Word: dossiers
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...mistaken. Because Saddam was such a serial liar, analysts repeatedly assumed the worst. In September 2002, when Blair's government wanted to convince the public to take a tougher line against Saddam, it turned to its top clearinghouse for secret information, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), to produce a dossier on Iraq's supposed WMD. The JIC, in particular its chairman, John Scarlett, willingly rose to the task. But the contrast between its usual role of soberly sifting shards of ambiguous evidence and the starker hues needed to make a public argument resulted in what Butler dryly called a "strain...
...saying she instructed staff to write "a speculative piece" that would "lean far forward" and "stretch to the maximum the evidence" in response to senior policymakers' interest in links between al-Qaeda and Saddam. That sounds eerily close to accusations made about the British government's September 2002 dossier, which included the claim that Saddam could fire chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes. Blair's foreword pushed the case harder, calling the issue of Saddam's weapons a "current and serious threat to the U.K. national interest." Last week Blair admitted: "I have to accept that we have...
During his 24 years on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Harry A. Blackmun presided over thousands of cases, including Roe v. Wade, for which he wrote the majority opinion. The famously liberal judge also assembled a vast dossier of private papers--more than 530,000 letters and diaries--which, upon his retirement in 1994, he donated to the Library of Congress. Last week 1,585 boxes of his papers were unsealed...
...broadcast. Yet the diary of Blair's communications director, Alastair Campbell, shows that he was obsessed with outing Kelly, sure that this would "f___ Gilligan." Hutton focused instead on the worry of some officials that if they concealed that a civil servant had come forward to criticize the WMD dossier, they would later be accused of a cover-up. Instead of acknowledging that spin doctoring as well as decent motives could have fueled Kelly's outing, which led to his suicide, Hutton gave the government every benefit of every doubt...
Blair ended the week eager to "move on," a senior aide said. But those missing WMD will not leave him alone. Now that Hutton has pronounced the WMD dossier an honest mistake, pressure is growing, as it is in Washington, to investigate why it occurred. Blair rejects that idea. All the same, the BBC bosses had to quit because they had led their organization into trouble by trusting information from subordinates that turned out to be wrong. Blair, who accepted their resignations, may yet have to contemplate their example...