On 6 December the Information Tribunal heard the Foreign Office's appeal against the Information Commissioner's decision that it should release the secret draft of the dossier by former Foreign Office (FCO) spin doctor John Williams.

The case was between the FCO and the Commissioner and the Tribunal had refused my request to be attached to the proceedings on the grounds that I could not add anything evidentially. This was a slightly misplaced assumption and at the hearing I found the parties groping around in the dark.

Early in the proceedings I experienced what structuralists would call the death of the author. I listened to everyone speculating about my original request for the Williams draft, which identified the document by reference to Daniel Pruce's email of 10 September 2002 but also pointed out that John Scarlett had identified "John's draft of 9th September" as the work of Williams, not himself. The Foreign Office witness Stephen Pattison generated enough confusion to suggest that the document that the draft to which Pruce referred might be by Scarlett after all. Anyone with any knowledge of the Hutton Inquiry would know that it was established that Pruce, who sent his email at lunchtime on 10 September, could not have been referring to Scarlett's draft as that was sent to Downing Street after 6pm that evening. Nobody thought to ask me - a non-person - what I had meant. If they had, I could have pointed this out.

Timothy Pitt-Payne, Counsel for the Commissioner, did however force Pattison into an early admission that he did not have written knowledge of the matters in his written evidence, particularly his account of the drafting of the dossier. Pattison had prepared the FCO's submission to the Hutton Inquiry and his account was essentially a regurgitation of what was - or was not - given to Lord Hutton. Essentially, it was Pattison who failed to disclose the Williams draft. For the most part, the Foreign Office's case was, this is what we said at Hutton, so it must be true.

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?

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.

I'm told by the Information Commissioner that a decision notice on whether the Foreign Office should release the "secret" first draft of the dossier by Foreign Office spin doctor John Williams should be completed by the end of this week.

Whether it will actually be sent out this week is another matter - but watch this space.

I'm hoping the Commissioner will confirm that the Williams draft was a part of the process of drawing up the dossier. This will in turn confirm that the government's claim that the Joint Intelligence Committee wrote the dossier is bogus.

Given what I have found out about the dossier and what is soon to come out, I am astonished that Gordon Brown has appointed Jack Straw to head his leadership campaign.

It was Straw's press officer John Williams who, with Straw's agreement, wrote the first full draft of the dossier. It was Straw's Foreign Office that withheld the draft from the Hutton Inquiry. It was Straw who personally blocked my request to see the Williams draft. And Straw directly misled the Foreign Affairs Committee when he repeatedly insisted that the 45 minutes claim was in the dossier "in the first draft after the intelligence was received".

As I have shown, this was untrue.

As I wait for the Information Commissioner to finalise his badly overdue decision on the missing Williams draft of the dossier, I'm adding new material to the site about the four establishment inquiries that looked at the dossier and how the government misled them.

I recently published a piece on Comment is Free entitled What the Butler didn't see. This looked at how Lord Butler's claim to have seen "no evidence" that the dossier was "explicitly intended to make a case for war" is disproved by the leaked Downing Street documents. I've now added a broader analysis of the Butler Review, showing how wrong Butler to attribute "authorship" of the dossier to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and how utterly unfounded was his claim that, "Strenuous efforts were made to ensure that no individual statements were made in the dossier which went beyond the judgements of the JIC."

Next will be a look at how Alastair Campbell and Jack Straw misled the 2003 Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry.

To Coincide with the publication of The smoking gun on Comment is Free, The Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry gives a detailed account of how Jack Straw, the Foreign Office and Alastair Campbell misled that Committee about the origins of the dossier and the 45 minutes claim in particular.

In response to a number of very good questions from John Baron MP about the Williams draft, Margaret Beckett, who is nominally "Foreign Secretary", has shown an inclination to ignore Dennis Healey's advice "When you're in a hole, stop digging".

Beckett's answer to all five questions

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs pursuant to the answer of 25 January 2007, Official Report, column 1957W, on the weapons of mass destruction dossier

1. why she has no plans to publish Mr. John Williams’ draft document, extracts from it, or to confirm details of the contents; why the draft document was not made available to the inquiry led by Lord Hutton; and whether her Department retains the document;
2. whether the draft of the dossier on weapons of mass destruction produced by the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Mr. John Scarlett, on 10 September 2002 (a) was based upon and (b) took into account the draft document produced by Mr. John Williams on 9 September 2002;
3. whether reference was made to Iraq’s ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes in (a) an assessment by the Joint Intelligence Committee prior to 9 September 2002, (b) a draft of the dossier by the Joint Intelligence Committee prior to 9 September 2002, (c) the draft document produced by Mr. John Williams on 9 September 2002 and (d) the draft document produced by Mr. John Scarlett on 10 September 2002;
4. who the author was of the executive summary of the dossier on weapons of mass destruction in September 2002;
5. who the members were of the dossier on weapons of mass destruction drafting group in September 2002; at which meeting the dossier was signed off on behalf of the group; and which members of the group were present at that meeting.

was:

Matters relating to the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) dossier were examined in great detail by the inquiry led by Lord Hutton, Lord Butler’s "Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction" and the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report "Iraqi WMD—Intelligence and Assessments". These inquiries placed into the public domain as much information as it was possible to do without prejudicing national security.

Quite laughable really but Beckett has implied (otherwise she is misleading parliament) that it was a deliberate decision on national security grounds to withhold the draft from Hutton.

She is also again refusing to deny that the 45 minutes claim is in the draft and refusing to deny that the draft was the basis for the Scarlett draft that followed it.

On the whole, digging herself further into the cover-up.