Iraq
Inquiry Speech - March 2008
I gave the following speech to the House of Commons on
25 March during the Opposition Day debate on holding an inquiry into how we were taken to
war. Interventions I made earlier in speeches by the Foreign Sec and Shadow Foreign
Sec are appended at the end:
7.12 pm
Lynne Jones (Birmingham,
Selly Oak) (Lab): It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle
(Sir Peter Tapsell), and I must say that I agree entirely with his analysis. I was opposed
to the war, but not because I thought Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass
destruction. I thought that he probably did possess some residual capability of the
weapons that we knew he had possessed in the Gulf war. There was evidence of that past
possession, and in my view it was likely that he still maintained some capability. In the
1990s, however, weapons inspectors were crawling all over Iraq, and Hans Blix and his team
and Mohamed el-Baradei were not able to gather sufficient or indeed any evidence to
demonstrate that Saddam Hussein was a threat.
I was also very suspicious
of President Bush constantly referring back to 9/11 and suggesting that Iraq was involved
with al-Qaeda. He specifically said that Iraq
“has aided, trained and
harboured terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaeda.”
We know that that was not
the case. Saddam was a secularist, and if anything he had a lot to fear from the likes of
al-Qaeda. President Bush blatantly exploited his people’s fear and anger about 9/11.
When I put that to the former Prime Minister, he did not explicitly come out in support of
President Bush, but neither did he condemn that link. Indeed, on 20 March 2003, the then
Defence Secretary, now the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, told me:
He went on to say:
“We are not sure of the
precise nature of those links”.—[ Official Report, 20 March 2003; Vol.
401, c. 1096.]
How can we take a Secretary
of State seriously when he makes such comments to this House? In fact, I could not take at
all seriously the entire evidence presented to the House, and I was very surprised that
Opposition Members went along with the campaign.
It is time that we had a
thorough inquiry into what happened in the run-up to the war and after it. I have
reservations about the type of inquiry proposed, but the right hon. Member for Richmond,
Yorks
25 Mar 2008 : Column 87
(Mr. Hague) implied that Her Majesty’s Opposition would give the House the
opportunity to specify the kind of inquiry it wants.
Angus Robertson: It
might be helpful if the hon. Lady and other Labour Members who are considering voting for
the inquiry are made aware that the motion that stands today in the name of the
Conservative party is exactly the same as the motion previously tabled by the Scottish
National party and Plaid Cymru, having been drawn together by Members in all parts of the
House to try to get maximum support. The motion under consideration has, therefore, been
born out of views from all parts of the House.
Lynne Jones: I am
aware of that. I was unable to support the previous motion at the time, because I felt it
was playing politics and was personalising the matter. I take on board the hon.
Gentleman’s point, however.
Earlier, I mentioned the
Butler report and the Intelligence and Security Committee, and I cited evidence that came
to light in the Hutton inquiry of an e-mail from somebody called Matthew Rycroft to
Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Clare Sumner, Robert Hill, David Manning, Alastair Campbell
and John Scarlett. I shall read out the relevant parts of it:
“Ann Taylor read the draft
dossier this morning and passed on some detailed comments to John Scarlett. She has just
rung me to underline the following points.”
A number of points are then
made, and the message ends:
“the hardest questions in the
debate, not fully answered by the dossier, remain why now and why Saddam. The PM should
take these on in his statement to undercut critics”.
Those questions are still
relevant and have not been addressed—and certainly not by the ISC or the Butler
report. Ann Taylor was a member of the Butler committee, and she was also the chairperson
of the ISC.
The Foreign Secretary was
surprised that I cast doubt on the Butler report. I should like to illustrate why I cast
doubt on it—and not only on its membership. I and a former Member of this House, Llew
Smith, submitted a detailed dossier to the Butler committee. We focused on the
Government’s claim that Iraq had sought to procure uranium from Niger. We asked many
detailed questions, and we made 15 recommendations. I will not go into all of them, but
the report is posted on my website. It asks some pertinent questions, and refers to the
fact that I and colleagues had often received contradictory evidence in response to the
many parliamentary questions we had asked, and that when we queried those contradictions
we were referred back to the Butler inquiry. We were anxious that Butler examined this
issue in detail, because it was one of the core arguments about the threat that Saddam
Hussein posed to us.
We made 15 recommendations,
and I wish to read out a couple of them. We stated:
“From the information made
publicly available by the UK Government, the IAEA and the FAC, it is our view that the ISC
investigation into this matter was insufficiently inquisitive—the ISC do not make it
clear whether they even saw the relevant primary documentation. We recommend that the
Butler Committee ask the Government for all relevant primary documentation on the claim,
including the forged documents mentioned by the IAEA and assess what impact the forged
evidence had on the UK sources of June 2002 (which is officially
25 Mar 2008 : Column 88
still ‘under consideration’ over a year after the forged evidence was revealed)
and of September 2002 (the single source upon which the UK relied).”
