A senior British official has directed the United Kingdom's Cabinet Office to declassify documents that might indicate a 2002 effort to play up now-disproven claims regarding prewar Iraq's WMD capabilities, the London Independent reported today (see GSN, Feb. 19).
Information Commissioner Richard Thomas has called on the office to disclose memorandums and e-mail messages that might contain "evidence that the [Iraq intelligence] dossier was deliberately manipulated in order to present an exaggerated case for military action" against the regime of Saddam Hussein.
In the days before the British government released its September 2002 public summary of Iraq's alleged WMD capabilities, a series of revisions to the document were requested by Alastair Campbell, spokesman for then-British Prime Minster Tony Blair.
The 11 known revisions included changing wording on how Iraq's biological weapons "could be used" to "are capable of being used" and replacing "may have" with "have" in reference to the power of Hussein's sons to order the deployment of chemical or biological agents in combat. Blair asserted in the outline that such weapons could have been put into use "within 45 minutes of an order" from Hussein.
"Having considered the information which was withheld by the Cabinet Office, the commissioner is not satisfied that all of the comments on the draft dossier constituted information which engages the section 24 exemption (relating to national security)," Campbell said in his order to release additional records.
"Specifically, he (the commissioner) does not consider that the comments arising from bodies other than the Defense Intelligence Staff, and some of the comments made by officials to the Defense Intelligence Staff relating solely to the drafting of the dossier, can be said to amount to information whose exemption is required for the purpose of safeguarding national security," he continued.
The Cabinet Office must release the requested information or appeal Campbell's decision within 35 days (James Macintyre, London Independent, Sept. 4).