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What was the spook doing?
Yesterday, I got some information from the Cabinet Office under the Freedom of Information Act.
Having fallen off my chair. I realised that the document was a record of the first meeting on the "Public Handling and and Briefing" on the dossier. The document was sent to the Hutton Inquiry at the same time as the "John Williams Draft" of the dossier. Because it arrived late, it was not posted on the Hutton Website, although the record of the second and subsequent meetings are on the site.
The document is as it was sent to Hutton. It is most interesting because of the redacted (blacked out) names of some of the attendees. The Cabinet Office has told me that three of the four concealed names are: Charles Gray (Foreign Office); Jim Poston (Foreign Office/CIC) and Jim Drummond (Cabinet Office/OD Sec). The other name is being withheld under Section 23(1) of the FOIA, which means that it is a member of the security services or similar.
This is another case of the government withholding from Hutton evidence of the involvement of the Coalition Information Centre in the dossier process. It also shows that while spin doctors attended meetings about intelligence, spies attended meetings about public presentation. No-one seems to have worried about conflicts of interest either way.
- Category(s)
- The cover-up