We further recommended
“that the Butler Committee
investigate whether the information the Government have made publicly available provides
an accurate reflection of the primary evidence.”
The Butler committee did
answer that question, concluding that it was reasonable for the Government to make their
claims. The logic by which it reached that conclusion must be highly questionable. It
cited information obtained from the International Atomic Energy Agency that makes it clear
that not only before the war, when it presented its evidence to the UN in March 2003, but
more recently, it had received no further evidence that would lead it to believe that Iraq
had tried to obtain uranium from Niger.
The Butler report makes no
comment on the fact that the international agency charged with looking into these matters
did not believe that Iraq had sought to procure uranium from Niger, but simply talks about
reasonableness. It states:
“Since uranium constitutes
almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.”
That is a risible argument.
How can we take such an argument seriously? Yet, that was the Butler report’s
conclusion.
Furthermore, that report did
not take on board the argument that we had presented, which was that under article 10 of
UN Security Council resolution 1441, member states were required to provide any
information on Iraq’s prohibited weapons programmes, so either the British Government
did not make that information available or they did make it available and the IAEA
concluded that it was not credible.
Mr. Ellwood: I am
listening carefully to the hon. Lady. Can she complete this study on the uranium, or
yellow cake, by sharing with the House how it ended up being mentioned in the state of the
union address by President Bush?
Lynne Jones: It was
mentioned in the state of the union address, but shortly afterwards a withdrawal was made.
The UK Government cited CIA intelligence in support of their argument that uranium was
sought, yet the CIA did not support that; it simply reported that another state had
reported this fact. There is no evidence of any support from America or the CIA. Again,
Butler neglects that fact, which was again argued closely in our dossier.
All the evidence suggests
that the United Kingdom Government were going out of their way to present evidence in a
way that justified going to war. I could not put it better than the former member of the
Defence Intelligence Staff, Brian Jones, who said:
“A small coterie in and around
No 10 knew that the Prime Minister needed an intelligence assessment that allowed him to
paint a picture of an Iraq bristling with WMDs. That alone won him the public and
parliamentary support he needed to go to war. A few top intelligence officials were the
facilitators, providing the political spinners with enough of what they needed and the
silence of an acquiescent Joint Intelligence Committee did the rest”.
We need to get to the bottom
of how this House was misled in voting to go to war.
25 Mar 2008 : Column 89
Dr. Ian Gibson (Norwich,
North) (Lab): Will my hon. Friend also consider the possibility of examining the cost
of war—the sustained amount of money that seems to appear during a war? As the hon.
Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir Peter Tapsell), the historian across the way, will
recall, during the 1920s Churchill, Bonar Law and Lloyd George had long debates on the
issue of money being spent on the equivalent of the Iraq war then. Why has there not been
a proper discussion in this Chamber of the escalating costs of this war? Why does that
escalation happen?
Lynne Jones: With
respect, that is not a matter relating to the inquiry. I merely make the point that had
the resources that have been deployed in this war been devoted to fighting terrorism by
winning hearts and minds, we would not face the kind of international threat from
terrorists that we face today.
I am also moved to support
the motion as a result of recent contact with one of my constituents. She is a British
subject and citizen, and her husband, who is currently in prison in Iraq, has joint
citizenship. In February 2003, Oxfam stated:
“Those who propose war have
not yet shown that any threat from Iraq is so imminent that it justifies the risk of so
much suffering”.
We know that so much
suffering has been felt, and I shall tell the House about the suffering experienced by my
constituent and her husband.
Although it was not the main
reason for going to war, in Prime Minister’s questions Tony Blair told me:
“If we remove Saddam...the
people who will rejoice most will be the Iraqi people who will be free of a murderous
tyrant”.—[ Official Report, 19 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 936.]
The Iraqi people are free of
one murderous tyrant, but many hundreds of murderous tyrants have sprung up in his place.
The Iraqi Government are weak and the country is run by fiefdoms and militia.
The constituent to whom I
referred, Mohammed Hussein, was in Iraq in January 2007. He went there with his wife and
two-year-old son to try to persuade his mother to come to the UK for medical
treatment—she was very ill. She had been unwilling to leave Iraq because she was
living in the same household as her daughter-in-law, whose husband, her son, had been
killed in Baghdad by terrorists. Her son was a member of the Iraqi police force. She was
forced to flee Baghdad to Najaf, which I am told was more peaceful at the time. She was
not allowed by the governor of Najaf to join two of her daughters who were in the city,
but she did join another daughter who was living in its outskirts. In the run-up to the
holy festival of Ashura, she, her family and my constituents were outside Najaf at a place
called Zarga. On the night before Ashura, Mohammed Hussein telephoned a number—I
think it is 130—that Iraqi citizens are invited to use to report any suspicious
activity. He reported that a number of armed men had been seen in the vicinity.
