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Feeling for the truth

25 August 2003

The September dossier on WMD was not so much a balanced judgement as the case for the prosecution. Where in Downing Street were the people making the case for the other side?

The word "feel" and its derivatives had quite an outing last week. The prime minister's press supremo Alastair Campbell used feel, felt or feeling nearly 50 times in his, admittedly extensive, evidence to the Hutton enquiry.

"So what?" you may say. Some people say "I felt" when they mean "I thought". Evidently Campbell is one of these. But a psychologist with an interest in language might not leave it there. The word "feel" has a flexibility, a slight lack of specificity about it that could lend itself well to the vocabulary of a meister-spinner. There is a difference between "The feeling was..." and "We thought...".

That is not a criticism of Campbell. Spinners are paid to spin, and when you listen to them you build in a discount to reflect the fact that they are expressing matters in whatever way is most supportive of their master's plans. Campbell is also not paid to know anything about Iraqi weapons systems, and if anybody had asked him to write a dossier on the subject they would need their head seeing to. So Campbell is not really the story here. The key question is: while he was feeling his way to the best possible presentation of the government's position, who in Downing Street was doing the thinking?

The answer, at least so far as advising the prime minister on Iraqi weapons is concerned, appears to be the Joint Intelligence Committee, chiefly in the persons of Sir David Omand and John Scarlett. Sir David is Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office and has permanent secretary status in a job incorporating "a number of the functions traditionally associated with the Cabinet Secretary's post". He is also line manager to John Scarlett, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and head of the impressive-sounding Intelligence and Securities Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, although Mr Scarlett himself has, by his own account, "direct access to the Prime Minister".

These two gentlemen are the prime minister's most senior advisors on security matters, and both accept that the committee on which they serve set out to make the dossier on Iraqi weapons as strong as the intelligence could possibly allow. That sounds perfectly reasonable until you consider what it means. It is like a court of law in which the prosecution uses the evidence to make the accused seem as guilty as possible and the defence are not allowed to have their say. Such a trial would be a travesty of justice, but happily in real courts the prosecution evidence is made available to the defence lawyers, who use all their forensic and persuasive powers to project an alternative interpretation more favourable to their side.

Omand and Scarlett must know that intelligence is not evidence in the legal sense of the word. Intelligence is information that (a) might or might not be true and (b) even if true in its raw state might mean any one of half a dozen things. If you are going to use this information to make a point, you need not only to corroborate it if you can, but you need to test it by seeing what evidence you can find to the contrary. A good intelligence analyst needs a devil's advocate sitting on his shoulder saying "Yes, but what about..." every minute or so, lest he get carried away building selectively sourced castles in the air.

Now, given that none of the dossier's famous weapons have turned up in Iraq, it would beggar belief to say that there was no intelligence to say that these weapons might not exist. Indeed, Dr Kelly himself, who clearly knew a thing or two, is reported to have held the view pre-war that there was only a 30 per cent chance that Iraq had these weapons. So if the dossier had been intended as a fair presentation of the available intelligence it should have contained not only all the information pointing most strongly to the government's preferred conclusions, but also all the evidence pointing most strongly the other way.

That would have been a good intelligence analysis, but as a political tool for the government it would have been no use at all. The dossier that emerged, therefore, was not a balanced analysis but specifically a summary of all the best intelligence information on one side of the argument only. In other words, it set out the case for the prosecution.

There's nothing wrong with that, provided that is what they said it was. Nor was there anything wrong with the intelligence professionals putting it together as a service to the government, provided they were clear that it was only one half of a balanced view. But this is where the thinking seems to have stopped and the thing went all feely. For since, so far as one can read the history of these events, the essential decision in relation to the threat posed by Iraq had already been taken at a political level, there was no use for intelligence information that appeared to counter the established conclusion and Downing Street's intelligence staff fell into the mode of only providing what was useful to that end.

This is not to say that the intelligence provided was specious, or that anything was invented in the way that Mr Campbell was alleged to have done. It is simply to say that it was not the whole picture because the rest of the picture, the bit that turned out (unexpectedly) to be the true picture, had no use at that time. What one would like to know is this: were the intelligence people at Downing Street so tied in to the feely political project that they forgot about that devil's advocate that should have been sitting on their shoulder and making them think? Did they forget, therefore, to warn their political master that the conclusions being drawn from the intelligence picture they were presenting might actually be wrong?

The evidence given to Lord Hutton does not answer this question. But Tony Blair must be a better actor than we give him credit for if he did not believe 100 per cent in the direct threat that Saddam posed. It is possible, though alarming, to conclude from this that the crucial distinction between a balanced assessment (which would include the evidence against) and a document designed to make a case, appears to have been lost on him. In other words, he actually believed the dossier; believed, that is to say, that it really proved something. He supposed it to be in the nature of a judgement in a trial rather than the case for the prosecution with the defence as yet unheard.

It's a classic problem-solving slip up - convincing yourself that everything points to your favoured solution and closing your eyes to the bits that don’t help. You would have thought that all those classy advisers in Downing Street were there to ensure that this didn't happen. But the evidence of Hutton is that in Downing Street it really is T.B. who decides. If, as it appears, his decision to go to war was driven by a heady mix of personal idealism and Anglo-American top-dog chemistry, it seems unlikely that there will be found in the mound of papers presented to the enquiry any suggestion that those close to the prime minister were questioning whether this was a good idea.