sources should have been attributed to it and the fact that the sources were not attributed to it was a mistake. As I understand it, it was then used by Mr Campbell on a flight to Washington in order to brief journalists.

Q830  Andrew Mackinlay: Okay.

Sir Michael Jay: I think that was exactly what happened. They are questions really to ask him.

Q831  Andrew Mackinlay: I do not want to labour this point, Foreign Secretary, but you referred to part one and part three of that dossier, Mr al-Marashi when he gave his evidence said: "If I could estimate I would say that 90 per cent of this intelligence dossier was taken from the three articles, by myself published in MERIA and the two articles in Jane's Intelligence Review, virtually unchanged". It seemed to me he was quite emphatic. He looked at two other contributors.

Mr Straw: I am sorry, I have not done contextual comparisons but I just make this point: much of what is in here also reflected information that was publicly available in other sources. This was corroborative and what we knew publicly from documentary sources but also from Saddam's behaviour.

Q832  Andrew Mackinlay: Can I come to yellow cake. It is now agreed ground that the Niger document's were falsified, we do not know by who, but Dr El-Baradei has said publicly that he repeatedly asked the United States and the United Kingdom intelligence services to give him any evidence about development of atomic weapons. There has been an inference, I think either by yourself or the Prime Minister or both, that notwithstanding the fact that that Niger thing was totally falsified, we have been fooled here, not only that but there was some other intelligence which does support the fact that Saddam was seeking materials to develop nuclear weapons. My question is not coming to that, because we might go into that on Friday, but was Barraday given this information by the United Kingdom?

Mr Straw: The documents?

Q833  Andrew Mackinlay: Not the Niger stuff, which we now know is falsified, but what other information was he given? I understand that yourself and the Prime Minister, and it may well be right, think notwithstanding that we had some evidence that we cannot reveal.

Mr Straw: First of all, just to repeat, and it is very important that we should repeat, the documents which turned out to be forged did not come from the United Kingdom and in any event they were not available to us in here, and neither did we supply those to the IAEA. That is point one. Point two: there was other evidence, which was available, which was the background to the claims made in this document of 24 September. As to sharing this information with Dr El-Baradei, I will give you a specific answer on Friday about that, having checked. What I should also say, Mr Mackinlay, is that we did share intelligence with both UNMOVIC and the IAEA. I think you will find that both heads were complimentary about the co-operation they received from us. I also make this point, which I think was underlined by Mr Taylor in his evidence, that we shared it as quickly as we could. We had to be satisfied about the security arrangements by IAEA and in particular by UNMOVIC and, as Mr Taylor explained, United Nations' agencies are not sovereign states and their ability to keep secure information is inherently more challenging, more difficult, than that of a sovereign state like the United Kingdom.

Q834  Andrew Mackinlay: Okay. Can I ask you about talking to the press, the security and intelligence services. I had a parliamentary reply from the Prime Minister. I asked him if he would make a statement on the system within the security services for maintaining contact with the press. He said: "In line with ministerial responsibilities, media inquiries about the secret and intelligence services are handled by the FCO press office, media inquiries about the security service are handled by the Home Office press office, GCHQ has its own dedicated press office which works closely with the Foreign and Commonwealth press office."

Mr Straw: True.

Q835  Andrew Mackinlay: A few moments ago you indicated, I thought, to the Committee that there were special, I think you used the word, "authorised" people who speak. These are different animals, are they not, from the press office? There are some blighters ---- There is some reluctance to concede that there are people who talk to journalists. There are journalists in this room who have told me that they speak to these people all the time. We had emphatic evidence from Gilligan that he has their phone numbers and they have his. Why do we have the secrecy that there is not a culture and a convention that people do talk?

Mr Straw: We do handle routine press inquiries for SIS, GCHQ has it its own, the Home Office has its own. We handled the security services. It is also correct, and I will go into more detail when I see the Committee in private session on Friday, as I said to Mr Illsley, that the agencies make arrangements for them to have somebody available who briefs particular journalists. That is something which is authorised. I do not see a problem about that at all.

Andrew Mackinlay: There is a problem, it is a constitutional point. These men and women can speak to journalists but they cannot speak to Members of Parliament. That is not a matter for secret session, it is fundamental.

