Politics has been described as many things but in Britain currently a good summary is that it is the art of deceiving the public. Clare Short, after resigning her position as International Development Secretary, told a parliamentary inquiry of ‘a series of half-truths, exaggerations and reassurances that were not the case to get us into conflict [with Iraq] by the spring’ of 2003. This is, in my view, an understatement: all the evidence suggests that – at least over Iraq – the public has been subjected by the government to a campaign of managed deception.
‘Dark actors playing games’
In June 2003 it was revealed that the British government had for twelve years been promoting an operation designed to produce misleading intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Operation Rockingham had been established by the Defence Intelligence Staff in 1991 to provide information proving that Saddam had an ongoing WMD programme and quashing evidence that stockpiles had been destroyed or wound down.
According to Scott Ritter, a former chief UN weapons inspector, Operation Rockingham and MI6:
‘institutionalised a process of ‘cherry picking’ intelligence produced by the UN inspections in Iraq that skewed UK intelligence about Iraqi WMD towards a predordained outcome that was more in line with British government policy than it was reflective of ground truth’.
He added that ‘they had to sustain the allegation that Iraq had WMD [when] Unscom [the UN weapons inspectors] was showing the opposite’. This ‘intelligence’ was supplied to the Joint Intelligence Committee, the body that drew up the September 2002 dossier alleging Iraq’s ongoing WMD programmes.
One of the tactics used in the operation, according to Ritter, was leaking false information on weapons to inspectors and then when the search for them proved fruitless, using that as ‘proof’ of the weapons’ existence. He cited an example from 1993 when information led to inspections of a suspected ballistic-missile site; when the inspectors found nothing ‘our act of searching allowed the US and UK to say that the missiles existed’, he said. The government revealed in January 2004 that Operation Rockingham continued into 2002/3 with a budget of £79,000.
Another operation – called Mass Appeal – was revealed by the press in late 2003. This was launched in the late 1990s by MI6 and aimed to gain public support for sanctions and war against Iraq and involved planting stories in the media about Iraqi WMD. Scott Ritter was personally involved in this operation in 1997–1998 after being approached by MI6. He said that ‘the aim was to convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it actually was’, and that the operation involved the manipulation of intelligence material right up to the invasion of Iraq.
Poland, India and South Africa were initially chosen as targets for these media stories, with the intention that they would then feed back into Britain and the US. Ritter notes that ‘stories ran in the media about secret underground facilities in Iraq and ongoing [WMD] programmes. They were sourced to Western intelligence and all of them were garbage’. He also said that ‘they took this information and peddled it off to the media, internationally and domestically, allowing inaccurate intelligence data to appear on the front pages’.
US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh notes that the British propaganda programme was known to a few senior officials in Washington. ‘We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare’, he quotes a former Clinton administration official saying. A former US intelligence officer told him that at least one member of the UN inspections team who supported the US and British position arranged for dozens of unverified intelligence reports and tips to be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed to newspapers in London and elsewhere. The source said: ‘it was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world’. Hersh notes there was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6 at which documents were provided and quiet meetings were held in safe houses in the Washington area.
British propaganda campaigns on Iraq were established well before the new phase began in late 2002. In the run up to the invasion, the government established a Coalition Information Centre technically based in the Foreign Office Information Directorate but chaired by Alastair Campbell and run from Downing Street. Campbell also chaired another cross-Whitehall committee, the Iraq Communication Group. It was these organs that played a key part in controlling the campaign that misled the public about Iraq’s WMD and which oversaw the production of the dossiers.
In March 2004, the all-party House of Commons Defence Committee produced a report showing that ‘the Ministry of Defence began working on its media strategy [on Iraq] in September 2002 in consultation with the Americans’. This strategy plan ‘was an integral part of the overall military plan’ and was ‘coordinated across Whitehall with a daily interdepartmental media coordination meeting chaired by No. 10’. In all, some 200 additional press officers were deployed by the Ministry of Defence ‘to support the media campaign effort’.
