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WMD dossier may come back to haunt Govt.

I think so. Gilligan is quoted in the New Statesman article as saying 'this is a significant new link in the chain of evidence' or words to that effect.

The interesting thing is, as you can see from the questioning, that the lawyer is asking about Campbell's role, just as everybody else was at the time.

In the light of these allegations it almost seems like he and Blair are doing a little dance together around the question of the dossier of the 9th September that this FCO spin-doctor guy, this friend and colleague of Campbell's had written, and which the Hutton inquiry never saw and which the FCO has taken two years even to admit to the existence of.
 
Scarlett in his testimony does mention the Williams draft of the 9th, but he characterises it as a sort of freelance effort, outside the intelligence process.

Campbell's testimony seems to say that there was no such draft that he can recall (according to the NS article, I haven't read back over that bit of the Hutton evidence yet)

Blair keeps emphasising that the dossier had to come from the JIC to be seen as 'objective' and talks about a JIC assement of the 9th with the 45 minutes claim, but (let's not forget Blair is a lawyer too) keeps saying 'I believe' and 'as far as I recall' when he gets anywhere near to the matters implied by the points now raised by the New Statesman article.
 
Here's what the NS article says about the sequence of events.
On 3 September, the Prime Minister announced from his Sedgefield constituency that a public dossier would be presented to parliament when it was recalled on 24 September. The drafting of the dossier began immediately. In a parallel process, the JIC staff worked on its report assessing the possible WMD threat and on the dossier.

When the Joint Intelligence Committee met a day after Blair's speech, it asked its assessment staff to insert the 45-minute claim into its latest report but, crucially, the JIC staff decided not to include it in the dossier at this stage: the information was regarded as insufficiently conclusive. The question remains: who noticed the significance of the claim between 4 September and the 10th, at which point it made its first official appearance in the dossier?
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source
 
Bernie Gunther said:
Scarlett in his testimony does mention the Williams draft of the 9th, but he characterises it as a sort of freelance effort, outside the intelligence process.
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I think it will all depend on how similar the draft is to the final version.
 
Here's the bit of Campbell's testimony that it sounds like the NS is talking about. The preceding questions discuss the Iraq Communications Group (ie the spin team of which Williams was part) and Campbell's diary entries for the 5th (ie the day after the JIC assesment staff rejected the 45 minutes claim that the JIC wanted to put in.)
23 A. That it had to be revelatory; we needed to show it was
24 new and informative and part of a bigger case.
25 Q. Was anyone offering to help write it full time?

11
1 A. John Williams offered to write it full time.
2 Q. Did you accept that offer?
3 A. No.
4 Q. What was the reason for that?
5 A. The decision was taken, either at that meeting or
6 certainly by the 9th, that John Scarlett, I think if we
7 go on to the 9th, I mean he talked about -- he used the
8 word "ownership", that John Scarlett felt he ought to
9 have ownership of the dossier. And I emphasised, and
10 this was spelt out in the minute that I circulated
11 following these meetings --
12 Q. Which was on the 9th?
13 A. On the 9th.
14 Q. We will come to that.
15 A. I beg your pardon.
16 Q. You emphasised; you can make the point, please.
17 A. I emphasised that the credibility of this document
18 depended fundamentally upon it being the work of the
19 Joint Intelligence Committee; and that was the
20 touchstone of our approach right through this from that
21 moment. So John Williams was very kindly, not
22 criticising him at all, he was saying -- he is a very
23 experienced writer, he was offering to write it full
24 time. I made the point and John Scarlett made the point
25 that was not sensible, it should be written by

12
1 John Scarlett.
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source
 
TAE said:
I think it will all depend on how similar the draft is to the final version.
Click to expand...
I think the key is where the '45 minutes' claim comes in, according to the NS, the JIC assessment staff rejected that claim on the 4th, so how it had gotten back in by the Scarlett draft of the 10th is the question.

What both Blair and Campbell are emphasising is the importance of the document being seen to be 'owned' by Scarlett so they could present it as objective intelligence. From what Campbell is saying, it sounds like that decision was taken sometime no earlier than the 5th and either on or before the 9th.

