Q63, Chairman: Can I say first, my apologies for the short delay in starting. There is a lot of ground to cover and we hope that you will be able to help the Committee in our inquiry on the decision to go to war in Iraq. You have been quite trenchant in your criticism since, I notice, for example, the conclusion of your article to the New Statesman on 9 June where you say in terms, "My conclusion is that our Prime Minister deceived us". Do you still labour under that sense of deception?

Clare Short: I am afraid I do very sadly and I think it is a series of half-truths, exaggerations and reassurances that were not the case to get us into conflict by the spring and I think that commitment had been made by the previous summer. I think nothing else explains the failure to allow Blix to complete his process and the way in which certainly I personally was deceived and I think the country was deceived about what the French decision was, the claim that the French said, "No second Resolution of any kind", when it is absolutely clear now that President Chirac said, "Blix must be given enough time to complete his inspection process, but if disarmament is not achieved through the Blix process, then the matter will have to come back to the Security Council", and then war would be inevitable.

Q64, Chairman: I am sure colleagues will take up some of those other points, but you mentioned that the decision had been made in the summer. That is the decision between the Prime Minister and the President on going to war?

Clare Short: Yes. The reason I say that is that three extremely senior people in the Whitehall system, whom I will not name, said that to me very clearly and specifically, that the target date was mid-February and later extended to March because of a difficulty with the Turks and so on and to give our Prime Minister a little more time, but at that time we were being assured, and I personally was being assured by the Prime Minister, that we were committed to a second Resolution.

Q65, Chairman: So you think that come what may, following that decision in the summer, war would inevitably have followed?

Clare Short: I think short of Saddam Hussein coming out with his hands up or going to Saudi Arabia or something, they were committed to war. The question is and everyone must ask themselves this question: why Blix achieved to get 64 ballistic missiles out of some, say, 70 dismantled? That was a considerable amount of disarmament and yet his process was truncated, so he was succeeding, yet he was not given the time he asked for and the question is why. Now, we were told that you have to threaten war in order to avoid war and I accepted that. That is how we got Resolution 1441. Therefore, you have to deploy some troops to threaten war and then we are told that the troops cannot sit in the desert because they have been deployed and we have to go to conflict, and the Blix process was truncated. Why were we all working to a target date which did not permit enough time for the Blix process to be completed?

Q66, Chairman: Well, I am not totally following you. Let's say, for example, after 1441, which gives "a final opportunity", without which there would have been serious consequences, if Saddam Hussein had recognised that this was indeed the final opportunity, the troops were massing at his frontier, if he had then published a dossier on 8 December which was followed and he had co-operated with Blix, do you think the coalition would still have gone to war?

Clare Short: When 1441 was passed, because of course that was a resolution that was put together in the normal way that takes place in New York with a long process of negotiation and amendment so you get buy-in and you build consensus and indeed get unanimity, we and others assured the Security Council, because there was some dispute and the French wanted to make sure that the matter would have to come back to the Security Council if there was to be an authorisation of military action, and verbal assurances were given that the matter would have to come back to the Security Council, and then Blix achieved considerable disarmament and made it clear himself that he needed more time. After all, it was not until November that it was passed and you have to get the weapons inspectors into Iraq and get them there with all their equipment, and there was the question of sharing intelligence. I was seeing our intelligence agencies at that time and they were saying that the scientists' records and laboratory equipment and so on were hidden and being hidden across the country and they knew where it was, and I was arguing with them, "Why don't we give the information to Blix then and facilitate Blix going to the houses where things are hidden?", so there was not very much time between 1441 being passed, Blix getting in, getting started and getting going. If you remember, he complained that he was not getting much help with intelligence information and that the UK was more helpful. Then he was making progress in achieving a destruction of ballistic missiles and he made it clear that he needed more time and then suddenly the Resolution or the draft saying that 1441 had not been fulfilled was tabled and the whole process was brought to an end. We were misled about the French position and everything was blamed on the French, but I happened to talk to Kofi Annan on the telephone around that time about the situation in the Congo and he said, "It is absolutely clear that the majority of the Security Council think that Blix needs more time". Now, this is a very serious matter and I understand how serious a matter it is, but I am afraid, I am very sorry that this is my conclusion.

Chairman: We hear that.

Q67, Mr Hamilton: Clare, to what extent were you aware of the threat posed by Iraq prior to the events of 11 September 2001?

Clare Short: I have been very troubled by sanctions and the suffering of the people of Iraq for a very long time and certainly since I took office in the Government in 1997, and we have attempted to improve the humanitarian programmes and the effectiveness of UN actions and to get some relief in the way in which sanctions worked, so I have been absolutely clear that the situation was unsatisfactory. I do not believe it could have just been left and I did not believe in containment both because Saddam Hussein was defying the UN, but also because the people of Iraq were suffering so badly.

Q68, Mr Hamilton: Did you believe that there was a threat to British interests posed by Iraq prior to 11 September 2001?

Clare Short: No, I did not believe that. I believed that the people of Iraq were suffering badly and that Saddam Hussein was in defiance of the UN over the question of working to try to achieve chemical and biological weapons. I believed and I still believe that he did try nuclear, but the previous inspection regime dismantled that, so I still do not think he was an imminent threat. I think that is where one of the exaggerations came, but I think he was, and I believe still, that he was committed to having laboratories and scientists and doing work and trying to develop chemical and biological weapons, and we know that he had ballistic missiles of a range beyond that permitted in the Security Council Resolution. My view was that the problem needed attending to, but that there was not an imminent threat and, therefore, we should do it right. The new urgency which came into the US was because of September 11, and this false suggestion that there was any link to al-Qaeda is another of the falsities to try to get an urgency for that, so I think the right way would have been to say, "We are going to attend to this and we are going to attend to the Middle East". The Road Map had already been negotiated, so we should have started off with publishing that and started implementation and showing a commitment to move to justice in the Middle East and then we should have turned to Iraq, trying to keep the support of Arab governments, and we should have tried for disarmament and we could have even had the UN authorised military action to support the inspectors, it seems to me. We should have tried indicting Saddam Hussein and we should have lifted sanctions. If you take the Kosovo parallel, and I was one who believed that we should have acted on Milosevic earlier with all the ethnic cleansing from Bosnia and so on, but it was absolutely right to act and the Kosovars being pushed out of their country was reversed and then the military action stopped, but he was indicted and other action was taken and we got him to The Hague without a full-scale invasion of Serbia. I hope that is not too long an answer, but the point is that I was very aware of it. My deepest concern was the suffering of the people of Iraq and the anger that was causing in the Middle East and I think it should have been attended to, but we had time to attend to it right. Let me make it clear that from the beginning of this crisis, and indeed before, I have always thought that we had to be willing to use military force to back up the authority of the UN, so I was not saying, "No military force at all at any price", but I was saying that we should avoid it if at all possible and that is the teaching on the just wall and you have to make sure that there is no other way, and we should have tried that. I thought for a long time in this crisis that the UK was playing the role of trying to restrain the US and trying to examine all other means, and I now think that we were not and that we pre-committed.