The system of embedding journalists within the military in operations in Iraq – described by the Defence Secretary as ‘one of the more novel aspects of the media campaign’ – ‘helped secure public opinion in the UK’, the Defence Committee notes. It quotes the British land force commander, General Brims, stating that ‘from my point of view . . . none of them [the embedded journalists] let the side down’. Air Vice Marshall Torpy, the commander of the air force in the invasion of Iraq, said that his staff were ‘very satisfied with the coverage that they got’. The all-party Defence Committee entirely approves of these operations and recommends they should be significantly stepped up in future.
Media stories which may have been based on disinformation put out by British officials during the Iraq operation, included: a supposed ‘uprising’ in Basra; the death of Saddam; three giant cargo ships said to contain WMD (carried in the Independent); Saddam killing Iraq’s ‘missile chief’ to thwart the UN inspectors (carried in the Sunday Telegraph); ‘Saddam’s Thai gem spree hints at getaway plan’ (covered in the Sunday Times); and a story from ‘American and British war planners’ that Iraq was preparing a ‘scorched earth policy ahead of any US military attack’ to ‘engineer a devastating humanitarian crisis against his own people’ (carried in the Observer).
The propaganda campaign has continued into the occupation period. In November 2003 the Guardian revealed that the government was conducting a ‘media offensive’ with a code name of ‘Big October’ to convert the public to supporting the outcome of the Iraq war. Leaked documents showed that the Ministry of Defence had drawn up the strategy in September, a time when Britain and the US were facing increasing opposition; they stated that ‘information operations are seen as a tool to help keep the situation manageable’. One document specified that ‘the MoD’s main target is the UK public and media while [the main target] of the Basra headquarters for British troops is the Iraqi people’. The two main issues to stress through the British media were: ‘security in Iraq – try to push the perception that Iraq is becoming more secure’, and ‘utilities and reconstruction – try to demonstrate that services and utilities are as good if not better than before the war’.
Iraq was not perceived as a serious threat
Two myths widely conveyed in the mainstream media are, first, that there was simply a huge ‘failure of intelligence’ over Iraq and, second, that ministers acted in good faith in presenting to the public their view of the threat posed by Iraq, but simply got it wrong. These myths combine to let the government off the hook and protect the decision-making system.
When the Butler report was published, the Economist wrote an editorial about Bush and Blair entitled ‘sincere deceivers’. It noted that ‘in making the case for last year’s invasion of Iraq, they were honest about what they believed’. ‘Such salesmanship’ about the threat from Iraq ‘was understandable’ given ‘widespread scepticism about whether war was the right solution’. Similarly, a New Statesman editorial noted that Blair ‘got it wrong’, adding that ‘Mr Blair was almost certainly sincere when he said he was “in no doubt” that the threat from the Iraqi dictator was “serious and current”’. Blair therefore made a ‘catastrophic misjudgement’ and ‘failed to do his job’.
The reality is quite the opposite. It is clear from both the Hutton and Butler inquiries that the intelligence given to ministers was regularly vague and uncertain about an Iraqi threat. The Butler report notes that after the departure of the UN weapons inspectors in 1998, ‘information sources were sparse, particularly on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programmes’. ‘The number of primary human intelligence sources remained few’ while MI6 ‘did not generally have agents with first-hand, inside knowledge of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological or ballistic missile programmes. As a result, intelligence reports were mainly inferential’.
Joint Intelligence Committee reports were variously saying that intelligence on Iraqi WMD was ‘patchy’, ‘unclear’, ‘limited’ or ‘poor’ while noting that ‘there is very little intelligence’ and ‘our picture is limited’. A JIC report produced a few weeks before the release of the government’s September 2002 dossier stated that it ‘knew little about Iraq’s CBW [chemical biological weapons] work since late 1998’. In March 2003 the Joint Intelligence Committee provided an assessment stating, according to the government, that:
‘Intelligence on the timing of when Iraq might use CBW was inconsistent and that the intelligence on deployment was sparse. Intelligence indicating that chemical weapons remained disassembled and that Saddam had not yet ordered their assembly was highlighted’.