By the 10th, it was 'owned' by Scarlett as head of the JIC. But back on the 4th his own assessment staff were rejecting the 45 minutes claim.

What I think the NS are suggesting is that it came back in via the Williams draft of the 9th, ie a draft by a spin-doctor which Jack Straw didn't release to the Hutton inquiry and which the FCO still won't release. The notion being that Scarlett didn't, as we and the various inquiries have been led to believe actually produce the substance of that draft, but rather took 'ownership' of it, effectively to give it the 'credibility' that Blair and Campbell are talking about, from the 10th onwards.
 
I was thinking of the "person on the street" 's reaction:

If we had another dodgy dossier scenario, like when large portions of the other document were from the internet, that would be quite something. If several paragraphs of the final document consisted of John Williams' words, that would completely undermine any notion of Scarlett's men being the authors of the document.
 
Here's the other bit of Campbell's testimony that I think the NS is referring to.
21 Q. You have obviously introduced yourself. We can see
22 a series of comments Daniel Pruce makes on "John's draft
23 of 9th September". Do you know what that was
24 a reference to? Was that a reference to John Williams's
25 document I showed you?
1 A. I do not know. I do know that I did not reply to this
2 or the e-mail exchanges that it generated; and I think
3 this is part of the office chatter that I referred to in
4 my note, to say comments on out of date documents are
5 irrelevant, people should wait for the new one.
6 LORD HUTTON: Well, who was the John there that is referred
7 to in that first line?
8 A. I do not know, my Lord. I do not know if that is
9 Williams or Scarlett. It could be -- I mean, that --
10 I am just reading through now to see. (Pause). That
11 looks like John Scarlett, I think.
12 MR DINGEMANS: You see, what we have, and I have been
13 through this process a number of times, is we have
14 a dossier on 20th June.
15 A. Yes.
16 Q. I think I have shown you that. Then we have one on
17 5th September. Then we go to the 10th/11th September.
18 We have not been given a copy of a dossier on
19 9th September. Do you recall whether or not at
20 9th September there was a dossier?
21 A. No, there was not. The first draft of the John Scarlett
22 dossier -- I beg your pardon, it is 9th September. It
23 was 10th September. I beg your pardon. That cannot
24 have been John Scarlett's then. This must have been
25 referring to something else that went to that meeting.
1 Q. You see, it talks as if it is referring to a dossier.
2 "On content.
3 "In general I think we should personalise the
4 dossier ..."
5 If you are talking about a draft of another
6 document, it is a slightly unusual comment to make.
7 A. All I know is the draft of the dossier that came to me
8 from John Scarlett came to me on September 10th.
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source

There's more that I haven't quoted, but it's essentially the same substance. Campbell is saying 'I don't know' and 'I don't recall' a lot when being asked about the memos referring to the spindoctor dossier of the 9th which neither Hutton nor the public has been allowed to see.
 
16
13 I offered John Scarlett, a member of my staff, if he
14 wanted it to help him write it. John Williams was
15 volunteering for the job; so was somebody else at the
16 Foreign Office. John Scarlett was absolutely clear the
17 word was "ownership", he wanted ownership of the dossier
18 and the best way to have that was to write it.
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That sounds like a claim that John Scarlett wrote the whole thing.
 
Alistair Campbell said:
18 Q: We have not been given a copy of a dossier on
19 9th September. Do you recall whether or not at
20 9th September there was a dossier?
21 A. No, there was not. The first draft of the John Scarlett
22 dossier -- I beg your pardon, it is 9th September. It
23 was 10th September. I beg your pardon. That cannot
24 have been John Scarlett's then. This must have been
25 referring to something else that went to that meeting.
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The sentence I emphasise looks a lot like a lie, followed by some confusion which might be genuine or might be cover for the lie.

Tony Blair said:
1 it had to be a document that was owned by the Joint
2 Intelligence Committee and the Chairman, John Scarlett.
3 That was obviously important because we could not
4 produce this as evidence that came from anything other
5 than an objective source.
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In retrospect, "ownership" looks as though it may have been designed to cover the exchange "are you prepared to adopt these words?" "Yes."