Q69, Mr Hamilton: Well, that leads me to a second question. Throughout 2002 there was a renewed focus on Iraq being discussed in the media. How often was it discussed in the Cabinet and how far do you think that the renewed focus on Iraq was being pressed by Washington?

Clare Short: Well, I am certain it was being pressed by Washington, and I presume you will get the clerks to go back over the media story because it kept breaking into our media and we kept getting an echo of the arguments in Washington from our Prime Minister and our Foreign Secretary. I know that I asked. Occasionally pre-Cabinet you are asked if you want to raise anything, not every week, some weeks, interestingly, and I asked to raise certain situations in Africa departmentally and then personally Iraq in September time and the Prime Minister at that time said that he did not want it raised in the Cabinet and he would see me personally. I saw him when I was in Mozambique. We went to Mozambique before we went to the World Conference on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and that dates it in my mind. The Prime Minister came back from that trip and, if you remember, in one of his press conferences that he did from his constituency, if you check the press reports, he was quite belligerent, and he had been to the US just before that. In his Guardian book, which I do not know if any of you have seen, which was clearly written, the part in the run-up to the war, with collaboration from the Prime Minister's entourage, close entourage, because it was only the close entourage which were really part of this or part of the detailed day-to-day, week-to-week activity, it says very clearly that by September 9 they were both committed to military action, if you just examine the record in the book.

Q70, Mr Hamilton: So you think that by September 9 war became inevitable and that was the date?

Clare Short: I think the Prime Minister had said to President Bush, "We will be with you", and he had not laid down the conditions that were needed to bring Britain's influence to bear to temper the position of the US and to try and keep the unity of the international community and the Security Council. I think he had committed us and he did not say, "We will be with you on a series of conditions", trying to operate through the UN and so on. Then I think that is why he lost weight on the rest, that he had given policies in Washington and there was a feeling in Britain, in the Cabinet, in Parliament, in the Party and the country that he gave the assurances on the second Resolution and the two were rather contradictory and it conflated over truncating the Blix process and then the big fig-leaf became, "Blame France" and misleading us about France's position to get through that crisis of contradictory policies.

Q71, Mr Hamilton: Finally, if I can just add this, what did you believe were the real reasons for the war in Iraq?

Clare Short: I think if you read, and I have since, some of the publications of the Republican, neo-conservatives, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney and some of the others, they were writing from 1997 on, or that is the earliest material I have read, and there was some sensitivity about this, that there had been a failure to complete the first Gulf War and leave Saddam Hussein in Iraq and that action had to be taken. Now, I understand that, it was an evil regime and it was in defiance of the UN, but they were very committed to it. Then if you read the Bob Woodward book, Bush at War, I think it is called, that was written with full White House co-operation and it is about the run-up to Afghanistan, and you have got Rumsfeld arguing straight after September 11 that we have to go for Iraq and, as we all know, there was no link to al-Qaeda. Yes, it was an unresolved crisis, but they were not politically committed. In the Guardian book, you have got President Bush saying, and he is saying this in September 2002, "A year ago I was discussing with my officials the possibility of dealing with Saddam Hussein by tightened sanctions and more containment, but now everything has changed and it has to be war".

Q72, Mr Chidgey: Can I take you back to some of the opening remarks that you made, particularly in connection with the step change in policy within the Cabinet of moving to war. I want to look at the intelligence perspective of this and the influence that had on you and the Cabinet in coming to that conclusion. I think everyone would agree that intelligence is an inexact art, let alone a science. Can you tell us what intelligence assessments were made of what was happening inside the Saddam regime? Were you presented with a range of options, best-case, worst-case scenarios, explanations of what was happening in Iraq, or did it just come to you as a focused, "This is what is happening, this is the way forward and this is what we should be doing"?

Clare Short: Well, the first thing you should know is that the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee never met. There was never a paper. There was never an analysis of options and there was never an analysis on paper before any Cabinet committee or any meeting and it was all done only verbally. That is quite a collapse of normal British procedures for decision-making and I think some of the poor quality goes with the collapse in the proper decision-making processes, I really do, and I think that these are extremely serious matters for our government system. I think if there had been papers and analysis, we probably would have got ----

Q73, Mr Chidgey: Well, if I can lead you on, and I think actually you have answered the question, but I will just ask it: do you feel the Government's policies on Iraq in the period leading up to the war were soundly based on good intelligence?

Clare Short: Well, let me just say a word about intelligence because most members of the Cabinet do not see the raw intelligence, the day-to-day bits that come through, the reports from individuals or telephone notes.

Q74, Mr Chidgey: But you did see it?

Clare Short: I did see it all for months because I saw it over Africa, Nepal, Pakistan and so on and, therefore, I normally dealt with that kind of material. Of course the raw intelligence is just droplets of information and I think someone once said that it is like cornflakes. It is bits and pieces and it did not say anything devastatingly clear. It does not. It says, "Scientists from the regime say yes, the experiments are going on", and that type of thing, and then the Joint Intelligence Committee every so often pulls it together and makes an assessment. Could I say to the Committee that I think you should press to see the material. The reason for secrecy is to protect sources in Iraq. The whole situation in Iraq has changed and I think most of the material you could now safely see in terms of there is no one who would be threatened by your seeing it given all the changes. I did ask, and this is relevant, defence intelligence for an assessment because I knew they must be making an assessment in terms of the threat to our troops, the chemical suits and what kind of drugs they had to take and so on, and obviously my responsibility was thinking about the people of Iraq, so if there was a risk of chemical and biological weapons being used so that our troops had to be protected, what about Iraqi civilians, so I was asking for the best possible assessment that defence intelligence could make, and all the other stuff was coming from SIS, of that risk. A paper was prepared, saying, and I am speaking from memory of course, that there is a risk, and it was thought not to be very high, but it was definitely there, which I thought was a very serious matter. Then I had a number of individual briefings from SIS which the Prime Minister authorised partly because I was so troubled by the whole process and he was trying to keep me inside the tent at that stage. The view that was taken by the person that briefed me after Blix started his inspection was that the scientists, their work and whatever they had was being hidden and the risks of use were less. That is my summary.

Q75, Mr Chidgey: That is very helpful. If I can stick on that point, one of the issues which certainly troubles me from the evidence we have taken over a long period of time on this issue is the difficulty of actually locating and finding stocks of chemical weapons, particularly anthrax, of less than 1,000 litres, impossible to find. I have been wanting to try to find out whether the Government was actually briefed on this particular issue of how difficult it was to find these weapons and, therefore, it was clearly very difficult to remove the threat and whether then the policy formulation process moved on so that the only way to remove the threat is in fact to remove the perpetrator of the action and, therefore, the regime. Was that part of the step change or not?