The JIC also pointed out that other intelligence suggested that Iraq’s 750km range ballistic missiles remained disassembled and that it would take ‘several days to assemble them once orders to do so had been issued’. The government also noted the ‘uncertainty of the assessments and the lack of detailed intelligence’ provided by the JIC.
In July 2003, the Ministry of Defence produced a report called Operations in Iraq: First Reflections, which noted that ‘very little was known about how [Iraqi forces] planned to oppose the coalition or whether they had the will to fight’. The regime might ‘possibly’ use WMD ‘if it could make the capabilities available for operational use’. This admission that very little was known of Iraqi capabilities, in tune with the JIC reports noted above, is in stark contrast to the certainties of the Iraq threat contained in the September 2002 dossier and elsewhere, presented to the public at the time.
According to former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Tony Blair probably knew two weeks before the war that Iraq had no functioning WMD. Cook recalls a briefing on 20 February 2003 from John Scarlett, the chairman of the JIC. Cook notes that:
‘When I put to him my conclusion that Saddam had no long range weapons of mass destruction but may have battlefield chemical weapons, he readily agreed. When I asked him why we believed Saddam would not use these weapons against our troops on the battlefield, he surprised me by claiming that, in order to evade detection by the UN inspectors, Saddam had taken apart the shells and dispersed them – with the result that it would be difficult to deploy them under attack. Not only did Saddam have no weapons of mass destruction in the real meaning of that phrase, neither did he have useable battlefield weapons’.
Cook states that he put these points to Blair on 5 March, noting that he ‘gave me the same reply as John Scarlett, that the battlefield weapons had been disassembled and stored separately. I was therefore mystified a year later to hear him say he had never understood that the intelligence agencies did not believe Saddam had long range weapons of mass destruction’. Indeed, Blair had already said, almost a year before, in May 2002, that ‘there is no doubt in my mind’ that Iraq had concealed its weapons and that it would be ‘far more difficult for them to reconstitute that material to use in a situation of conflict’.
Although the intelligence presented to ministers was vague and uncertain, the JIC still miraculously came to the conclusion that Iraq was likely to possess some forms of WMD – and it is this which has been interpreted as an intelligence ‘failure’. Yet the critical issue here is that, as the Butler report makes clear, Iraqi use of WMD was seen as a threat only in response to an invasion. The intelligence was telling ministers that Iraq was otherwise little or no threat.
A JIC report from September 2002 notes that ‘faced with the likelihood of military defeat and being removed from power, Saddam is unlikely to be deterred from using chemical and biological weapons by any diplomatic or military means’. It also noted that ‘the use of chemical and biological weapons prior to any military attack would boost support for US-led action and is unlikely’. Yet when this intelligence came to be inserted into the September 2002 dossier, it simply read: ‘It [the intelligence] shows that he does not regard them [WMD] only as weapons of last resort’. This raises a further issue for those who accept that ministers really did believe Iraq possessed WMD – that they were still prepared to authorise an invasion knowing that this was the most likely provocation for Iraq to use them.
After the invasion of Iraq, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told a parliamentary inquiry that before the war neither he nor Blair ‘had ever used the words “immediate or imminent” threat’ to describe Iraq, but that they had spoken of ‘a current and serious threat, which is very different’. Straw added: ‘Impending, soon to happen, as it were, about to happen today or tomorrow, we did not use that because plainly the evidence did not justify that’. In other words, we could have waited for weapons inspections, potentially avoiding the deaths of thousands of people.
One email which emerged from the Hutton inquiry well-reported at the time showed that Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, raised serious doubts about a draft of the September dossier:
‘The document does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam . . . we will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat’.
