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| 45-minute claim 'a bit of colour' | 45-minute claim 'a bit of colour' |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| Including the 45-minute claim in an intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons was "asking for trouble", Tony Blair's former security coordinator has said. | Including the 45-minute claim in an intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons was "asking for trouble", Tony Blair's former security coordinator has said. |
| Sir David Omand told the Iraq inquiry some intelligence figures were "queasy" about publishing intelligence details. | |
| The 45-minute claim was put in late and was a "bit of local colour" the secret service would allow to be used. | |
| And he said it was a "big mistake" to combine the 2002 intelligence dossier with the government's case for action. | |
| Sir David, who was security and intelligence co-ordinator from 2002 to 2005 - was asked about the September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons. | |
| 'Natural queasiness' | |
| It included the claim that Iraq could use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes - which was at the centre of a row between the BBC and the government. | |
| Sir David said statements in the dossier had not been tightened up and said joint intelligence committee chairman John Scarlett would have told him if he was being put under undue pressure. | |
| The risk was we would end up with a document that was simply a series of assertions Sir David Omand | |
| On the 45-minute claim he said it was a piece of intelligence that was circulated "quite late in the day". | |
| He said there was a "natural queasiness" among some in the intelligence community at putting details into the public domain. | |
| "The [intelligence] agencies were quite happy for generalised statements to be made but were not very happy about any of the detail of the reporting being used. The risk was we would end up with a document that was simply a series of assertions." | |
| 'Beyond doubt' | |
| There was a concern that it would not look more convincing without more detail, he said. | |
| "That is my personal explanation of why as it were people fell on the 45 minutes, at least that was something the secret service would allow to be used, and with hindsight one can see that adding a bit of local colour like that is asking for trouble but we didn't really spot that at the time." | |
| He was asked about Tony Blair's foreword to the dossier, in which he wrote that he believed the intelligence had established "beyond doubt" that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons. | |
| 'Not spotted' | |
| Sir David said the foreword was not discussed as part of meetings of the joint intelligence committee but was circulated separately "late in the day". | |
| "My memory is that I didn't pay that much attention to this bit of it, which was a mistake... I totally failed to spot the potential problem that would arise through this disjunction between statement of case directly associated with the text of the dossier." | |
| He said it was a document produced by the PM under his own name, adding: "If we all had more time and perhaps had thought about it more perhaps we would have been suggesting different things." | |
| Sir David also said it had been a "big mistake" to combine "the making of the case by government... with the presentation of the summary and what the JIC had found". | |
| "We didn't spot the potential problems that would get us into. I certainly wouldn't recommend doing it again." |