Government ordered to disclose draft Iraq dossier

Andrew Sparrow
London Guardian
Thursday January 24, 2008

A Whitehall spin doctor may have played a greater role in the drafting of the famous dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction than the government admitted at the time, the Information Tribunal said today.
In a ruling on a freedom of information request relating to what is alleged to be the first draft of the dossier published in 2002, the tribunal said that the public should be allowed to read the document.

The tribunal made its ruling following a three-year campaign by a researcher who believes that the dossier will undermine the government's claims that the document was entirely drawn up by John Scarlett, the then-head of the joint intelligence committee, and not government spin doctors.

The dossier, which claimed Iraq could launch weapons on of mass destruction within 45 minutes, became the subject of huge controversy when the BBC reported that it had been "sexed up" by Downing Street.

Today's decision relates to an early version of the dossier written by John Williams, a former Daily Mirror journalist who at the time was head of press at the Foreign Office. The so-called "Williams draft" was mentioned during the Hutton inquiry but it was never published and at the time the Foreign Office claimed that it had little influence on the version that was eventually published.

The government always claimed that the dossier eventually published in September 2002 was the work of the joint intelligence committee and its chairman, Scarlett.

But Tony Blair was subsequently accused of "sexing up" the dossier to persuade the public to support the war against Iraq and at the time of the Hutton inquiry there was a fierce debate about the extent to which his spin doctors, and principally his press chief, Alastair Campbell, were involved in the wording of the document.

Willliams, who has now retired from the Foreign Office, apparently started writing his version on September 7 2002, four days after Blair had announced that a dossier on Iraq's WMD would be published.

Full article here.