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.

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!

Still no word from the Information Commissioner on the missing Williams draft of the dossier. Feel free to check here but I think they will send me the decision notice before publishing it.

In the meantime, and in any case, there is more to come on this. I'm going to be adding to this site with new stories about the cover-up, specifically how government fixed and misled the official inquiries and how the media fell for Alastair Campbell's spin.

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?

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?

Someone (not me) has put this up:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Follow the freedom of infomation act and aquiesce to the many requests for the release of the draft of the WMD dossier whose existence is admitted by the Foreign Ofice and is allegedly written by John Williams, but which is still being withheld by the government. WHY?

please sign up at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/WMDdraftrelease/ and ask your friends to do so.

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.