Chairman: Final question, Mr Mackinlay.

Q836  Andrew Mackinlay: I want to hear the answer to that, it is important.

Mr Straw: These people, and neither do press officers, do not routinely come and give evidence to Select Committees because ministers are responsible for them, but the heads of the agencies who authorise this level of press briefing do give evidence to the intelligence and security community on a routine basis. Although, Mr Mackinlay, you prefer that to be a Select Committee, and as you know I have a great deal of sympathy with that opinion, it is nonetheless a committee of parliamentarians, senior parliamentarians, who are very independent minded and who do in practice report to Parliament.

Chairman: Foreign Secretary, we welcomed Mr Ottaway to this Committee for the first time just before the public session. I now call upon you to break his duck.

Q837  Richard Ottaway: Foreign Secretary, I act as sweeper on this occasion. With hindsight, listening to your evidence today and you describing the January O3 dodgy dossier as an operation that was akin to "Horlicks", do you think on balance it would have been better not to have published it in the first place?

Mr Straw: Yes, given what happened --- Certainly it would have been better not to have published it in that form or if it was going to be published to have ensured that it went through the same rigorous procedures as the dossier that was published in September.

Q838  Richard Ottaway: I agree. You said earlier on that it was to the "sexed up" but you did admit that there were some changes made. Have you any idea why the changes were made?

Mr Straw: No, we have been trying to find out how and why these changes were made. As I say, the key change that was made, which was changing "opposition groups" to "terrorist organisations" and I think as a statement it was entirely justified for reasons I have explained because it is a matter of public knowledge that the Saddam regime was actively supporting MEK, this very unpleasant terrorist organisation targeting Iran, and Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, paying the families of suicide bombers and so on. However, it should not have been changed in that context, which of course led to the difficulties it has led to. A better way of doing it would have been to quote directly from the PhD thesis and then say, "Our judgment is they are not only supporting opposition groups they are also supporting terrorist organisations", but made it a clear where we were quoting and where we were using our own judgment.

Q839  Richard Ottaway: Yet at the same time, if I can go back to Sir John Stanley's question on 3 February, when the Prime Minister said: "I hope that people have some sense of the integrity of our security services. They are not publishing this, or giving us this information and making it up. It is the intelligence that they are receiving and we are passing it on to people." Would you agree that that is now a shade inaccurate as a statement?

Mr Straw: I do not accept that because the first, second and third sections were the ones that were based on intelligence. I do not think there has been any challenge to those at all, apart from this slightly risible suggestion that there was an error between "Iraqi Security Service" and "General Security Service" which, as I say, is hardly a hanging offence. The middle part of it is a description of Saddam's security apparatus and when I read it through, bluntly, I thought, "Well, it is useful to know about this", but not suggesting that it was necessarily going to have this kind of architecture, it might be slightly different, but any regime like that was bound to have this kind of security apparatus.

Q840  Richard Ottaway: Would it be helpful if by Friday you were able to break down the January 03 document to let us know who produced which part of it because it says at the top that it draws on a number of sources and I think it would be rather helpful to the Committee if we knew what bits were produced by whom.

Mr Straw: Of course I can do that in more detail, but the key point is that part two was drawn overwhelmingly from this PhD thesis, subject to these amendments which we have described and which we have identified. My understanding is that the first and third were drawn largely from intelligence but of course included some perfectly open information about the nature of the Ba'ath Party.

Q841  Richard Ottaway: So in truth when the Prime Minister says it is intelligence that the JIC is receiving, it is some of the intelligence that the JIC is receiving?

Mr Straw: It never claimed that it was simply from intelligence. The rubric at the top of page 1 says: "This report draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material, and shows how the Iraqi regime is constructed to keep WMD ... and is now engaged in a campaign of obstruction of the UN Weapons Inspectorate", which for certain it was.

Q842  Richard Ottaway: To go back to the point Mr Maples was making, as a backbencher who does not get the sort of intelligence you get, you have to make a decision on this and it was not unreasonable to believe, from what the Prime Minister was saying, that it was primarily intelligence based.