Powell also stated that the drafters ‘need to make it clear that Saddam could not attack at the moment. The thesis is he could be a threat to the UK in the future if we do not check him’. Yet a week later, Blair launched the document, together with a warning that Iraq could deploy WMD within 45 minutes of an order to do so.
The lack of a credible threat from Iraq was also outlined in a report from the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency, leaked to the media in June 2003. A summary obtained by CNN stated that ‘there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons or where Iraq has or will establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities’. This report was produced in September 2002, the same month as the British dossier.
Robin Cook has plausibly commented that many of the most stark assertions in the September 2002 dossier were not repeated in the debates in March on the eve of the invasion – by this time, there was no reference to weapons being ready in 45 minutes, to Iraq seeking to procure uranium from Niger or to a nuclear-weapons programme that had been reconstituted. His argument is that if the government had not already known in September 2002 that Iraq presented no real threat, it certainly did by March 2003, when it went to war.
It should also be said that the September 2002 dossier – the key public plank of the British government’s whole case against Iraq – provided no actual evidence of a threat from Iraq. The Guardian reported at the time that ‘British government officials have privately admitted that they do not have any “killer evidence” about weapons of mass destruction. If they had, they would have already passed it to the inspectors’. On the day before Blair announced that the dossier would soon be published, a Whitehall source was quoted as saying that the dossier was based on information found up to 1998, when the inspectors withdrew from Iraq, and that there was ‘very little new to put into it’.
Also worth remembering is that the September 2002 dossier was not the first produced by the government to prepare the country for military intervention. Before the bombing of Afghanistan, the government produced a report called ‘Responsibility for the terrorist atrocities in the United States, 11 September 2001’, making the case against al Qaeda. This includes various mentions of al Qaeda’s alleged ‘substantial exploitation of the illegal drugs trade from Afghanistan’. It also said that ‘in the spring of 1993 operatives of al Qaeda participated in the attack on US military personnel serving in Somalia’. These are false accusations that ended up in the pot, like many of the fabrications on Iraq.
Observer journalist Jason Burke comments in his book on al Qaeda that:
‘The British intelligence specialists must have known that the dossier they gave to the prime minister to reveal to parliament and the British public to justify involvement in a major conflict included demonstrably false material but felt the war in Afghanistan needed to be fought and the public needed to be convinced of it’.
The government’s media propaganda on Afghanistan continued well after the bombing phase and the collapse of the Taliban. In March 2002, for example, the Observer published a story under a headline ‘Story of find in Afghan cave “was made up” to justify sending marines’. The paper stated that:
‘Britain was accused last night of falsely claiming that Al Qaeda terrorists had built a ‘biological and chemical weapons’ laboratory in Afghanistan to justify the deployment of 1,700 Royal Marines to fight there. The allegation follows a Downing Street briefing by a senior official to newspapers on Friday which claimed US forces had discovered a biological weapons laboratory in a cave in eastern Afghanistan . . . The claim, carried by a number of newspapers yesterday, was denied emphatically last night by Pentagon and State Department sources’.
This precedent suggests that similarly false claims about Iraq were to be expected. That many journalists still played along shows the degree to which mainstream news reporting is characterised by wilful self-deception.
The case for going to war was fabricated
Amazingly, various parliamentary committees and the Hutton inquiry cleared the government of ‘sexing up’ intelligence. In the real world, all the evidence suggests that the case for going to war was not just ‘sexed up’ but consciously fabricated; it needed to be, given the understanding of the level of threat posed by Iraq. Blair’s cabal was so bent on promoting its perceived interests through invasion, that the result was a public deception strategy that sought to justify it. This shows how far removed from the national interest is that of the narrow policy-making elite.
Clare Short told a parliamentary inquiry that ‘the suggestion that there was the risk of chemical and biological weapons being weaponised and threatening us in the short term was spin. That didn’t come from the security services’. When asked whether she thought that ministers had exaggerated the use of intelligence material, she replied: ‘That is my suggestion, yes’. This was done in order ‘to make it [the threat] more immediate, more imminent, requiring urgent action’.
