Downing Street Says

Asked if the Prime Minister would follow President Bush’s example and announce an inquiry on Iraqi WMD, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) acknowledged that there were valid questions about this issue but he was unable to provide any details about the announcement that would be made. Asked if it might be made today, the PMOS said he couldn’t rule out the possibility. The announcement would be ready when it was ready. Asked if it might coincide with the Prime Minister’s appearance before the Liaison Committee tomorrow, the PMOS said that the announcement was not being delayed deliberately to coincide with the Liaison Committee hearing. We would make the announcement when we were ready to do so. Asked if the announcement would be made directly to the House, the PMOS said that we wanted to try to do it either as a written or oral statement to the House. Asked the point of a written statement when there were obviously going to be follow up questions which MPs would want to ask, the PMOS said that, in our view, the detail of the format was secondary to the fact that we wanted to get it out as quickly as possible. He pointed out that there would be several opportunities this week for people to ask questions about it. Asked why he was being so vague, the PMOS said that there were some details that had yet to be tied down. Providing further information would mean having to get into the specifics of the announcement, which he was reluctant to do.

Asked the Government’s reaction to President Bush’s announcement that he was setting up an inquiry, the PMOS said that what the Americans did was a matter for them. Similarly, what we did was a matter for us. As he had said this morning, we were in discussions with the US and were continuing to work in parallel with them as much as possible. They had their own dynamic and we had ours. Asked if the British intelligence agencies would co-operate with the inquiry given the information they had shared with their US counterparts in the run-up to the war, the PMOS pointed out that British and American intelligence agencies shared information the whole time. We would be able to discuss this issue, and others like it, in more detail once we had made an announcement.

Asked when the Prime Minister had become aware that President Bush was going to announce an inquiry, the PMOS said that it wasn’t our policy to engage in discussions about processology. Needless to say, we had been in contact with the US about this matter for some time. The Hutton Report had changed the context of the situation inasmuch as it, together with the reports from the FAC and ISC, had dealt with the allegations that the Government had falsified or hyped up intelligence or had misused it for political purposes. Asked if the Prime Minister believed that the President had ‘pulled the rug from under him’, the PMOS said that this was a description which neither he nor anyone in Downing Street would recognise. Asked if the Prime Minister had spoken to President Bush about the inquiry, the PMOS said that it wasn’t our policy to provide a running commentary on the conversations between the Prime Minister and the President. As journalists were well aware, they spoke on a regular basis.

Asked if Lord Falconer and Peter Hain had been aware when being interviewed yesterday that an announcement was going to be made about an inquiry, the PMOS said that, as he had made clear this morning, there was no point going over the territory that Lord Hutton, the FAC and the ISC had already covered. As David Kay had stated in his interim report, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) had found evidence of WMD programmes and concealment activities. However, the fact that we hadn’t yet found WMD posed a valid question which should be addressed.

Asked if he was indicating that the Prime Minister was no longer confident in the intelligence he had received before the war in Iraq, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister had no intention of pre-judging the outcome of any announcement before it had been made. We would answer the questions being put once an announcement had been made. Asked on what grounds the Prime Minister would now justify the war in the light of his apparent doubts about the existence of WMD in Iraq, the PMOS said that he did not accept the premise of the question. What was clear was that, as the reports from Lord Hutton, the FAC and the ISC had all found, the intelligence had not been distorted or falsified as had been alleged. The Prime Minister believed that the war in Iraq was – and remained – justified. Asked to clarify the justification for going to war, the PMOS said that the justification had been the breaches of Resolution 1441. Both in his interim report last year and in his comments last week, David Kay had stated that multiple breaches had occurred.

Asked if the ‘valid questions’ which we had been talking about today were questions of doubt about WMD which had been raised in the Prime Minister’s own mind, the PMOS said the Prime Minister believed that it was right at this stage to address the valid questions being posed regarding the whereabouts of Iraq’s WMD. That said, he continued to believe that the intelligence that had been provided last year had been given in good faith. Pressed as to whether the Prime Minister was beginning to think that the WMD might not exist, given his confident assertions in past months that WMD would be found, the PMOS said it was a fact of life, whether we like it or not, that questions about the existence of WMD were being asked. It was therefore valid for us to find a mechanism to address them. It was also a fact of life that the ISG was continuing its work and that David Kay had found evidence of WMD programmes and concealment activities in Iraq. That was the situation at the moment. We were not prepared to jump any further forward and pre-empt what the outcome of what might emerge from the process set up by the announcement.

Asked again what had changed in the last twenty-four hours to shift the Government’s position from advising people to wait for the ISG report to its intention to make an announcement, the PMOS said that it was not impossible for two courses of action to run alongside one another.

Asked if there was any concern that an inquiry might, in itself, damage the credibility of the intelligence services, the PMOS said that we would obviously not do anything that could damage the integrity of the intelligence agencies. The Prime Minister had talked on numerous occasions about the valuable work they carried out in all sorts of areas. He did not think that the intelligence agencies themselves had any doubts or concerns either. Asked how he could be so sure that the outcome of any inquiry would not damage the integrity of the intelligence agencies, the PMOS said he had been making the point that the actions of the Government would not damage the integrity of the intelligence agencies in any way because the Government fully supported their work.

Asked if Downing Street agreed with David Kay’s comment last week that, on the basis of the evidence last autumn, it was reasonable to assume there was an imminent threat from Iraq, the PMOS said he did not think it would be helpful to get into a word-by-word analysis of Dr Kay’s comments. Suffice to say that there was a lot more to what he had said than had been reported at the time – in particular with regard to his remarks that what had been found on the ground would have breached Resolution 1441 and his assessment of the nature of the threat that Iraq had posed given the discoveries.

Asked if the Prime Minister had responded to the requests from the Leader of the Opposition and Charles Kennedy to be consulted on the nature of any inquiry , the PMOS said that he had nothing further to add to what he had said about this particular issue this morning.

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» Monday, February 2, 2004

WMD

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