Campbell apologises over Iraq dossier
Tony Blair’s chief aide Alastair Campbell has apologised for a mistake in the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’ published in the run-up to military action against Iraq.
Prior to the outbreak of the US-led war against Iraq, the Government produced several documents which assessed Saddam Hussein’s weapons capacity and his regime’s record on human rights.
However, the second paper – published in February – was later found to have been plagiarised from a 12-year-old PhD thesis on Iraq by an American student.
Facing questions from the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee today on his involvement in the document, Mr Campbell accepted that mistakes had been made in its compilation.
However, he insisted that no-one in government had been aware of the plagiarism prior to its publication, and insisted on the accuracy of its contents.
“The Prime Minister has made clear, as he made clear in the House today, (that he) was content with the paper as it was, but what he was not content with, and nor am I, was the fact that in its production a mistake was made”, Mr Campbell told the committee.
“We have acknowledged that mistake, we have apologised for that mistake, and we have put in place new procedures to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, and I don’t honestly see that there is much more we can do than that”.
Yesterday, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw admitted the February dossier had been an ’embarrassment’ for the Government.
He told the same committee: ‘It is not remotely in the Government’s interests to produce a document with this provenance. To put it the vernacular, it was a complete horlicks in the way it came to be produced.’
Addressing MPs this afternoon, the PM’s chief spin doctor also sought to play down the importance of the dossier, maintaining that a prior publication on Iraq’s alleged weapons capacity released in September last year was of significantly greater value.
For his part, Mr Campbell has been directly accused of deliberately ‘sexing up’ the 2002 document in an attempt to bolster support for the military invasion of Iraq.
According to an unnamed source in the intelligence community reported by the BBC, the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which could launch within 45 minutes had been kept in the document at the behest of Downing Street against the reservations of intelligence chiefs.
However, defending the document yesterday, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that the document’s claim that Iraq could launch WMDs within 45 minutes had some credence.
He insisted that it had been approved by the joint intelligence committee (JIC) and had not derived from Downing Street’s spin machine.
And addressing the committee today, Mr Campbell said that he had in no way embellished the report, and in some cases had sought to “sex it down”.
“What is completely and totally and 100% untrue is… that I in any way overrode that judgement, sought to exaggerate that intelligence, or to use it in any way that the intelligence agencies weren’t 100% content with”.
He added: “Having seen the meticulousness and care that the chair of the JIC and his colleagues were taking in the whole process, I really didn’t think that it was my place to say, ‘Hold on a minute, what is this about'”.
Mr Campbell also angrily demanded an apology from the BBC for its decision to stand by the 45-minute claims.
Insisting that the story was untrue, he accused the organisation of having failed to produce the evidence behind the claims, and added: “We have apologised in relation to Dr Al-Marashi (author of the plagiarised report), and I think it’s about time the BBC apologised to us in relation to the 45-minute point.”
For his part, BBC defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan has steadfastedly stood by his source since he broke the story last month.
The BBC said in a statement: “We do not feel the BBC has anything to apologise for. We regret that Alastair Campbell has chosen to accuse Andrew Gilligan and the BBC of lying.”
The spin doctor’s comments come after two former cabinet ministers, Robin Cook and Clare Short, accused the Government of exaggerating the actual weapons threat posed by Iraq in the run-up to the conflict.
