gaurdianuk | Tony Blair's government "intentionally and substantially" exaggerated assessments of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction culminating in highly misleading statements about the threat that amounted to lies, the inquiry into the war in Iraq was told today
Carne Ross, a British diplomat to the UN who was responsible for Iraq in the runup to the invasion, said intelligence was "massaged" into "more robust and terrifying" statements about Saddam's supposed WMD.
In evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, which heard that the Foreign Office had objected to the release of documents that he wanted to disclose, Ross said: "This process of exaggeration was gradual and proceeded by accretion and editing from document to document, in a way that allowed those participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in blatant dishonesty."
He added: "But this process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies."
In an example of what he called a process of "deliberate public exaggeration", Ross said the government in March 2002 sent the parliamentary Labour party a paper that included the claim that "if Iraq's weapons programmes remained unchecked, Iraq could develop a crude nuclear device in about five years".
He said the government's real assessment was more or less the opposite: that sanctions were effectively preventing Iraq from developing a nuclear capability.
The statement to the PLP was "purely hypothetical", said Ross, "and was true in 1991 as it was in 2002; there was no evidence at either point that Iraq was close to obtaining the necessary material". A senior Foreign Office official sent a minute to an adviser to Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, warning about the discrepancy in the memo to the PLP. But, Ross told the inquiry, the official was ignored.
Ross, who resigned from the Foreign Office in 2002, said co-ordinated action to prevent exports from Iraq and target Saddam's illegal revenues could have been an alternative to military action. It was a "disgrace" that Britain did not exhaust all peaceful options before going to war, he said.
"There was no deliberate discussion of available alternatives to military action in advance of the 2003 invasion," he said. "There is no record of that discussion, no official has referred to it, no minister has talked about it, and that seems to me to be a very egregious absence in this history – that at some point a government before going to war should stop and ask itself, 'are there available alternatives?'"
The Foreign Office had also asked him to redact information relating to a proposal to seize illegal bank accounts held by Saddam in Jordan, Ross told the inquiry.
Meanwhile, a document declassified today by the inquiry revealed that a former commander of British troops in Iraq had warned of an urgent need of helicopters. Lieutenant General Sir James Dutton said in a letter in 2005 to Air Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, chief of joint operations: "Massaging airframes and hours can only go so far; the simple fact is that we need more helicopters (and aircrew) urgently."