[news] Butler Report on WMD was watered down to protect Blair

[Resist!ca]

Posted by-Mohammad Basirul Haq Sinha 
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By Melissa Kite and Patrick Hennessy Downing Street secured vital changes to 
the Butler Report before its publication, watering down an explicit criticism 
of Tony Blair and the way he made the case for war in the House of Commons. The 
Telegraph has established that the disagreement between No 10 and Lord Butler's 
inquiry team centred on a passage in an original draft of the report about Mr 
Blair's statement to MPs in September 2002. The original passage drew a much 
clearer contrast than the final version of the Butler Report between the strong 
case for war made by Mr Blair and the weakness of the intelligence the Prime 
Minister received about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The changes secured 
by No 10 diluted the criticism of Mr Blair and helped Downing Street to mount 
its main defence - that the report showed that the Prime Minister was acting in 
good faith. A member of Lord Butler's team has disclosed to The Telegraph that 
changes were made at the behest of No 10. However, the inquiry member also 
revealed that on the day he published his report, Lord Butler was preparing 
publicly to distance himself from Mr Blair if asked at his only press 
conference whether the PM should resign. "It was not his job to bring down the 
Government," the inquiry member said. "But he was not going to back Blair 
either." The deliberately equivocal answer Lord Butler had prepared - which in 
the end he did not have to deliver because the question was not asked - would 
have stood in conspicuous contrast to his explicit request in his report that 
John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, should not 
have to step down from his new post as head of MI6. The attempts by the inquiry 
to make stronger criticism of Mr Blair in their report were hampered during an 
exchange of views between Lord Butler and Downing Street that began some 10 
days before publication last Wednesday. Under the rules governing inquiries, 
any individual who has been criticised or fears he may be criticised has the 
right to be shown sections of the draft in advance with a view to giving a 
response. An inquiry member said: "This process was gone through. One or two 
things were changed. These were accepted by the committee." In the original 
draft a passage on page 114 contained stronger criticism of Mr Blair's Commons 
statement of September 24, 2002. The report as published stated, in one of very 
few direct references to Mr Blair's conduct: "The language in the dossier may 
have left with readers the impression that there was fuller and firmer 
intelligence behind the judgments than was the case: our view . . . is that 
judgments in the dossier went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the 
intelligence available. "The Prime Minister's description, in his statement to 
the House of Commons on the day of publication of the dossier, of the picture 
painted by the intelligence services in the dossier as 'extensive, detailed and 
authoritative', may have reinforced this impression." In the original draft 
this last sentence was much stronger, expressing the opinion that Mr Blair 
personally masterminded the misleading impression left by the dossier. The 
passage is important because Downing Street maintained last week that the 
report at no point questions Mr Blair's "good faith". According to a member of 
the inquiry, however, the Prime Minister should not be regarded as in the 
clear. "The whole thing points straight to the man in charge . . . absolutely 
to where responsibility belongs, which is the Prime Minister, which is what we 
could not say." The disclosures will put further pressure on Mr Blair following 
the revelation that the earlier Hutton inquiry was not told about the 
withdrawal of key intelligence which formed the basis for claims made by the 
dossier. Downing Street admitted that MI6 withdrew some elements of the 
intelligence supporting the Government's case for war because it was 
unreliable, but decided not to tell the Hutton inquiry. Mr Blair's spokesman 
said that the intelligence service felt the withdrawal was "too sensitive" to 
be made public at that point. He said the Prime Minister had not been told and 
only became aware of the withdrawn intelligence because of Lord Butler's 
inquiry. The disclosure is contained in the Butler Report with other nuggets of 
new information which are emerging piecemeal. Members of the Butler inquiry 
have privately expressed frustration that the early reaction to the report 
included allegations of "whitewash", but they believe the evidence contained in 
it is damning. A Downing Street spokesman said: "Lord Butler gave the final 
copy of the report to the Prime Minister on Tuesday last week. There is only 
one Butler Report." Yesterday Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign 
secretary, called on Mr Blair to resign because, he said, he had taken the 
country to war on a false premise.

URL: http://resist.ca/story/2004/7/20/8481/68962