Subsequently, there was an event that became known as the battle of Najaf. During that
conflict, the mother, sister and, we believe, the brother-in-law of my constituent were
killed, and my constituents were rounded up along with many other people.
Since then, along with
hundreds of people who were rounded up simply for being in the vicinity of that conflict
area, my constituent was sentenced—in an en
25 Mar 2008 : Column 90
bloc trial where no individual evidence was allowed—to 15 years’ imprisonment. I
have a letter from his wife telling me about the torture that he suffered from the Iraqi
authorities. She said:
“During this time he has been
tortured brutally. He was hung from the ceiling for two hours causing permanent damage to
his arms and attempts were made to pull out his nails.”
She gave some further
information, and I have since spoken to her. She told me that she witnessed the torture of
another woman with whom she was imprisoned for a short time. She said that that woman was
hung from the ceiling, her clothes were forced above her waist and she was beaten on the
legs and feet by the authorities. My constituent was threatened with the prospect that
that would happen to her. For a while, she was imprisoned near her husband. She said that
he was chained to a toilet and guards came in intermittently, beat him and threatened to
rape his wife and his sister. That is what is going on in Iraq today. Is that what we
fought this war for?
I went to Iraq in 2005 and
met many people, and the majority were in favour of the war. Almost all of them, however,
condemned the nature of the occupation. They said that it had been totally mishandled.
They were very concerned that the Iraqi people were seeing no benefits from the millions
of dollars that were being poured into their country. One said to me, “No other
tyrant has done what the Americans have done to my country.”
We also spoke to an opinion
pollster who had set up the first opinion poll in Iraq. He had 350 very brave people going
out throughout the country—
Madam Deputy Speaker:
Order. I am afraid that the hon. Lady’s time is up.
Earlier interventions in the preceeding debate
Intervention on the Shadow Foreign Secretary
25 Mar 2008 : Column 41
Lynne Jones rose—
Mr. Hague: In fairness, I shall give way to the hon.
Lady, who has been trying to intervene, and I shall then proceed a little way.
Lynne Jones: I thank the right hon. Gentleman. While I am
in favour of an inquiry, and I do not accept the Government’s arguments that the time
is not right, I am concerned about its nature. If we vote for the right hon. Gentleman’s
motion, how can we be sure that it will provide a full inquiry that will take evidence in
public, preferably on oath, in which we can have every confidence? We have not had
confidence in previous inquiries, with good reason.
Mr. Hague: The case we have set out in the motion is for
a Privy Council inquiry, modelled on the inquiry that took place after the Falklands war.
As I said in response to the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay), the practical
result of the motion being carried would be that the Government would be required by
Parliament to set up an inquiry, which would be a matter for further debate. My preferred
model is that of a Privy Council inquiry. I want to set out the reasons for that in a
moment.
Intervention on the Foreign Secretary
25 Mar 2008 : Column 60
Lynne Jones: Will my right hon. Friend give way?
David Miliband: In a moment; let me make some progress.
The right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks, majored on this point, but it is not credible
to argue on the basis of the risk of interest fading, of records being lost, or of e-mails
going missing. That cannot conceivably be the basis for arguing for an inquiry now,
25 Mar 2008 : Column 61
rather than when our troops have come home. That seems to me to be the fourth and final
weakness of the case that he makes.
Lynne Jones: My right hon. Friend mentions the Butler
committee’s inquiry, but how can the House have confidence in that inquiry, or indeed
that of the Intelligence and Security Committee, when one member of both committees—a
former Member of the House, Ann Taylor—was involved in the preparation of the
dossier? We know that from an e-mail to Jonathan Powell, among others, that begins:
“Ann Taylor read the draft dossier this morning and passed on
some detailed comments to John Scarlett. She has just rung me to underline the following
points.”
There
then follow various points. A Member of the House was involved in drawing up the dossier,
was then appointed a member of the Butler committee, and was Chair of the Intelligence and
Security Committee; how can we have confidence in those procedures?
David Miliband: I have never heard the credibility or the
good sense of the Butler inquiry called into question. I think that all of us who have
read that study believe that it did a very serious job, without fear or favour. It
interrogated all the relevant people, it looked into all the issues, and it had full
access to papers. It came up with a clear set of recommendations that no one would say
were comfortable for the Prime Minister and the Government of the time.
Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South) (Lab): What the Butler
saw was as little as possible.
David Miliband: My hon. Friend says, from a sedentary
position, something about what the Butler saw; I think that the Butler saw pretty much
everything in this case. I am surprised to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham,
Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) cast doubt on the credibility of the Butler inquiry.
---
Despite David Miliband's surprise, the criticisms I made of the Butler Inquiry in 2004
have long been up on my website. To read them, please click here.