Clare Short: No, it was not like that. The first proper open discussion was in October some time when members of the Cabinet just gave their opinions about the whole situation in the Middle East. After that, most weeks there was a discussion and indeed I often instigated it, but it was what I call "guided discussion". It was, "So what's the latest?" and by then there was a compliant atmosphere in the Cabinet and it was clearer and clearer where things were going and there was a kind of loyalty, so it was arranged at one point that small groupings of the Cabinet would go for briefings with the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and we went in groups of two or three. I think for most members of the Committee, but you would have to check with them, they did not see even the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments, all of them.

Q76, Mr Chidgey: So you were never advised from the intelligence reports that it was impossible for them to give you an assessment which told you that the Government could successfully remove or could not successfully remove the threat from chemical and biological weapons through the inspections process?

Clare Short: There was never a discussion in Cabinet at that kind of level of detail.

Q77, Mr Illsley: You have just covered some of the issues that I want to raise actually, but I will try and press you a little bit more on this. In particular, you have just told us that you saw Joint Intelligence Committee reports, the raw intelligence material and the assessments because you asked for them, particularly in relation to Africa.

Clare Short: Well, I had a relationship with that material and I saw it regularly. I made a point of seeing everything on Iraq.

Q78, Mr Illsley: So you actually saw the assessments. You have also said there that you were putting in comments along the lines of, "Why aren't they putting this to Blix to tell him where to go?", so was anybody taking any notice of that? Were your comments accepted?

Clare Short: Well, this is why I reached this sad judgment that I reached. I also saw the Prime Minister personally quite frequently and this question of when Blix asked for more help, if you remember, and again I am speaking from memory, but I am sure this is a matter of record in the media at that time, Blix asked for more help with the intelligence, and the UK said, "Yes, we're going to give him more intelligence", and I know I had a personal briefing from SIS at that time. They told me that the UK had got better intelligence than the US because of our links into Iraq and that there were brave Iraqi scientists and so on who were giving us information and we knew about books, records and equipment being moved to people's houses. I tell you this because it is an important exchange. I said to him, "Well, in that case, let's give Blix the information. Let's give him the helicopters or whatever he needs. Let's get that house raided. Let's go there, let's fund it", and I had that conversation with the Prime Minister also, and he said, "Yes, yes", but it did not happen, did it?

Q79, Mr Illsley: Do you think they were stopped from giving that information to Blix?

Clare Short: I think it is a matter of record that Blix said, but again I am speaking from memory, that in one of his reporting sessions to the Security Council he had started to have more co-operation from the UK, but still not from the US. Again I am speaking from memory, but he has said more recently that it all led nowhere and they chased it and there was nothing there when they got there.

Q80, Mr Illsley: The quality of intelligence was not good enough when Blix acted on it, when he had been given it. You just mentioned earlier that Cabinet members were allowed to go in twos and threes to joint briefings from the intelligence staff.

Clare Short: That is from the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee who is a former member of the security service and then he takes on a different role when he assesses the raw intelligence in order to make reports.

Q81, Mr Illsley: Just before, you said that the PM authorised you to see this intelligence, so was the Prime Minister or Ten Downing Street controlling exactly what members of the Cabinet could see or could be briefed on?

Clare Short: Earlier on, after September/October, I asked to see SIS, which I often did over Africa or different situations in the world, so I knew them quite well and I often asked to see them or whoever the expert was for a briefing on Iraq, and they came back and said, "No, Number Ten says no", and I made a fuss and it had to go to the Prime Minister individually and then I did see them. Then I saw them throughout, myself, when I asked, as well as seeing the material, but I think there are a lot of ministers who do not deal with intelligence material because they are in domestic departments or whatever and would not be in that relationship, and I presume they did not see it, and Defence and Overseas Policy, where normally the senior figures in the Cabinet come together, was not meeting, never met, never had any papers before it, so there was this one occasion when it was suggested by the Prime Minister at Cabinet that Cabinet members should be given a briefing by the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee and that happened, so people went in twos and threes and had an hour or so and he gave his assessment of where things were.

Q82, Mr Illsley: In that sort of control of access by Number Ten, but of you in particular because you knew the system and the individuals, do you think that was coming from the Prime Minister himself or from his advisers?

Clare Short: Unquestionably coming from the Prime Minister himself and when I pressed Sir David Manning, he made it clear that he had to ask the Prime Minister to get me permission to see the security services over Iraq in the same way when I saw them normally over other situations in the world.

Q83, Sir John Stanley: Were you suggesting to the Committee a moment ago that there was some deliberate policy by the US and the UK Government not to co-operate fully with Mr Blix's inspectors?

Clare Short: I think that they wanted to make an effort through the UN for the sake of international public opinion and probably United States' public opinion, so they wanted 1441 and, therefore, wanted the return of weapons inspectors. Well, you can remember the dissident voices, and I think Vice President Cheney said publicly that he did not want weapons inspectors, so there were different views in the Administration and you will know that the US Administration does have different views always and it is usually quite a fractured system, and particularly so through the state departments and the Pentagon through the early stages of this crisis. Certainly President Bush and our Prime Minister wanted 1441, wanted the weapons inspectors back in, but then I think in the US they were worried about getting entangled in the weapons inspection process and it taking longer than they would have liked, maybe trapping them into that way forward, and there was some of this briefing against Blix which again was in the media and I see he is talked about publicly. So I think they wanted to try through the UN, but they did not want to get entangled in the UN and they wanted to be free to act, having tried the UN, when they wanted to act.

Q84, Sir John Stanley: So are you saying that there was a policy of only giving partial assistance to Mr Blix and thereby ensuring that perhaps weapons of mass destruction were not found as rapidly as might be the case, assuming they are still there, in order to keep the military option open?

Clare Short: Well, my understanding is, and I think Blix asked for more help publicly in one of his sessions at the Security Council, that the UK determined to give him more help and I think it is a matter of record him saying that the US were less helpful, but it is a fractured Administration. You cannot assume coherence in that decision like a conspiracy to make Blix fail. You have got different parts of the US Administration, some of them never wanting to go back to the Security Council and never wanting Blix in anyway, so this controlling the decision not to give him full help on the intelligence, I do not know.

Q85, Sir John Stanley: You have made the, to my mind, extraordinary statement that the Defence and Overseas Policy Sub-Committee of the Cabinet never met on Iraq.

Clare Short: Never met.

Andrew Mackinlay: At all.

Q86, Sir John Stanley: That is exactly what Ms Short said.

Clare Short: It is a long time since it has met.

Q87, Sir John Stanley: Did you make a formal or informal request to the Prime Minister that that very, very important Cabinet sub-committee should meet?

