No New Assessments

The government has repeatedly used a false claim of JIC approval for the dossier and its judgements to brush over these discrepancies but this was directly contradicted by JIC chairman John Scarlett. He expressly told the Hutton Inquiry that the dossier: "was designed to bring together existing standing JIC assessments. It was not planning to formulate new ones." (Section 76)

The "45 minutes" claim

A great deal of attention has been focused on the claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. This claim was already controversial before BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan's Today programme report which allegedly reported the view of weapons scientist Dr David Kelly that the government's spin doctors had inserted it knowing it to be wrong, or at least unreliable. This site deals in detail with the allegation that the spin doctors inserted the claim, because that allegation was so controversial, was so vehemently denied and became so symbolic and because it appears to have been true. Although the intelligence relating to the claim did appear in a draft JIC paper produced in parallel with the dossier, the JIC assessment staff chose not to include it in early drafts of the dossier's assessment of Iraq's current WMD capabilities - just as Gilligan had claimed. Its inclusion in the dossier followed - and probably resulted from - spin doctor involvement on or before 9 September 2002, the day before the draft on which the government has always based its defence to the charge that it inserted the claim. It may well be in the "missing" first draft of the dossier, produced on 9 September by Foreign Office spin doctor John Williams.

Fabricated Judgements

Possibly of greater importance than the inclusion of the claim was its subsequent upgrading to the status of "judgement", a status that it did not have in the formal JIC paper or on its first appearance in the dossier. Indeed, the greatest single episode of sexing-up was the fabrication of judgements that took place between the draft dossiers of 10 September and 16 September. The earlier draft is the first of those that are in the public domain to have an executive summary in the same format as the published document. After a few introductory paragraphs, there is a set of bullet points expressed as "judgements". There is then a second set of points representing what "recent intelligence" was said to indicate. These include the 45 minutes claim, reflecting the weight given to it in the formal JIC assessment of the previous day.

But by the time of the 16 September draft, someone had made a simple presentational change to leave only one set of bullet points. Without a single exception, the points that had been expressed as "recent intelligence… indicates" had been transformed into "judgements". It appears that the spin doctors were responsible.

"Real Progress"

Another quite blatant case of sexing-up occurred when Alastair Campbell had added to the dossier a crucial statement that Saddam had made progress with his WMD programmes in spite of sanctions. The claim that the attempts to contain Iraq were not working and that renewed inspections - to which Saddam had just agreed - would not work was a key part of the case for war.

The consequences

The sexing-up of the dossier by the fabrication of judgements and the creation of certainty was about much, much more than semantics (see The language of the dossier). We now know that the case the dossier made for action to deprive Saddam of his non-existent WMD was part of a strategy aimed at providing justification for war. When UN weapons inspectors failed to find these weapons the UK and US governments continued to insist on war, partly on the basis of low level non-co-operation but primarily by arguing that Saddam’s refusal to admit to possession of the WMD that they "knew" he had was a breach of his obligations.

In March 2003 Blair asked Parliament for a vote in support of war and got this. Two days later, when US, UK and other "coalition" partners began a massive "shock and awe" bombardment of Iraq, Blair told Britain in a television broadcast that the aim of the war was "to disarm Iraq". He knew that he could never have taken the country to war had he put the case that was put to him – that Iraq probably had banned weapons. That is why he lied.

Of all of the inquiries that looked at the dossier, the one that came closest to concluding that it had been "sexed-up" was the Butler Review. But it was only by wrongly attributing "authorship" of the dossier to the JIC that Butler concluded that any flaws in the dossier were by definition not "sexing-up". It is now clear that the JIC was not the author of the dossier and did not "approve" it. It is now clear that the dossier was sexed-up.

Next: How the 45 minutes claim got in the dossier