’The public must look to what is missing from the report’

By Scott Ritter

Tony Blair’s government is heralding the Hutton report
as a victory, since it absolves it of any wrongdoing
regarding the "sexing up" of intelligence about the
threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The Hutton report was released at the same time as the
former head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay,
testified before the US Congress that there appear to
be no WMD in Iraq, and that the intelligence was "all
wrong". Given this, the Hutton findings have taken on
an almost Alice in Wonderland aura. By focusing on a
single news story broadcast by the BBC, Hutton has
created a political smokescreen behind which Blair is
seeking to distract the British public from the harsh
reality that his government went to war based on
unsustained allegations that have yet to be backed up
with a single piece of substantive fact. Lord Hutton
was in a position to expose this; he chose not to. It
is left to the public, therefore, to carefully examine
his report, looking not for what it contains but for
what is missing.

A review of testimony submitted to the inquiry elicits
a single reference to Operation Rockingham, a secretive
intelligence activity buried inside the Defence
Intelligence Staff, which dealt with Iraqi WMD and
activities of the UN special commission (Unscom). This
acknowledged that Rockingham managed the interaction
between David Kelly, the weapons expert whose suicide
led to the Hutton inquiry, and the UN. But Lord Hutton
dug no further into this. If he had, some interesting
insight would have been provided on several issues of
concern, including the possibility of the "shaping" of
UN intelligence data by Rockingham to serve the policy
objectives of its masters in the Foreign Office and the
joint intelligence committee.

Dr Kelly became Rockingham’s go-to person for
translating the often confusing data that came out of
Unscom into concise reporting that could be forwarded
to analysts in the British intelligence community, as
well as to political decision-makers. Rockingham was in
a position to know that, increasingly, the facts
emerging from inside Iraq supported Baghdad’s
contention that there was no longer a biological
weapons programme in Iraq, or any hidden biological
weapons or agents.

But this data received little or no attention inside
Rockingham. Dr Kelly was not only an active participant
in the investigations in Iraq, but also a key player in
shaping the findings to the British government. He was
also one of the key behind-the-scenes advocates of the
government position. For some time, the government had
allowed him unfettered access to the press, where he
spoke, often on the record, about his work with Unscom.

Any probing of Rockingham by Lord Hutton would have
exposed it for what it had become - a big player in the
shaping of information regarding Iraq’s WMD inside the
government and, through its media connections, in
shaping public opinion as well.

Given Rockingham’s penetration of Unscom at virtually
every level, there existed a seamless flow of data from
Iraq, through New York, to London, carefully shaped
from beginning to end by people working not for the UN
security council, but for the British government.
Iraq’s guilt, preordained by the government, became a
self-fulfilling prophesy that only collapsed when
occupied Iraq failed to disgorge that which Rockingham,
and the rest of the UK intelligence community, had said
must exist.

· Scott Ritter was formerly chief UN weapons inspector
in Iraq

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1134768,00.html