Clare Short: No, I did not. The way I pursued matters was both by bringing everything up in Cabinet, reading all the intelligence, seeing and getting regular briefings from SIS and seeing the Prime Minister quite frequently myself individually. I was working absolutely on the assumption that the UK could see its role as being to use our relationship with the US to try and keep the US with the UN and with the international community if we could possibly do it, and I operated in the way that I have described, and I think I was working on a false premise, but that is what I decided to do. This is happening actually in our government system, a breakdown of normal decision-making procedures and decision-making getting very individualised in Number Ten, and that is happening in general.

Q88, Sir John Stanley: You have made two references to areas where you thought the intelligence picture was exaggerated in the sense that the threat was exaggerated, and you referred to the issue of imminence and you referred also to links with al-Qaeda. Were there any other areas where you believed the intelligence position was exaggerated?

Clare Short: No. I think our intelligence service absolutely believed, as I do, that Saddam Hussein was going on with the science and going on with trying to get chemical and biological weapons. They were absolutely clear that he was a long way from nuclear, that he did not have any capacity and it would take years, though he had tried it before. The conversations of their briefing and the conversations with them were like that, but I think it is this phrase "weapons of mass destruction", when that is used, people think of bombs full of chemical and biological weapons that are going to rain down out of the sky and drop on people or whatever. They did not think of scientists in laboratories doing experiments, and I think that is where the falsity lies. Yes, he was dedicated to having scientists doing the work to try and create chemical and biological capacity, but the suggestion made to the public was that it was all weaponised and could be used imminently and was a dangerous threat to us and other neighbouring countries, and I think there was talk of Cyprus being reachable and so on.

Q89, Sir John Stanley: So you are suggesting that it was the use of the intelligence material by members of the Government and politicians which was responsible for the exaggeration?

Clare Short: That is my suggestion, yes.

Q90, Chairman: Was there any complaint at the time that you met the JIC and the DIS people that their raw material was going to be misused by the Government?

Clare Short: They never said that to me, but we discussed the desirability of the second Resolution, which they thought highly desirable. My understanding of their judgment was that this should not be left, but that we should try and keep the world together. I have read the media, as have you, and my own reading of the analysis is that when there were no WMD found, and now so much information you get through off-the-record briefings to the press, it started to be suggested that maybe the intelligence was defective and that made the intelligence community so angry that they started to brief about the way in which their material had been exaggerated politically. That is my reading of it.

Q91, Mr Hamilton: Clare, can I move on to the September dossier which I think on 3 December the Prime Minister announced would be published with the Government's assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability. Can I ask you whether you saw any related papers to that dossier before it was published in September?

Clare Short: Well, I just said that I saw the raw intelligence as it comes in, which is telephone reports and reports of conversations with individuals, and it does not say who they are, but it says, "a reliable source" or "a new source", but that kind of material all the time, and then the dossier, or I saw all the Joint Intelligence Committee reports and then the dossier which was threatened once, then held back and then it came again. I have to say that there were three dossiers, were there not, and they were all pretty shoddy pieces of work, even the human rights one. There is no doubt that even the human rights piece was very old material, a lot of it preceding the first Gulf War, so I am afraid I was not surprised that it was not a kind of forensic, highly accurate document because I think that is the house style.

Q92, Mr Hamilton: Do you recall how much of the information which was included in the September dossier came through shared intelligence arrangements with other countries? Were you ever told?

Clare Short: No. My understanding is that we share with the US, but I have been informed that our intelligence is better. I understand that we share with France and theirs is good and that was uninterrupted right through the crisis, funnily enough, or that is my understanding, or France shares with us.

Q93, Mr Hamilton: That is interesting. I do not think I have heard that before. Can I ask you whether it was an accurate reflection of Iraq's threat at the time or was it, how shall I put it, exaggerated?

Clare Short: I have not reread it, so now this is quite a long time, but my sense is that lots of it was accurate and the exaggeration and the suggestion of immediate threat and the suggestion, which is not in the dossier, but was made in press briefings and maybe in the House of the potential link to al-Qaeda, that is where the falsity lay. Of course when you see the picture of what happened, the exaggeration of immediacy means you cannot do things properly and action has to be urgent.

Q94, Mr Hamilton: So you think there was a deliberate attempt to emphasise certain aspects of the intelligence to make the threat more credible, real and immediate?

Clare Short: To make it more immediate, more imminent, requiring urgent action, yes.

Q95, Mr Hamilton: Did you try and oppose that in any way in Cabinet? Did you try and challenge it?

Clare Short: I think I was seen as pretty awkward throughout. I raised the question of Iraq repeatedly in the Cabinet and kept questioning, but you cannot fire on all sides on all issues all the time. I was still dedicated to the second Resolution as the way of restraint and, therefore, I did not fight harder over the dossier.

Mr Hamilton: I cannot believe you would have been awkward, Clare.

Q96, Mr Maples: I wonder if we can just pursue this question of the dossier. What was, as far as you are aware, the process by which the September dossier, the weapons of mass destruction one, was produced? Did a draft come to the Cabinet? Were you involved in the raft of comments in the process of it being drafted since you were seeing the Chief of Staff?

Clare Short: No, a draft did not come and I did not comment on a draft. Again speaking from memory, there was talk of a dossier earlier, the publication of intelligence material, and then I think that went quiet for a bit and then it was brought back. Alastair Campbell and co. were involved, so I left it to them. That is not my speciality, that side of things.

Q97, Mr Maples: I was going to ask you about that because when you said that the Prime Minister's close entourage was involved, you were including the Head of Government Information Service in that category ----

Clare Short: Well, Alastair Campbell individually, Jonathan Powell, Baroness Morgan, Sir David Manning, that close entourage.

Q98, Mr Maples: And what do you know of their involvement in producing this dossier? Do you think they were involved in that?

Clare Short: I do not know in any direct way. That was the team, they were the ones who moved together all the time. They attended the daily 'War Cabinet'. That was the in group, that was the group that was in charge of policy.

Q99, Mr Maples: Campbell, Manning, Morgan, and you mentioned somebody else.

Clare Short: Jonathan Powell.

Q100, Mr Maples: You also said in relation actually to all of the dossiers that you think they were a bit shoddy, but then you said that that did not surprise you because it was the house style.

Clare Short: Well, that is a bit harsh, is it not, but I think I mean it. I am really shocked by the way these decisions were made. This is of such profound importance to human rights, to the record of our country that I think one has to go to a sort of higher level of commitment to truth and accuracy and proper decision-making, and we should do it all the time, but particularly in a question like this when you are going to war and when people lose their lives and the future of a country is at stake, but things were not decided properly. There were no records, no papers, in the Prime Minister's study all informal, this small in group of people and obviously Alastair Campbell is responsible for the presentation of government policy, and that soon becomes propaganda and there is a place for that. Once proper decisions have been made, then the Government should put forward what it is trying to do as well as it can and communicate to the public, but the two often conflate and they were conflated there.

