Investigations and Reports

In the U.K., a great furor grew over the report that the Blair government had ordered intelligence officials to "sex up" its dossier on Saddam Hussein in advance of the war, in particular Tony Blair's announcement that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so. In short, a BBC correspondent overstated the position of an intelligence worker, David Kelly, and by most accounts the BBC did not have appropriate safeguards to prevent or detect the overstatement. Kelly's identity was subsequently discloced by the government, Kelly committed suicide, and an inquest was ordered. It was hoped by some opponents of the war that the inquiry would reveal intentional deception by the Blair government, although such a finding would be outside the scope of the inquest. It was feared by some in the Blair government that the inquiry would cast at least a shadow of responsibility over Blair.

The report has now been completed, and it is a complete exoneration of the Blair government. Not surprisingly, this has inspired questions of whether it was a whitewash and, to one degree or another, most major British newspapers question the findings. The BBC has apologized to Blair for its actions, and its Director General has resigned.

The investigation did shed some light on the "45 minutes" claim:

Evidence emerged during the inquiry from John Scarlett, the head of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), who drew up the dossier, that the 45 minutes related not to long-range weapons as had been widely assumed at the time but to battlefield weapons.

This is significant, because it supports the BBC case that the threat from Saddam was not as grave as the government dossier suggested.

But Lord Hutton said in his report that the distinction between battlefield weapons and long-range ones deployable within 45 minutes "does not fall within my terms of reference".

But perhaps the biggest fault of the report is the extent to which it clears the government of responsibility - according to reports, not even the government expected such positive findings, and those inclined to think that the Blair government did intentionally overstate intelligence findings and did intentionally "out" Kelly will probably reject the findings as imbalanced, and one commentator has even compared the report to the cover-up of the "Bloody Sunday" incident in Northern Ireland. Another columnist sardonically observes,

It is indeed, as Margaret Thatcher famously remarked at the time of her decapitation, a funny old world. The country is taken to war on the basis of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that almost everyone now acknowledges never existed. There, thousands are killed. Here, a scientist kills himself after raising legitimate doubts about the government's intelligence. And a six-month inquiry by an eminent judge concludes that the only people who have done anything wrong at all work for the BBC.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., we are facing more and more evidence that our own "dossier" of evidence against Hussein was a house of cards. The latest is the expression by David Kay, that he does not believe that any significant stockpiles of WMD's will be found in Iraq, and does not believe that any existed past the mid-1990's. Kay expresses that there was no pre-war pressure on intelligence agencies to, in British parlance, "sex up" their findings - and suggests that the focus of our inquiry on "how things went so wrong" should be on our intelligence agencies as opposed to the White House. He may well be right - intelligence agencies were not reluctant to shower the Bush Administration with intelligence on what was likely to happen in post-war Iraq, despite knowing that it wanted to hear about the troops being welcomed as liberators and showered with flowers and candy. The Bush White House does not pretend that those reports did not exist, although it tries to downplay their significance and to defend its choice not to prepare for the post-war riots and resistance that those reports so accurately predicted. Ultimately, the Washington Post is correct when it writes:

The president and Congress should agree on the appointment of an expert, nonpartisan commission with full secrecy clearance and subpoena power to examine why the intelligence on Iraq proved wrong and to report on how such failures can be prevented in the future. "It's not a political issue," Mr. Kay told National Public Radio. "It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."

Unfortunately, it probably won't happen - or the Bush Administration will attempt to stall any investigation, shape the commission and limit its scope and authority so as to prevent any possibility of embarrassment (consistent with its approach to the 9/11 commission). If that happens, when the report comes out, regardless of its accuracy any exculpation of the government will likely be viewed as a whitewash.

Whatever you make of White House overstatements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, there is one prior expression by G.W. Bush that is unquestionably false - his campaign rhetoric to the nation's voters, "I trust you." His exceptionally secretive and closed administration, unquestionably, does not.

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