Bloody useful if you need to publish something by someone who can't write (for the intended audience). Not useful if you're making a case for war and if you know the military Chiefs of Staff are very, very unhappy about the legality of that case.
 
TAE said:
I was thinking of the "person on the street" 's reaction:

If we had another dodgy dossier scenario, like when large portions of the other document were from the internet, that would be quite something. If several paragraphs of the final document consisted of John Williams' words, that would completely undermine any notion of Scarlett's men being the authors of the document.
Click to expand...
I think if the New Statesman is on target, that perhaps the Scarlett draft of the 10th was some sort of re-write of the spin-doctor's draft of the 9th which the FCO still won't release.

The suspicion would be that after the JIC assessment staff (ie pros like Dr Kelly) rejected the stuff the spin guys wanted to use like the "45 minutes" claim, on September the 4th. This caused a big problem with legitimacy.

The spin guys, specifically John Williams, then wrote their own document, culminating in John Williams draft of the 9th which we're not allowed to see. By teatime the following day, John Scarlett has a suitably 'credible' draft document which everybody is happy to acknowledge and which contains the '45 minutes' claim again.

Thus the "John Spindoctor" document of the 9th has now magically become the credible "John Spook" document of the 10th according to this theory. The only problem is that there is an e-mail trail around the document of the 9th which Campbell spends a nervously amnesiac half an hour or so dodging questions about during the testimony I quoted and the pages immediately following it.

He gets away with it, according to this hypothesis, because a) he can conflate the two Johns as (luckily) no surname is given in the key e-mail and b) because nobody outside this charmed circle has actually seen the John Spindoctor dossier of the 9th to compare it with the John Spook dossier of the 10th.
 
TAE said:
That sounds like a claim that John Scarlett wrote the whole thing.
Click to expand...
It could be read that way, or it could be read as describing the ideal situation. It doesn't say for example 'the dossier was 100% a John Scarlett production and nobody else wrote a word of it' It just says that it ideally should have been and that he did at least some writing, turning down offers from the spin doctors to do the final cut (an offer Scarlett mentions in his own testimony in a way that at a stretch could be taken to be consistent with both readings)

If the hypothesis is correct, both Blair and Scarlett didn't actually tell lies to Hutton, they were just dancing around the truth, but Campbell apparently, at least on my reading of what the New Statesman is claiming, did deliberately give false evidence, assuming the Williams dossier is what they think it is and that he knew all about it. He's the only one who was directly questioned about the details.

Interestingly he's the one who resigned not long afterwards.
 
Bernie Gunther said:
It could be read that way, or it could be read as describing the ideal situation.
Click to expand...
I think it's a fairly straight forward explaination of why Scarlett wrote it and not Williams.

Bernie Gunther said:
It doesn't say for example 'the dossier was 100% a John Scarlett production and nobody else wrote a word of it'
Click to expand...
Actually, I'm quite sure that Blair had said that at some point.
 
TAE said:
<snip> Actually, I'm quite sure that Blair had said that at some point.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure about that. Which bit of his testimony do you have in mind?

I can see where he's explaining why (as Campbell and Scarlett also do) that it was important for Scarlett to 'own' it. It's interesting that they all seem to use the word 'own' in this context far more often than they use the word 'write'

I don't see him asserting that Scarlett produced the draft of the 10th all by himself, although I may have missed the relevant passage. I do see Campbell having a lot of trouble explaining the paper trail about the 'draft of the 9th' though.
 
Ah OK. I think I've found the bit you mean in Blair's testimony, key passage in bold.
19 Q. And you can see what you say at the top:
20 "... the idea that we authorised or made our
21 intelligence agencies invent some piece of evidence is
22 completely absurd ..."
23 A. Yes.
24 Q. Was that the main charge to which you were responding at
25 the time?