From the Hutton inquiry emerged various emails from Downing Street officials, described by the Guardian as ‘a frantic attempt to produce a dossier that will justify aggressive action against Saddam Hussein. Within the space of a fortnight and with almost no new evidence – other than the now infamous “45 minute warning” – Mr Blair’s aides turned British policy towards Iraq upside down’.
One Downing Street press official wrote that:
‘Much of the evidence we have is largely circumstantial so we need to convey to our readers that the cumulation of these facts demonstrates an intent on Saddam’s part – the more they can be led to this conclusion themselves rather than have to accept judgements from us, the better’.
He also wrote that ‘the more we advertise that unsupported assertions (eg Saddam attaches great importance to the possession of WMD) come from intelligence the better’. This should ‘add to the feeling that we are presenting real evidence’. A Downing Street press officer similarly wrote: ‘Can we show why we think he [Saddam] intends to use them [WMD] aggressively, rather than in self-defence?’ The Guardian also reported that Julian Miller, John Scarlett’s deputy, was having meetings with Downing Street media staff to ensure that everyone was ‘on the right track’.
In the material intended for public consumption, the government transformed possibilities about Iraqi capabilities into certainties and removed vital caveats. To give three examples in the process of drafting the September dossier:
- The dossier stated that Iraq ‘continued to produce chemical and biological weapons’. Yet the JIC ‘did not know what had been produced and in what quantities’, according to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.
- A draft of Blair’s foreword to the dossier read: ‘The case I make is not that Saddam could launch a nuclear attack on London or another part of the UK (he could not)’. This was omitted from the final document.
- An email from Jonathan Powell commenting on a draft of the dossier stated that the claim that Saddam would use chemical or biological weapons only if his regime was under threat posed ‘a bit of a problem’. So the passage was redrafted and all reference to Saddam’s defensive use of such weapons was taken out, leaving the impression that Britain was 45 minutes from attack.
Brian Jones, a former senior Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) official, stated that ‘the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier’ which resulted ‘in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq’s capabilities’. It is ‘the intelligence community leadership . . . that had the final say on the assessment presented in the dossier’, he noted. Jones told the Hutton inquiry that his staff had told him ‘that there was no evidence that significant production had taken place either of chemical warfare agent or chemical weapons’. But ‘the impression I had was . . . the shutters were coming down on this particular paper [i.e., the September dossier], that the discussion and the argument had been concluded’. An MoD civil servant similarly said that ‘the perception was that the dossier had been round the houses several times in order to try to find a form of words which would strengthen certain political objectives’.
The case against Iraq was indeed ‘sexed up’ both by No. 10 staff and some senior ‘intelligence’ officials. According to the Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor, John Scarlett was ‘hopelessly seduced by Blair’s coterie. Under Scarlett’s control, drafters of the dossier put things in at Downing Street’s suggestion. They also took things out’. Robin Cook noted that ‘John Scarlett was only too consciously aware that the Prime Minister expected him to come up with a justification for war’.
Alastair Campbell suggested more than a dozen separate changes to the draft dossier on Iraq; Scarlett responded by saying the language had been ‘tightened’. Crucially, Campbell suggested that the word ‘may’ was weak and be substituted for the word ‘are’ so that when the dossier was published the assertion was that Iraq possessed weapons that ‘are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them’.
Campbell also suggested another significant change to the dossier. The September 5th draft stated that after the lifting of sanctions ‘we assess that Iraq would need at least five years to produce a [nuclear] weapon. Progress would be much quicker if Iraq were able to buy fissile material’. In a memo on September 17th Campbell wrote to John Scarlett that the Prime Minister ‘like me, was worried about the way you have expressed the nuclear issue . . . Can we not go back, on timings, to “radiological device” in months; nuclear bomb in 1–2 years with help; 5 years with no sanctions’. The final document stated that: ‘Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon in between one and two years’.