Q101, Mr Maples: One of the allegations about this document is that into the foreword had been pulled two or three of the bits which might scare people more than others, one of which of course was the 45 minutes allegation. Are these the sort of things that you think that that inner group would decide on?

Clare Short: I do not know about the writing of the foreword, but in every government publication that I have been involved in when I have written a foreword, I do my own foreword, and that is the nature of it. With four ministers who take personal responsibility for what they do, you would expect that to be very personal in a document of that kind.

Q102, Mr Maples: But you do not know if it happened?

Clare Short: No.

Q103, Mr Maples: Just on this 45 minutes allegation, in the formal briefings that you had and the SIS briefings that you had and the JIC stuff that you saw, was that a feature of that?

Clare Short: No, not ever. Do not forget, because of my focus, and I do not know what arrangements you have made to see material, but I do hope you press to see this defence intelligence assessment because of course they made an assessment about our troops and that is relevant to the Iraqi people's risk, so I was very, very fixated on what was the risk of the use of this material on unprotected Iraqi people, so I attended to all of that in some considerable detail and I never missed the 45-minute threat. It was not ----

Q104, Mr Maples: That was never a feature of the personal briefings to you?

Clare Short: No.

Q105, Mr Maples: And that this was something you really ought to worry about?

Clare Short: No, but it is there as a risk, and the risk of use is probably not high, but a danger, was kind of the tone of it.

Q106, Mr Maples: On the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, other than on Iraq, does it meet regularly?

Clare Short: No. It has met. At the beginning, in 1997, my Department was not a member of it and we became a member of it and there were some early meetings. I can remember the Ministry of Defence giving, they always give those wonderful overhead projections, they are terribly good at that because they like all that equipment, those type of presentations, but we never had a presentation on military options or the military strategy, though I did personally, but there was never a presentation of that either and it has not met for years, I think.

Q107, Mr Maples: On the big other issues you were involved in, big humanitarian efforts in Africa and things like that, the DOP did not meet to consider those issues?

Clare Short: No, but the others would have been Afghanistan, Kosovo.

Q108, Mr Maples: West Africa?

Clare Short: Sierra Leone had a special committee chaired by the Foreign Secretary which met a number of times, not Defence and Overseas Policy.

Q109, Mr Maples: So it did not meet on Afghanistan or Kosovo?

Clare Short: I do not think it did. Maybe, I cannot remember now, it is a long time since it met and I have only been to one or two meetings of it and they were only on, it may have been Kosovo, but I do not think they met on Afghanistan, but there was a ministerial committee on Afghanistan that started to meet after military action. Similarly, on Iraq, when the military action started, then we had the daily Cabinet and it took reports of what was going on.

Q110, Mr Maples: So what we are getting a picture of here is that the relevant Cabinet committee did not consider this in detail which is what one would have expected?

Clare Short: There was no paper or analysis of the risks, the dangers, the military options, the political and diplomatic options, the strategy for the UK, there was never that.

Q111, Mr Maples: But not just at that level, but full Cabinet level either?

Clare Short: No.

Q112, Mr Maples: And decisions were being taken by a very small group of people close to the Prime Minister, none of whom, apart from him, are elected?

Clare Short: Yes.

Q113, Mr Maples: So there were no ministers involved in that part of it?

Clare Short: That is right.

Q114, Chairman: Did you know about the role of the Foreign Secretary at this time?

Clare Short: Well, the Foreign Secretary would have a close relationship with the Prime Minister and the entourage, but I think the decisions were being made by the Prime Minister and the entourage and the Foreign Secretary was helpful. He went along with those decisions, but I think the decision-making was sucked out of the Foreign Office which I think is a great pity because there is enormous expertise about the Middle East in the Foreign Office and certainly the Foreign Office has the expertise to understand what is necessary to achieve the second Resolution.

Q115, Chairman: You are saying that the Foreign Secretary was helpful. Are you suggesting that he was ancillary and the decision was elsewhere?

Clare Short: I am suggesting that he was extremely loyal to the Prime Minister and his decisions.

Q116, Mr Olner: Can I ask you, Clare, whether you think that was the decision in 1998 when we actually had a military conflict with Iraq in Desert Fox? What was different then to what happened recently?

Clare Short: Well, of course it was more restrained. It was not full-scale war in1998. It was a much more limited military action which was taken.

Q117, Mr Olner: Somebody said yes to that military action.

Clare Short: Yes, indeed, but it was relatively short. I do not remember a lot of fuss about the decision-making about it. I think the limited action was agreed on and it was taken.

Q118, Mr Olner: Could I refresh your memory to the fact that the United Nations did not support that action, the international community did not support that action and President Bush was not even elected then. I am just wondering why there was no fuss made by certain members of the Cabinet then to what is happening now. The only constant thing is Saddam Hussein.

Clare Short: I am sorry, but I think that is a rhetorical and inaccurate question. Limited military action was taken, and I am now speaking from very old memory, Kofi Annan was involved and went to Iraq to try and restrain that from escalating, and I know some of the neo-cons are critical of the actions he took at that time, but it was not a full-scale conflict of anything comparable to the conflict that has just taken place, and I do not think your comparison is accurate, and on the length of it, it was not long either and nothing like the same scale.

Q119, Mr Olner: There were an awful lot of civilians killed in that particular military action.

Clare Short: Were there? I would have to check the record. I do not think that is so.

Q120, Mr Olner: Could I bring you just quickly to the February dossier. You have made it crystal clear that if you were a literary critic, you would not be giving any of the dossiers any sort of -----

Clare Short: No, it is not literary; it is attachment to accuracy.

Q121, Mr Olner: So the grammar was right?

Clare Short: Well, I have not checked the grammar. I could go back and do that, but I was not pretending to do the literary style.

Q122, Mr Olner: Could I just ask whether the February dossier in particular, these are not your words, but certainly in most people's words, now termed the 'dodgy' dossier, did any members of the Cabinet see that before its publication?

Clare Short: I do not think so. I certainly did not read it. This is a shameful piece of work. To think that in the run-up to a declaration of war when people's lives are at stake, to lift a PhD thesis off the Internet and distort it because you know that the young man concerned has complained that even the words of his PhD thesis were distorted?

Q123, Chairman: He will be appearing before us.

Clare Short: Is he? Okay. I think it is shocking. I just am shocked that our government system can come to this. I do not think we should permit this. Obviously what has happened in Iraq has happened, but let us learn the lessons in trying to help the people of Iraq rebuild their country, but I hope that some lessons will be learned about our government system and we will not make decisions like this again.

