Iraq Inquiry Digest

Monday, 30th November 2009

The Chilcot Inquiry is already proving a hundred times more interesting than anyone expected. My only worry is that people already view 2003 as ancient history. There is a tendency to think we already know what we only suspected. I was an agnostic on the intervention. I hoped in would work, but worried that it would be a disaster. I still think it is too early to tell whether it was.

What is certainly the case is that most British journalists failed to hold the government to account at the time. Even at the height of excitement about the Hutton Inquiry, much was missed by those being paid to cover the hearings. Enter Chris Ames, a one man research machine, who has proved by means of the Freedom of Information Act and an assiduous study of the documents, that the intelligence material was moulded by the press operation led by Alastair Campbell and the then head of the Foreign Office media operation John Williams. The findings can be studied at his Iraq Dossier website.

Chris Ames has now created a new website to monitor the Chilcot Inquiry which is fast becoming a must read for Iraq War trainspotters. The Iraq Inquiry Digest picks up where his previous masterwork left off. It puts the rest of us to shame.

Filed under: Alastair Campbell (21 more articles) , Chilcot Inquiry (44 more articles) , Foreign Office (30 more articles) , Foreign Policy (318 more articles) , Hutton Inquiry (1 more articles) , Iraq (159 more articles)

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jon dee

December 1st, 2009 4:59pm Report this comment

Wish I could share your optimism, though I agree that Chris Ames is a hero, but his fears expressed today are detailed and I fear, accurate.

Veiwing Manning and some of his fellow ex-mandarins gliding effortlessly through a benign comfort zone of cosy questioning and spoon-fed prompts is sad.

For some, protecting Blair et al and hence their own backsides is the name of the game. Almost encouraged to do so by a supine panel whose opaque and banal questioning complete with absence of supplementaries belies the mass of documentation at their disposal and the repetetive verbiage they are being fed by witnesses. Only occasionally is a witness stimulated to disagree or show disloyalty to the party line and even then they remain untouched, when further probing is clearly called for.

Unless there is a dramatic change in the days ahead, Chilcot will confirm our worst fears with another whitewash.

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