Mr Straw: As to burden, in terms of percentage it is more difficult to measure but I will try to give you an assessment. Mr Ottaway, I understand the point that Mr Maples was making and I dearly believe it would have been very helpful to the Government if the provenance of this document had been made clear from the start, but I do also say in terms of should you believe the document or not, yes, actually this document was accurate and it makes it all the more aggravating that we have had to deal with the problems that we have about the inadequate sourcing and the changing of some words.

Q843  Richard Ottaway: Turning to the September 2002 document, you have sought today to play down the 45 minutes claim somewhat, and I wrote down the words you used, that "it has got a life of its own". I just draw your attention to the fact that it is referred to no less than four times in the September document and, indeed, on page 17 under "The current position: 1998-2002", it is described as one of nine main conclusions, along with uranium being sought from Africa. You then said that since then it had not been repeated. Of course, the President of the United States repeated it in his State of the Union address and you in your speech at Chatham House repeated it as well.

Mr Straw: I did not say it had not been repeated although, I must say, I had forgotten that. One of your other colleagues, I think, claimed that nobody in the United States ever mentioned 45 minutes, well it turns out, Sir John, that the President of the United States did in his State of the Union address.

Sir John Stanley: No, he did not.

Q844  Richard Ottaway: I stand corrected.

Mr Straw: It was part of this but plenty of other things in a document which has an Introduction, Executive Summary and a body. It was repeated four times. I think when people got this document subsequently they judged the 45 minute claim in context. It was not the revelation, the flash from the Gods, that led people to change their minds at all, it was simply one part of the evidence, the overwhelming evidence was about Iraq's use and capability of chemical weapons, its capability of biological weapons, its drawing up of a very extensive nuclear programme which it had, which was discovered in the mid-1990s, and all the other things that followed. This was further and better particulars. I just make this point: the 45 minutes issue was no more an issue in terms of the decision to go to war than a wide range of other matters until Mr Gilligan made his claim on the Today programme on 21 May. Of course, I understand why people are now interested in this, but if you are looking at the decision to go to war, to claim with the benefit of hindsight since 21 May that this 45 minutes claim was somehow central to the consideration of that decision to go to war, that is simply not the case because people looked at the very much bigger picture. Here was Saddam, he was a threat to international peace and security, he had refused to comply with a Whole series of mandatory United Nations Security Council resolutions, we had gone back to the United Nations, he had been given a final opportunity to comply, he failed to take it, and even then, let me say, was given an ultimatum by us, was offered, as both Donald Rumsfeld and I did in the middle of January, the opportunity to leave Iraq and be given safe haven and, as Donald Rumsfeld said on that occasion, a far better alternative than war, and I agreed with him, and he was given a 48 hour ultimatum once a decision was taken.

Q845  Richard Ottaway: Do you still stand by the 45 minutes claim?

Mr Straw: It was not my claim. I stand by the integrity of the JIC. This is a really important point - really important. I stand by the integrity of the people on the Joint Intelligence Committee----

Q846  Richard Ottaway: Do you still believe the claim?

Mr Straw: ---- who made the assessment. I believe that they made the assessment properly. Let us be absolutely clear about this. This was not my claim in the sense that I simply got together a pile of documents and thought "That is a nice idea". This was intelligence which came into the agencies in the normal way and was then subject to assessment in the normal way and was made by the JIC. I accept the claim but did not make it.

Q847  Richard Ottaway: So really you are just the advocate for the intelligence information that is put in front of you? On that point, do you agree with the Member for Livingston when he appeared in front of this Committee, your predecessor, he was talking about the way intelligence is put together and he said: "It is not perceived, it is not invention" - he was talking about the sincerity of yourself and the Prime Minister - "it is not coming up with intelligence that did not exist, but it is not presenting the whole picture. I fear the fundamental problem is instead of using intelligence as evidence on which to base the conclusion of a policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which we could justify a policy on which we had already settled". First of all, do you accept the cherry-picking argument that only certain bits of intelligence were being presented?

