Quick thanks to Sunny @ Pickled Politics for this reference.

Today should be an important day for those of us who want to know the truth about the Iraq dossier

– the document that took us to war. The New Statesman is publishing my follow-up piece to Martin Bright’s story last November about the secret first draft, written by former Foreign Office spin doctor John Williams. At the same time, the Information Commissioner is finalising his ruling on whether the draft should be released. To mark all this, this website iraqdossier.com, which tells the whole story of how the dossier was sexed-up, is launched.

Today has been quite a day, starting off with publication of my piece in the New Statesman. Then Martin Bright was kind enough to lend me his blog and I did a another piece for Comment is Free, with the downside that they wanted my picture.

Reaction has been good and a few other blogs/sites have linked to the story and this site:

• Ian Dale's Diary
• Blairwatch
• Obsolete
• the durruti column
• Liberal England

It's all helped to get a lot of attention for the site and, most gratifying, people understand that it is a very serious and properly researched piece of work.

No word from the Information Commissioner. Watch this space!

Is the 45 minutes claim in the missing draft of the dossier produced by John Williams?

Following up my investigations, Lib Dem shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Moore asked Margaret Beckett what would appear to be a straightforward enough question: "whether the first draft of the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction dossier authored by John Williams makes reference to Iraq's ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes."

Beckett responded with a classic non-denial: "There are no plans for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to publish Mr. Williams' draft document, extracts from it or to confirm details of the contents."

Given that for Williams to have inserted the notorious claim in his draft the dossier would make it - as I have said - the smoking gun to end all smoking guns, you might think that the Foreign Office would deny this if possible. You might think Beckett would at least deny that the Williams draft was the first draft. You might think she would at least say "no plans to confirm or deny". Is this non-denial tantamount to an admission? Is Beckett burying herself deeper in the mire by perpetuating the cover-up?

Interestingly, the Theworkforyou website is running a poll on whether Beckett has answered the question. At present 2 (and I'm one of them) think not, while no-one thinks she has. What do you think?

I am told that the Information Commissioner should issue his decision on whether the Foreign Office should release the Williams draft "fairly swiftly". Unfortunately, this means "by the end of the month".

In the meantime, I have been appearing on Blogger TV to promote this site. Good luck to anyone trying to view this. Bloggers Sunny Hundal (from Pickled Politics), Andrew Ian Dodge and Clive Davis all promised to link to it. We'll see...

As I await the Information Commissioner's decision on release of the Williams draft, I wonder what spin strategy the government will deploy to distract attention from confirmation that the the first full draft of the dossier was written by a government spin doctor. Perhaps they will deploy Patrick "Humphrey" Wintour, the No. 10 house pet, who has this week repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to spin whatever No. 10 puts in front of him.

It is understood that Lord Levy did not contribute any names to the lists nor offered honours to any financial backer, but was simply asked for his opinion on potential peers.

Can we expect a piece from Wintour telling us, whatever the facts about the Williams draft, that he understands that it was all perfectly innocent?

If there is to be another inquiry into the Iraq war, the (post-Blair) government won't want it looking too closely into the false case it presented to Parliament. Call for Ann Taylor, ex MP and now Baroness Taylor of Bolton.

Taylor was the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) during the dossier's drafting. Although the ISC is often wrongly described (and spun) as a parliamentary committee, it is in fact a function of the Cabinet Office and Taylor was appointed by Blair. She was asked, in this oversight capacity, to look at a late draft. She ended up making partisan drafting and presentational suggestions, including some that she gave directly to Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) chairman John Scarlett which have never seen the light of day.

When the row over the Gilligan/Kelly report broke out, Blair was suspiciously keen to say that an ISC inquiry would suffice. Neither he nor Taylor mentioned at that point that she had been on the inside of the process of drafting the dossier. What an honest person would have done was to declare this involvement and immediately disqualify herself from the inquiry. But Taylor went ahead and the ISC cleared the government of sexing-up the dossier and pulled its punches when Geoff Hoon blatantly misled it regarding the complaints made by the Defence Intelligence Staff.

When Blair set up the Butler Review, Taylor represented Labour and was reported in The Independent to be arguing strongly for criticism - particularly of Scarlett - to be toned down. Butler pulled his punches and Blair got off.

Scarlett also got off - the fall guy with the bungee rope. It appears that Taylor supplied this:

"We realise that our conclusions may provoke calls for the current Chairman of the JIC, Mr Scarlett, to withdraw from his appointment as the next Chief of SIS. We greatly hope that he will not do so. We have a high regard for his abilities and his record." (Review Report Conclusion 38)

In return for services to the establishment, Taylor has now joined Hutton and Butler in the Lords. Meanwhile, Scarlett has been knighted.

So Scarlett takes the fall for Blair, Taylor saves Scarlett. Blair honours both of them.

Meanwhile, Butler appears to have found the words that Taylor talked him out of:

...neither the United Kingdom nor the United States had the intelligence that proved conclusively that Iraq had those weapons. The Prime Minister was disingenuous about that. The United Kingdom intelligence community told him on 23 August 2002 that,

"we ... know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work since late 1988".

The Prime Minister did not tell us that. Indeed, he told Parliament only just over a month later that the picture painted by our intelligence services was "extensive, detailed and authoritative". Those words could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him.

Butler also said:

I doubt whether any further inquiry is needed into the reasons why the United States and the United Kingdom went to war or even into the machinery of government questions... I think that we, and increasingly the British public, know what happened about that.

I agree that I don't think we need another establishment inquiry to conclude that everyone did their best in good faith in a difficult situation. We need the whole truth to come out.

The dossier has again returned to the news agenda, with former UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix telling Sky News that those who drew it up "exercised spin" and "put exclamation marks instead of question marks".

It's not surprising that spin was deployed, given that the government's spin doctors were put on the inside of the drafting process for this very purpose (para 6).

Full transcript of Blix interview