21
1 A. Yes, I mean, look, this was an absolutely fundamental
2 charge. It is one thing to say: we disagree with the
3 Government, you should not have gone to war. People can
4 have a disagreement about that. This was an allegation
5 that we had behaved in a way that were it true -- as
6 I say in my statement, tested in this way, had the
7 allegation been true, it would have merited my
8 resignation. It was not a small allegation, it was
9 absolutely fundamental. The next day in Poland
10 I thought we might have been able to deal with it on day
11 one just by saying: look, this is completely untrue.
12 Day two, when we were in Poland, I then asked --
13 I cannot remember exactly who and how it all came about,
14 but I said: look, you have to check this out. What is
15 more, you have to check it out with John Scarlett and
16 the JIC people that we can say definitively and
17 emphatically this is not the case. The dossier was the
18 work of the JIC and they were entirely happy with it.
19 I then made that emphasis at the press conference;
20 and I hoped then that the strength of denial might put
21 it to rest, but it did not. What really I think from
22 that moment on made the thing extremely difficult was
23 there was then a Mail on Sunday article by Mr Gilligan
24 that then named Alastair Campbell as the person who had
25 done this effectively. I cannot remember -- there was

22
1 some huge great headline.
2 Q. We have seen the article.
3 A. Yes. What that then did was -- you already have this
4 extraordinarily serious allegation which, if it were
5 true, would mean we had behaved in the most disgraceful
6 way and I would have to resign as Prime Minister.
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Sorry, I didn't mean in his testimony.

I remember him saying it on TV, very clearly stating that 'every word' was the work of JIC, perhaps at the press conference which he mentions in line 19.
 
The thing is, we already know that statement contains at least one barefaced lie or at least a culpable evasion.

The JIC assessment staff were not happy with it. John Scarlett might have been, and no doubt he's happy with his promotion to head of SIS also, but we know that the actual WMD experts weren't.
 
Here's David Kelly's boss, commenting at the end of the New Statesman article.
And Dr Brian Jones, former head of the branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff dealing with WMD added: "I made the point before it was published that the dossier was not supported by the intelligence. I was overruled. I have always found it hard to believe that the explanation for this was the incompetence of those in intelligence who approved the dossier. But if the government spinners were doing more than polish a final product, if they were driving the drafting to meet the policy requirement from the start, that might explain it."
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Yep. In which case I was wrong and Blair also lied to the Hutton inquiry as well as lying to everybody else, assuming that the New Statesman article is correct about the role of Williams' draft of the 9th.

He's skating very close to the a lie and by any reasonable assessment going right over the edge, when he claims the JIC was 'entirely happy' when we have overwhelming evidence that their assement staff was definitely not.
 
Well, he's pretty much saying the same things in his evidence to Hutton.

I think that means that if the New Statesman can prove their case, they've also nailed Blair for perjury as well as Campbell and possibly Scarlett.

Of course proving it requires getting hold of the Williams dossier of the 9th from the FCO.
 
I'm sure that many many very serious researchers will be going over all the given statements as we speak.
:)
 
As an aside to Dr Kelly's tragic death, I see from the article that those sold out fuckers from Spiked got in early providing a servicable smear job.
 
Bernie Gunther said:
sold out fuckers from Spiked
Click to expand...

Not sold out - they always were evil fuckers.

That Richard Webster seems friendly to them, though possibly only because they give good reviews to his books about paedophile panics - has he really not checked why they do so?

[/DERAIL]
 
Bernie Gunther said:
As an aside to Dr Kelly's tragic death, I see from the article that those sold out fuckers from Spiked got in early providing a servicable smear job.
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This one, condemning Hutton before he'd even started?

http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DEA9.htm

Point taken.

Webster's prediction in an associated article was on the button, though.

It may well be that the chosen judge will not actually perform this function in quite the way that the government of the day might hope. In setting up any such judicial inquiry a government is therefore almost always taking a calculated risk. It could be in this case that Lord Hutton will confound the doubters and produce a report which is not only robust and penetrating but which actually brings about the downfall of the government which commissioned it. All that can be said in this regard is that, were he to do so, he would also confound the entire history of the inquiry system.
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http://www.richardwebster.net/print/xdavidkellyaffair.htm
 
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