Tony Blair says reports clears him of 'bad faith'
Damien Gayle is at the protest in central London, where the Green MP Caroline Lucas has said she believes Tony Blair is a war criminal.
Damien Gayle (@damiengayle)
#Blair is a war criminal, says @CarolineLucas at #Chilcot demo pic.twitter.com/ACJPhKhOUJ
July 6, 2016
We also have a full story on the criticism of intelligence agencies.
The Chilcot report identifies a series of major blunders by the British intelligence services that produced “flawed” information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the basis for going to war.
The intelligence community emerges from the report with its reputation and some of its most senior staff badly damaged.
The report singles out for criticism Sir John Scarlett, the chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), an umbrella group that pulls together the work of the main intelligence agencies, mainly the findings of the overseas service, MI6.
The then MI6 chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, also comes in for criticism.
In one of the most damning sections, the report concludes that Tony Blair presented the assessments of the spy agencies to parliament with a “certainty” not justified by the intelligence that had been gathered. Chilcot castigates the intelligence community for failing to make any serious attempt to rein him in.
Read the full story here:
Here is a snippet of our main political story about the report:
Tony Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime as he sought to make the case for military action to MPs and the public in the buildup to the invasion in 2002 and 2003, the Chilcot inquiry has found.
In his forensic account of the way Blair and his ministers built the case for military action, Chilcot finds the then Labour prime minister – who had promised US president George W Bush, “I will be with you, whatever” – disregarded warnings about the potential consequences of military action and relied too heavily on his own beliefs, rather than the more nuanced judgments of the intelligence services.
In particular, Chilcot identifies two separate, key occasions in the buildup to the conflict, against the background of mass protests on the streets of London by the Stop the War coalition, when Blair appears to have overplayed the threat from Iraq and underplayed the risks of invasion.
In the House of Commons on 24 September 2002, Blair presented Iraq’s past, current and future capabilities as evidence of the severity of the potential threat from Iraq’s WMDs [weapons of mass destruction]. He said that, at some point in the future, that threat would become a reality,” Chilcot says.
But Chilcot argues instead: “The judgments about Iraq’s capabilities in that statement, and in the dossier published the same day, were presented with a certainty that was not justified.”
Read the full story here:
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Here’s part of our main story on the report’s findings.
Sir John Chilcot has delivered a devastating critique of Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, with his long-awaited report concluding that Britain chose to join the US invasion before “peaceful options for disarmament” had been exhausted.
The head of the Iraq war inquiry said the UK’s decision to attack and occupy a sovereign state for the first time since the second world war was a decision of “utmost gravity”. He described Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, as “undoubtedly a brutal dictator” who had repressed his own people and attacked his neighbours.
But Chilcot – whom Gordon Brown asked seven years ago to head an inquiry into the conflict – was withering about Blair’s choice to join the US invasion. Chilcot said: “We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.”
The report suggests that Blair’s self-belief was a major factor in the decision to go to war. In a section headed Lessons, Chilcot writes: “When the potential for military action arises, the government should not commit to a firm political objective before it is clear it can be achieved. Regular reassessment is essential.”
Read the rest here:
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