Mr Straw: No, I do not. I certainly accept what Robin says when he says intelligence necessarily gives an incomplete picture by definition. What you therefore have to do is have a very clear system of assessment in respect of that assessment and why we have a JIC process. It is why I quite often (not only in respect of Iraq) ask further questions about the provenance of particular sources and I will go into this in some more detail on Friday. But the case, Mr Ottaway, we made - and I just want to repeat this - did not depend on the 45-minute claim or any other individual claim, it depended on the overall assessment of the behaviour of Saddam and the threat that he posed, and most of that was in the public domain. I know that you and I think Mr Maples put to Robin what was said on his behaviour by Derek Fatchett and Doug Henderson in 1998 and I myself put to Robin what he wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 20 February 2001 in which he says: "We believe that Saddam is still hiding these weapons in a range of locations in Iraq and Iraq is taking advantage of the absence of weapons inspectors to rebuild weapons of mass destruction." What I readily accept is this: Robin on the basis of evidence judged that containment could work; I did not, and that was the difference.

Chairman: With brisk questions and brisk replies we can make progress. Mr Illsley, on this point.

Q848  Mr Illsley: In reference to the second dossier I think you said again a few moments ago that it was substantially correct. The Committee has received evidence from a Professor which goes through that document page by page and indicates that pages 6 to 16 are all taken from internet sources, and pages 2 to 5 relate to the claims made by Hans Blix to the UN Security Council, which are then contrasted with other claims with the suggestion that those claims are wrong. The numbers of soldiers in the document have been substantially increased. To give you one quote from it, the original article referred to forces being recruited from regions loyal to Saddam and comprise 10,000 to 15,000 "bullies and country bumpkins". In the document that was published by the Government this then became "10,000 to 15,000 bullies", so words have been omitted, words have been added. The whole context of some parts of this document have simply been mistakenly put in there. The changing of names of organisations like General Intelligence to Military Intelligence suggest in a Government document that an organisation was founded in 1992 apparently before it had been created. There are a whole series of inaccuracies which have been put to us by Professor Rangwala.

Mr Straw: I have already accepted that there are sections from the internet, particularly in respect of the PhD thesis, should not have been changed. We have been over this before. If there are basic points made in that document which are themselves inaccurate I have yet to hear them, and I will go through his particular evidence, but the basic points made in the document about the nature of the regime and its failure to comply with the weapons inspectors and security structures were accurate. That does not excuse a separate issue which was about the provenance of the document but nor should you produce the defects about providing provenance for the document as a reason for saying therefore the document was inaccurate.

Q849  Chairman: Foreign Secretary, that document was sent to you. It would be helpful if you had a note with your observations on Mr Rangwala's submission.

Mr Straw: I will try and get that to you by Friday.

Q850  Sir John Stanley: Foreign Secretary, when you answered my previous series of questions you said towards the end that you believed in the total veracity of the September document, the September JIC approved assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. I must put it to you that I can see no basis on which you can say that unless the weapons of mass destruction programme on the scale set out here is actually uncovered in Iraq, unless you believe that Saddam Hussein had a covert, secret massive destruction programme of his WMD. The Prime Minister, you will remember, looked at that possibility in his speech in the House on 18 March and he said: "We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years, contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence, Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." I wholly agree with the Prime Minister, it is palpably absurd to suggest that the scale of this WMD programme has been secretary destroyed by Saddam Hussein. The issue is not whether he had some capability of some potential, so please do not ride off on that one, the issue is whether he had it on the scale set out to Parliament and to the British people and was used as a justification for war. I put it to you that there is no way you can say that this is correct until weapons of mass destruction on the scale set out in this document are uncovered.

Mr Straw: Let me say this in response to you, Sir John. Again, to repeat the point, what was in that dossier was corroborated by earlier evidence provided by UNSCOM and later evidence contained in UNMOVIC reports. If you want further corroboration, I did not refer in my speech on 18 March, nor in the much more extensive statement that I gave on 17 March, to this September dossier. I did refer to the 173 pages that Dr Blix had provided to the Security Council on 7 March of unresolved disarmament issues. Of course, it would be hugely helpful if further corroboration of the extent of these programmes was found, but the fact that evidence cannot be found does not mean that the programmes did not exist. Overwhelmingly, the rational explanation for Saddam's behaviour, all the evidence, has to be that programmes of the scale identified existed. What was in that dossier was also in here. It is in here that reference is made on 6 March 2003 to the fact that UNMOVIC believed in respect of 10,000 litres of anthrax - I am trying to dig out the exact statement - they said there was a substantial presumption that they still existed, and there were 29 separate clusters, a whole series of unresolved questions. My point is this: leave aside our dossier, look in here. It would have been utterly irresponsible for the international community in the face of this evidence here and Saddam's behaviour going back over 25 years to have simply sat on our hands and done nothing about his failure to comply with the United Nations. That was at the heart of the argument.

