Chilcot hamstrung by secrecy

Should the man who told us that intelligence assessments had "established beyond doubt" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction be allowed to put his own spin on even more documents which we have not seen? That was the question facing the Iraq inquiry as Tony Blair made his long-awaited appearance in the absence of the papers that contradict his version of events. Yes, was the Chilcot panel's answer. The inquiry has indeed been gagged and its questioning of Blair stymied by its inability to quote back at him from actual evidence. Blair is very convincing if you don't have the full facts, as his Iraq adventure showed. Just about every version of the questions that Blair should be asked included the key and interlinked issues of when he signed up for war and for what purpose. Was it disarmament or regime change? The panel made a half-hearted attempt to establish what point Blair had signed up for regime change but they appear to have realised before they started that they were on a loser. They are not allowed to quote from documents that have not been declassified, including some that – as Sir Roderick Lyne acknowledged – are in the public domain. To get a good idea about what the Blair government's policy was before the April 2002 Crawford meeting with Bush, you only have to look at the Cabinet Office's options paper of March 2002 . This paper, as Lyne mentioned, has been leaked and is available on the internet. It discusses the options of toughened containment – via the return of UN inspectors – versus regime change, and comes down in favour of the latter. There is no conceivable reason why the government should not have declassified this document, except that it is too revealing. This, therefore, allowed Blair to misrepresent the paper. He claimed that it contained three options and failed to acknowledge that a specific one was chosen. He did, however, admit that the paper was not shown to the cabinet, as Clare Short has complained. Blair said that Iraq policy had been discussed at cabinet – but, of course, he did not tell the cabinet that the policy was regime change. Similarly, Blair denied that he had made any real commitment, conditional or otherwise, at his Crawford meeting with Bush, except that he would deal with Saddam. "Nothing was decided." There is a note of that meeting by Sir David Manning, Blair's foreign affairs adviser. It has not been released and is unlikely to be. But what the panel well know is that the Cabinet Office also published a briefing paper "Conditions for military action" for the famous July 2002 Downing Street meeting, which recorded that: "When the prime minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met." The recent controversy over suppression of documents has mainly focused on letters that Blair sent Bush in 2002, in particular one in July after the Downing Street meeting. Lyne has suggested that Blair offered "without conditions" to take part in military action. It is clear that the government has refused to declassify this and on that basis, the inquiry seems to have avoided it altogether. Similarly, Lawrence Freedman appears to have used as the basis of his questioning a note of another Blair meeting with Bush in January 2003. But he did not quote from this and, in particular, did not address the most controversial claim that has been made about that document – that it records a plan to trick the Iraqis into firing on a spy plane painted in UN colours. On Wednesday, chairman Sir John Chilcot made it clear that he was frustrated that the inquiry could not publish – and therefore quote from – documents that the government had refused to declassify. Lyne overtly dropped a line of questioning that went into areas he was not allowed to discuss. There is some merit in the Liberal Democrats' suggestion that Chilcot should suspend the hearings until they could operate in a way that inspires public confidence. But that would come, in any case, too late as far as Blair, who had an easy ride today, is concerned. We are left with the hope that the inquiry will be in a better position to question him if it asks him back for a second hearing. If, by that time, it can confront him with evidence that contradicts what he said today, that could be very damaging. In the meantime, an inquiry that came about in part because of documents that have emerged since previous inquiries has failed to follow through the implications of those documents. Hamstrung by secrecy it has protested only weakly, the Iraq inquiry stumbled badly today.