By Tim Shipman
Daily Mail
13th May 2011
Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair were accused of lying to the Iraq Inquiry yesterday after devastating secret evidence was declassified.
A furious former spy chief wrote to Sir John Chilcot, the Inquiry chairman, to complain that the former Downing Street spin doctor failed to tell the truth about the dodgy dossier on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
And Mr Blair came under fire from the man he put in charge of Southern Iraq after the war. Sir Hilary Synnott said the then prime minister distorted his words about the post-war chaos.
Details of the backlash emerged as the Inquiry team released a series of previously secret documents.
Sir John delivered further bad news for Mr Blair and his allies by revealing that he will not publish his report until the summer because he needs time to contact those he is planning to criticise.
When Mr Campbell gave evidence in January 2010, he vociferously denied that the dossier on Saddam’s arsenal was specifically drawn up to ‘make the case for war’.
But Major-General Michael Laurie, who was head of intelligence collection for the Defence Intelligence Agency, has become the first senior spy to flatly contradict the spin doctor’s claims.
In an email to Sir John, published for the first time yesterday, General Laurie said: ‘Alastair Campbell said to the inquiry that the purpose of the dossier was not “to make a case for war”. I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used.
‘We knew at the time that the purpose of the Dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence. I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given.’ Read more…
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