Q851  Mr Pope: Just a quick final question about the February dossier and Mr al-Marashi's evidence to us last week. Put in a nutshell, it appears that his thesis was downloaded off the Internet by someone - we will probably find out tomorrow by whom - that was not accredited to him, his permission was not sought, some of his work was changed, as we have heard, and there were some inaccuracies in the final document. But worst of all - I just find this incredible - Mr al-Marashi is an Iraqi, his family are still in Iraq, and it seems to me that nobody at any point anywhere in the Government gave any thought to the effect that linking him intimately with the case for Britain going to war would have on his relatives in Iraq. Do you think that whoever compiled this document owes him an apology?

Mr Straw: He is owed an apology and I am very happy now to give an apology on behalf of the Government. Of course he should have been asked his permission and it is one of the many errors that were made.

Mr Pope: That is very helpful, thank you.

Q852  Andrew Mackinlay: One thing you might clarify for me about Hammill and Manning; one is FCO and one is Department of Defence.

Mr Straw: Sir David Manning is the Prime Minister's principal diplomatic adviser, very shortly to be Her Majesty's Ambassador in Washington and Mr Hammill, Sir Michael?

Sir Michael Jay: Mr Hammill was working at the time for the Communications Information Centre, the CIC.

Q853  Andrew Mackinlay: I am not being sarcastic, but his fingerprints are on this document we have focused on. Manning would not have seen this document, would he?

Mr Straw: I do not know.

Q854  Andrew Mackinlay: The final thing concerns Cabinet government. The Cabinet did not sit from the rise of Parliament at the end of July around to beyond the third week of October. I am wrong?

Mr Straw: Cabinet met in the very last week of July. I cannot give you the date but I am pretty certain about that. It definitely met on 23 September.

Chairman: Two final points, Foreign Secretary. Firstly, there are questions which we hope to address to Sir Michael at the beginning of this afternoon's session which will begin at 3.15, which have not been resolved this morning. Secondly, a final thought, you have said that the only rational explanation is that those weapons of mass destruction existed. Do you think it might be time now to think the unthinkable that in fact Saddam had destroyed those stockpiles or at least, as Sir John has said, a large part of those stockpiles from the time when UNSCOM made its report and that perhaps ---

Sir John Stanley: I most certainly did not say that. I agreed with the Prime Minister that it was palpably absurd to suggest that Saddam Hussain had a secret WMD destruction programme.

Q855  Chairman: I am sorry, that the quantities were substantially less and that possibly there were valid reasons why Saddam Hussain deliberately kept up the pretence, namely to keep his enemies at home and abroad in fear and trembling and also perhaps for reasons of national prestige?

Mr Straw: I saw that that was one speculative explanation offered. No, I think for international peace and security it would have been irresponsible and rash, to pick up your phrase, to have thought the unthinkable here and completely inconsistent with the burden of the evidence and what we knew and know about Saddam, completely inconsistent with that. I must go, I am afraid. I am happy to see you again on Friday but I will just make this point: there were the most intensive inspections of the Saddam regime between 1991 and 1995 and it was not until a combination of the inspectors coming across some evidence and, above all, the defection of his son-in-law that anything was known of any significance about the scale of the biological weapons programme and the nuclear programme. I think Mr Taylor or Dr Samore made the point in respect of the Soviets, that the ability of totalitarian regimes to conceal programmes is really astonishing, but it is there. No-one has to speculate about the nature of this regime and what it had done, it is all here in perfectly open sources.

Q856  Chairman: Our debate will continue on Friday morning and with Sir Michael briefly at the start of this afternoon's session.

Mr Straw: We will make arrangements about what proportion of the session on Friday is in private and which public.