Q124, Ms Stuart: Your final sentence moved into a question I want to raise with you. After 1441, which was passed unanimously and countries like Syria did not have to vote yes, this was seen as a clear indication by the then international community as a desire to have a second Resolution, and I seem to recall that even after the final vote, the feeling was they would not get a final Resolution, so Jeremy Greenstock, in an article, said that this was a kind of failure of diplomacy because only 15 countries signed up. They knew in their own minds that they had not actually signed up to the same thing and we did not have a dialogue which made it quite clear where do we go after 1441. Do you think that all of that confusion in the mind of the international community added to a process where the policy essentially was decided and governments were just looking for evidence to support it?

Clare Short: No, I do not think there was any confusion in the mind of the international community. I think there were two different strategies. I think that the willingness to use force and the determination of the US to do so helped to get us 1441. That was a difference and I personally think that we needed to resolve the Iraq crisis, so I am with those who say that it was a good to bring it to a head, but that got us to 1441 and unanimity was remarkable, including Syria. Of course Syria was pressed by a lot of Arab countries, and being there as a rotating member it was representing the Arab world, to co-operate because the Arab world was very keen for the thing to be resolved by the international community without all-out war if at all possible, and I think most members of the Security Council really hoped that inspection and Blix would work. I think the US wanted to go to war in the spring and the UK, I now think, had pre-committed to that timetable. I thought then that we were trying to use our friendship with the US to hold the international community together and see post-1441, which was a great achievement, if we could move forward with full international co-operation, and 64 ballistic missiles were destroyed. That is no small thing. This is the delivery mechanism for the chemical and biological weapons, so I think we were getting a lot of success and then it was truncated, and that is the tragedy. We never found out whether Blix could have been more successful, and we could have looked at a sanctions lift, we could have looked at indicting Saddam Hussein, and I thought that was the route Britain was on, but now I think Britain was never on that route and that was the difference. We have to remember with Jeremy Greenstock, who is a very, very, very fine diplomat, he receives telegrams giving him instructions and that is the process with the UN, so even a guy of his seniority all the time, over every country in Africa and so on, instructions are issued from London, so where he says that we could not get agreement because one country would not agree, he has got instructions. You know, he has been appointed today to be the UK representative in Baghdad. I wonder whether he has volunteered for his penance. He was going into retirement. He is taking over from John Sawers.

Q125, Ms Stuart: I think you repeatedly said that the Prime Minister deceived you, the Cabinet and Parliament - deceived you deliberately or deceived you on the basis of wrong information?

Clare Short: I believe that the Prime Minister must have concluded that it was honourable and desirable to back the US in going for military action in Iraq and that it was, therefore, honourable for him to persuade us through the various ruse and devices he used to get us there, so I presume that he saw it as an honourable deception.

Q126, Mr Pope: Could I just go back to the answers you gave to the questions that John Maples put about the decision-making process in the run-up to the war and during the conflict. You were saying in answer to John that there was a small unelected coterie around the Prime Minister which comprised Sally Morgan, Jonathan Powell, David Manning and Alastair Campbell, and you also said the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee never met in this period. Is it not also the case that these things were discussed in Cabinet at the same time?

Clare Short: As I have said, the first discussion at Cabinet was in October time and thereafter it was discussed at most Cabinets and I often initiated that discussion, but there were no papers and it would be, "Ask the Foreign Secretary how he got on in the last visit to New York", or, "Ask the Defence Secretary this", and then the Prime Minister would speak a number of times and I would usually say something and some others might say something, so it was not a thorough investigation of an options-type discussion, but kind of updates, "Where is everything?", and then often a, "Yes, I'm very hopeful we will get a second Resolution" type of assurance. It is that kind of guided discussion and update, not an analysis of options and a thorough kind of collective decision-making, but it is kind of giving consent, I suppose, by not objecting. The Prime Minister would ask the Foreign Secretary and others to update on what is going on and then he gives his own conclusion as to where things are.

Q127, Mr Pope: We seem to be getting conflicting messages really. You said in your resignation statement, "the Cabinet has become, in Bagehot's phrase, a dignified part of the Constitution", and it does not really seriously decide things. It clearly did discuss Iraq probably at every meeting between the beginning of this year and when you left the Cabinet. Would it be fair to say that it meets weekly and it cropped up at every meeting? The reason I ask is that we were told earlier on today by Robin when he was giving evidence, and I jotted it down because I thought it was interesting, "You could not have hoped for a fuller discussion in Cabinet. It was a rare meeting which did not discuss Iraq", so that seems to me different from what you said, that there was a collapse in the decision-making process.

Clare Short: Well, the collapse in the decision-making process, not having Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, not having any papers, not considering options, diplomatic and military options, I think is very, very poor and shoddy work and is a deterioration in the quality of British administration which is shocking and this deterioration has been taking place for some time. There were discussions in the Cabinet, I often instigated them, but I do not agree with whatever the words about "you could not have had more thorough discussion". It was the same kind of discussion we have at Prime Minister's Question Time in Parliament with people raising their concerns and the Prime Minister saying, "Yes, I think we will get a second Resolution", whatever the concern of that week was. It was not what I consider a thorough decision-making discussion and there was no kind of collective decision-making. I really mean what I said and it is not just in relation to Iraq, but it is more generally, on foundation hospitals, top-up fees. These things have not been discussed in a way that says, "What can we do to decentralise the Health Service?" or, "What can we do to get more money into higher education?" and so on, and then you get sort of at the last minute the appropriate Secretary of State saying what the position is and people toe the line. That was how it operates now and this is not what I think collective Cabinet decision-making should be like.

Q128, Mr Pope: I am just trying to get a feel of how this operates, so there is a brief discussion in Cabinet and presumably votes are not taken, but people are able to dissent or to put an alternative view and that would be listened to?

Clare Short: Well, people do not. Famously we did on the Dome at, I think, the first Cabinet and the dissent was completely ignored. People do not now. This is our political system. Yes, this is Iraq and yes, this our Party in power, but this is our political system, this is our country's decision-making system and it is not good enough. That is what I am saying to you and I think your Committee has to take this seriously for the sake of our country's good governance.

Q129, Mr Pope: Let's move on to what I think is perhaps the more serious allegation which you made. In the article that you wrote in the New Statesman in which you were saying that the Prime Minister deceived us, it seems to me that the most grave choice one could make against a Member of Parliament and especially against a minister is that they have misled the House of Commons. You appear to be concluding that the Prime Minister has misled us on at least two occasions, first, by exaggerating the threat posed by the weapons and, secondly, you were saying that he agreed with President Bush a timetable for war as early as 9 September of last year. First of all, can you confirm that those are the allegations because I think those are incredibly serious allegations to make against a minister? Secondly, you were telling us earlier on that you had access to pretty much all the bits of the intelligence data, so I was wondering if you could tell us how you tried to use that intelligence data to restrain what you must have seen at the time was the Prime Minister deceiving Parliament?

