who had been on the Butler Inquiry into WMD Intelligence in the UK.
The report had this to say about that day:
The next key stage was a meeting on 23 July chaired by the Prime Minister with those
Ministers and officials primarily involved in UK policy formulation and military contingency
planning. This meeting considered, on the basis of a briefing from the Chairman of the JIC,
the current intelligence assessment of Iraq’s nuclear, biological, chemical and ballistic
missile programmes, noting that Iraqi capabilities were smaller in scale than those of other
states of concern. The meeting discussed the re-engagement of United Nations
inspectors, against the background of intelligence advice that the Iraqi regime would
allow inspectors into Iraq only when the threat of military action was thought to be real. It
also commissioned work on legal issues.
So they knew there was a meeting, but said hardly anything interesting about it (just that they thought Iraq had less WMD than other countries). So I asked him (he's the only member of the committee who is still an MP, so I reckoned he had to answer me):
The report of your committee does mention the meeting of 23rd July, 2002, in which the Prime Minister met with the Foreign Secretary, the head of SIS, and various others to discuss Iraq, and for which the memo written by Matthew Rycroft was recently leaked. However, your report makes no mention of the remarks that war was seen as inevitable, or that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy (which seems to be extremely relevant to the committee's purpose).
Did your committee see the actual memo, or did you just get a description of the meeting from one (or more) of the participants? If you did not see the memo, is there anything in it which would have changed the conclusions, either of yourself, or (in your opinion) of the committee as a whole?
which seems a reasonable question, since fixing the intelligence about WMD around the policy of regime change is obviously important for an investigation into WMD intelligence. This is the non-answer I got:
The Butler Review was about weapons of mass destruction and, although we saw various documents, we confined our report to matters related to wmd. The memo you mention was concerned with the political arguments and thus outside our remit. That is why no comment was made.
Pathetic, huh? He didn't even try to answer my question - he just said it's Someone Else's Problem. I'm wondering if it's worth writing to any of the other members to try to get a proper answer (they are all retired from public post, now, I think, so they don't have such an obligation to reply).
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