Carne Ross's blog, Dr. David Kelly, Iraq WMD, on the 10th anniversary

[deminks]

http://www.carneross.com/blog/2013/02/26/iraq-story-my-testimony

Iraq: the story of my testimony

02.26.13 | With the ten year anniversary of the war, I wanted to tell the story of the evidence I gave to the first official inquiry into the war, an event that led to my resignation from the British foreign servce.

The Butler Inquiry, as it was known, in 2004 invited testimonies from officials who had worked on Iraq before the 2003 invasion. I had been the UK's Iraq expert at the UN Security Council from 1998 to 2002, where I had negotiated resolutions on issues like sanctions and weapons inspections. I had been part of the small team of British officials working on Iraq for 4 1/2 years and had, for instance, taken part in all the official UK-US bilateral discussions on Iraq which covered the gamut of our joint Iraq policy.

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But after transmitting the testimony to the inquiry, I decided to resign. I felt that I could no longer work with ministers and officials whom I knew to have lied. This was the hardest decision of my life, but perhaps one of the best (the best was marrying K, whose support during this episode was the means of my very survival). Much on mind was the death of my colleague and friend David Kelly, the weapons scientist with whom I had worked closely on the WMD question, and who was driven to suicide by the disgraceful campaign of vilification by Blair's officials after he was revealed as the source of a BBC story that the Number Ten "dossier" alleging the threat from Iraq had been considerably exaggerated. David and I had run private briefings of Security Council diplomats on the intelligence picture on Iraqi WMD. He was the UK's foremost WMD expert with a unique ability to connect the dots of the complicated intelligence picture. He and I had both worked on the Number Ten dossier, and had both, separately, submitted concerns about its basis in the intelligence evidence. Indeed, his death was one of the reasons I resigned.

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But the political and public pressure for some kind of investigation eventually forced the government to establish such an inquiry, the Chilcot Inquiry. You can read my written testimony to Chilcot here, and indeed see me being questioned by the inquiry here. You will see a tribute to David Kelly at the beginning of my written evidence. Before I appeared before the inquiry, a very aggressive official warned me that if I mentioned David Kelly, the live press feed of my appearance would be cut off and I would be asked to leave. I will save my thoughts on the Chilcot inquiry, which has yet to publish its findings, for later.


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