Clare Short: It is an incredibly serious thing to conclude that your Prime Minister has been misleading you and Parliament, so when the Prime Minister kept assuring me personally and saying to the House and Cabinet that he was going for a second Resolution, if you remember, he said quite often, "And I am sure we will get one unless one fickle country might veto", but I believed in that strategy and I believed in that role for the UK, so despite people saying to me that a date had been fixed, which very senior people did say, I still was going along with believing in the strategy. However, examining everything that happened and what happened to the Blix process and the views of all of the other countries involved and the people who work in the UN system, my conclusion is the sad conclusion that I have reached and it is even worse than that because I think that this way of making the decision led to the lack of proper preparation for afterwards and I think that a lot of the chaos, disorder and mess in Iraq flowed from not having made the decision properly and made the preparations properly. However, let me say because my former Department were getting clearer and clearer about Geneva Convention obligations and at first we were the only one with the military there, our military took very seriously and started ordering food and preparing for their Geneva Convention obligations and did a lot better in Basra than US troops did in Baghdad, but this unit, which was set up in the Pentagon to govern Iraq after the conflict, was not properly prepared for its duties, so I think this way of making the decision on top of the allegations about misleading us all are a large part of the explanation of the very bad situation in Iraq now and that is what I am saying.

Q130, Mr Pope: Could I briefly ask you about the intent here. I can see what you are saying, but it seems to me that there is a different way of looking at this, that the Prime Minister genuinely believed that Iraq posed a threat, that he desperately wanted the second Resolution not just in terms of the wider international community, but in terms of domestic politics, and he must have been devastated when he failed to secure a second Resolution and it made life much more difficult for him and actually he has acted honourably in all of this. If he has misled the House of Commons or the public, it was not his intention.

Clare Short: You have to ask if you reach that conclusion, and I agree that is a possible conclusion, why Blix could not have more time. The only thing we were told on that was that we could not leave the troops in the desert, but you can rotate troops and you can bring some home, so you can do that. A lot was at stake here, and the Prime Minister did try very hard after the failure of the first Resolution that they tabled at US/UK/Spain simply saying 1441 was not fulfilled and they could not get support for that and despite ministers going to Africa and so on and the US trying to press Chile and Mexico, they just could not get the majority for that, so the Prime Minister tried for this Chilean so-called compromise with the six points that would be required to be fulfilled if Blix was to be successful, including Saddam Hussein going on television, if you remember that discussion, but he was saying then, "I could get the US to give us a few more days", and it was still March, so this is the thing which drives me to my conclusion, that there had to be military action by March at the latest. Now, that, I think, closed down any prospect of a second Resolution and then we were misled about what France was saying. I do not like this conclusion, but I think the facts lead you here when you scrutinise it all and, as I say, I can only assume that the Prime Minister thought, "Saddam Hussein needs to be dealt with. This is an honourable thing to do and I've got to use my influence and my persuasive powers to get us there". There is a legal problem then.

Q131, Mr Pope: Should he consider his position?

Clare Short: I think we should, as a country, get to the bottom of it and the lessons of it. That question is a separate issue.

Q132, Andrew Mackinlay: Am I correct in saying that the Cabinet did not meet from the time of the start of the summer parliamentary recess round beyond the Labour or Conservative Party Conferences? Is that right?

Clare Short: Yes. The Cabinet does not meet when Parliament is not meeting. This business of being asked if I wanted to raise anything and I said Iraq and the Prime Minister said not and then he said he would talk to me in Mozambique was all in the summer recess period.

Q133, Andrew Mackinlay: So in terms of arguing there is Cabinet collective responsibility, it goes into deep freeze between the end of July and the third week in October?

Clare Short: Well, it does not meet.

Q134, Andrew Mackinlay: Just a ballpark figure, how long did the average Cabinet meeting last in your experience of six years of Government?

Clare Short: Something under an hour.

Q135, Andrew Mackinlay: And there are various subjects to discuss?

Clare Short: You start off with next week's business and there are other areas.

Q136, Andrew Mackinlay: Are Cabinet minutes - I was a town councillor - done like local authority minutes? Are there minutes circulated with "resolved" and "recommended" on them?

Clare Short: The minutes are very lean, but this is the deep part of the British tradition. They are very limited. They are there but the Head of the Civil Service sits there with a book writing everything down and there are two others, one for home and one for foreign because they change at the end of the table, so a much bigger record is kept which presumably comes out 50 years later or however many years it is.

Q137, Andrew Mackinlay: With the Queen Mother it will be a hundred years, I suspect.

Clare Short: They are lean.

Q138, Andrew Mackinlay: You have revealed some interesting things about the machinery of government, you have shown us some of the flaws in the thinking in some of the intelligence, but where I think there is agreement is that you actually said you did not think containment was working?

Clare Short: Containment was hurting the people of Iraq too much. We could not go on with sanctions.

Q139, Andrew Mackinlay: So you were frustrated by this. I did not want to interrupt you, you said it could not go on like this. You also recognised he posed a threat or would develop the weapons of mass destruction if he had not got them, though I take the point on that terminology. It really comes down to whether or not there should have been more time for Blix, in which case you seem to think the French and others would have fallen into line if there had been continued frustration by Saddam Hussein. Would that be correct?

Clare Short: I think we had to deal with it and we should have done our very best to keep the international community acting together, but we had to be willing to contemplate military action to resolve it. That was my position throughout and I still think that is right, we should not have just left it indefinitely with the nature of the regime and the nature of the suffering of the people. But I think the prize of having unanimity at the Security Council and getting 1441 and getting the dismantling of 60 ballistic missiles was very considerable, and we should have gone on for a bit longer to see how much more we could get.

Q140, Andrew Mackinlay: Can I be devil's advocate. It seems to me at some stage you have to blow the whistle and say, "The game is over, the time has run out". Are you not slightly confusing the decision to go war, which was taken in the late summer/autumn, as the deadline? Either we have unimpeded access for UN inspectors, full compliance or, in a sense, Saddam triggers the tripwire?

Clare Short: There was a sleight of hand over 1441. As I have said, assurances were given to the Security Council that there was not automaticity, the thing the French objected to, and if Saddam Hussein did not co-operate with 1441, it would come back to the Security Council and of course Blix came back with his reports. Our Prime Minister had got himself committed to the second resolution. I do not agree, 1441 was not in terms which said, "Comply now or there is military action."

Q141, Andrew Mackinlay: No.

Clare Short: Therefore the second resolution, therefore you are back to why not more time to do it right but with an absolute determination to take action. You have to take this point, if the real objective was to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime rather than the WMD, then there are legal questions.

Q142, Andrew Mackinlay: Yes. But supposing there had been more time but still no second resolution mandating, where would you have stood then?

