Foreign Office told to give up WMD draft

Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday January 24, 2008
The Guardian

An early draft of the government's discredited Iraq weapons dossier written by John Williams, a former journalist and head of the Foreign Office news department, must be released, the Information Tribunal ordered yesterday.

The government has said the dossier was entirely the work of the intelligence agencies. Williams' role in the affair was not disclosed to the Hutton inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, the government weapons expert who questioned the way the dossier was drawn up.

The tribunal dismissed FCO claims that the release of the draft was not in the public interest. It said: "We do not accept that we should, in effect, treat the Hutton Report as the final word on the subject ...

"Information has been placed before us, which was not before Lord Hutton, which may lead to questions as to whether the Williams' draft in fact played a greater part in influencing the drafting of the dossier than has previously been supposed. We make no comment on whether it did so in fact."

The Hutton inquiry, which cleared the government of conspiring to "sex up" the dossier, was not handed the Williams contribution or address the questions which it might raise, the tribunal said.

It has been suggested that the draft might contain the first mention of the notorious and ill-founded claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a WMD strike within 45 minutes. Williams has denied the claim.

Carne Ross, a high-flying diplomat who resigned in protest at the way the Blair government led to the country to war, told the Guardian last night that the decision should pave the way to the publication of the later dossier drafts drawn up inside Whitehall. The FCO said it would be "studying the tribunal's decision".