Clare Short: Then we would have had to have the advice of the Attorney General and we got that advice, very strangely, very late. By then there was agitation in the Ministry of Defence that they would not go if it was not legal. The published Attorney's advice - and the day Robin Cook resigned from the Cabinet was the day we got it and he came and sat in Robin's seat - and I saw everything but that was all I ever saw and I did not see any longer papers from the Attorney General. He said there was legal authority for conflict without a second resolution. That caused surprise to some but I accept that. This is our system. If our Attorney General says that, that is the legal position. I still think we should have gone on to see if Blix could work, but once we had that advice we knew we could legally take military action even if it was impossible to get a second resolution in the Security Council. We did not know it until that date but from then on we knew it.

Q143, Andrew Mackinlay: It seems to me, although you were not Foreign Minister you were in foreign affairs in the broad sense, and it seems to me there would have been cataclysmic consequences for the Atlantic Alliance, for perhaps even the relationship of the United States with Europe, commitment to NATO, many other things, if the United Kingdom had at the eleventh hour said, "We are not going to play ball." The die was cast.

Clare Short: No, I am sorry, this is really important. That implies we had given our word earlier. I am absolutely clear we had to mean resolving it this time but it was not the eleventh hour and we had all worked together to get 1441 and to get Blix in, and we should have had more time and the UK could have been a really helpful player and helped to try to get the international community together and try to see if it could have been resolved together and if that had failed then it would have come to military action as we took, and that would have been a deeply honourable role. That is not what we did. So I do not agree that all those things were at stake. I think enormous harm has come out of what has been done. I think probably very large numbers of recruits to al-Qaeda have come out of what has been done.

Q144, Andrew Mackinlay: You raised the question of the moral justification for war, proportionality and last resort and so on, and the legal advice and so on, but surely the kernel of this matter is that Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War sought an armistice, it was granted subject to conditions, he never complied, so surely the legal and the moral basis is there, taking Thomas Aquinas on board. He abrogated the armistice terms and basically there was a search warrant. If a policeman turns up at your door and my door, you do not negotiate with him, you either give him unimpeded access and full disclosure or he has to force his way in.

Clare Short: The trouble with that argument is that he is a monstrous dictator who has inflicted enormous suffering on the people of Iraq and indeed endangered neighbouring countries and defied the UN, and the people of Iraq have suffered terrible and are suffering terribly. The teaching on the just war and the law on the just war says, "no other means". I think you could say it was a just cause, you can argue proportionality because of the nature of the regime and so on, but we did not exhaust "no other means" and in the teaching on the just war and politically that was a very big mistake. The determination to take the route you are on, "We are fed up, time is up, we are going to do it anyway" means our country was deceived about what the plan really was.

Q145, Chairman: Roughly how many meetings did you have with the chairman of the JIC or someone else briefing you on the Iraq situation?

Clare Short: With the chairman of the JIC I only went to that meeting when the groupings in the Cabinet were being briefed, until the War Cabinet was set up and he attended that daily. I saw representatives of SIC five or six times, something like that.

Andrew Mackinlay: Chairman, does that square with what we were told by the Security Intelligence Committee?

Chairman: That is one thing for the Committee to discuss.

Andrew Mackinlay: Can you put that to Clare because she might be unaware that the Annual Report says that the Intelligence and Security Committee says that, "Ministers confirm they were given the JIC papers which their private offices believed they needed to see. Officials in the Department drew papers to the ministers' department and reflected their ministers' views at JIC meetings."

Q146, Chairman: Do you dissent from that?

Clare Short: I saw the JIC papers, and they became more frequent. That is the assessment then of the intelligence. I was never asked to comment on them or feed into meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee but I read all those papers.

Q147, Chairman: You read them?

Clare Short: I did not meet the chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee when I read those papers.

Q148, Chairman: When you met him, that was before the dossier of 24 September?

Clare Short: No, I do not think it was, I think it was afterwards. It was quite late on, the meetings of the Cabinet. They must have given you the date of that.

Q149, Chairman: What briefing did you get before the 24 September dossier?

Clare Short: As I said, personally I was reading all the raw intelligence and the JIC reports regularly. And I had had individual briefings.

Q150, Chairman: Did you conclude there was any discrepancy between what you had heard and what you had read and what appeared in that document?

Clare Short: As I said earlier, it is spin, it is exaggeration of imminent threat. There is no dispute on the fact the regime is resisting the UN, committed to chemical and biological weapons and had ballistic missiles with too great a range, it is how you present how imminent the danger is as a result of that. That is where I think the exaggeration took place.

Q151, Chairman: From your contacts with members of the agencies, did you have any indication of any dissent, any concern about exaggeration?

Clare Short: You have asked me that already. This dispute came later. Once the conflict started I attended the daily Cabinet but I ceased to have - well, I had a couple of personal chats in the margin, I suppose - those individual briefings. It was too late then.

Q152, Chairman: But the imminent threat appeared on the 24 September dossier. There were a number of occasions when you met these people, when you would have had the opportunity to express your views.

Clare Short: Indeed. As I said to you, senior people in the system said to me that a date had been fixed sometime ago.

Q153, Chairman: Did they express their concern about any exaggeration in the document?

Clare Short: No, we did not have that conversation. There was concern about whether a date had been fixed and there were people who were very keen on a second resolution.

Q154, Chairman: A very final question, are there any matters which you want to raise which we have asked you which you would like to leave with the Committee?

Clare Short: I would like to mention - and I have just mentioned it in the exchange here - the incompetence of ORHA and the failure to take seriously the Attorney General's advice prior to the passing of the Security Council Resolution which then authorised the coalition to act in ways that have not previously been seen as the powers of an occupying power. I think that is a very serious question which helps to explain the disorder we have in Iraq. There is also the very serious constitutional issue of how important is the Attorney's advice. I thought it was sacrosanct, yet it was brushed to one side. He wanted to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with the US so British people who were put into ORHA, British public servants, would be protected and given legality, but they would not do it. I think that is another extremely serious question. The question of the Attorney's advice and what is his power and what is supposed to happen in our system when it has been given, needs further examination.

Q155, Chairman: The advice you are referring to is the limits of the occupying powers?

Clare Short: Absolutely, which was later leaked. I would like to draw your attention to it. I think it is another very serious set of issues.

Q156, Chairman: It is your judgment that those concerns have been overridden by the subsequent UN Security Council Resolution?

Clare Short: I am sure they have legally. Once the Security Council has passed a resolution, it has authorised the coalition to behave in ways which the advice said it could not. So there was an interim period when that advice was ignored. It seems to me this is extremely serious - systems of government, powers of the Attorney General, how are you supposed to operate as an occupying power - which I ask you to look at.

Chairman: You have been very helpful. I am sure the Committee will ponder and reflect on your concerns. Many thanks.