The Iraq Inquiry: Statement by Sir John Chilcot [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Iraq Inquiry: Statement by Sir John Chilcot [pdf]

iraqinquiry.org.uk

145 pointsmerraksh82 comments

  On 28 July, Mr Blair wrote to President Bush with an
  assurance that he would be with him “whatever”
  [...]
  At the end of January, Mr Blair accepted the US timetable
  for military action by mid-March.
  [...]
  As late as 17 March, Mr Blair was being advised by the
  Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee that Iraq
  possessed chemical and biological weapons, the means to
  deliver them and the capacity to produce them.

Seems to me the lesson here is: If you decide to invade first, then later you invite your intelligence agencies to "get with the program, jump on the team and come on in for the big win" when it's clear what you want them to tell you, they'll tell you that.

Trying to shift blame to them after things went badly seems like scapegoating to me.

I mean, that's like going to a car dealership and asking the salesman if his cars are reliable. There's no point in even asking, because you already know he'll say yes regardless of the truth.

Max Hastings makes the point in his book on intelligence in WW2 (The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-1945) that intelligence agencies always tell their political masters what they want to hear - this happens in democracies and totalitarian regimes.

It was presumably clear to those in MI6 that Blair had already decided to go to war, so what would have been in it for them to try and persuade him otherwise? Probably an early retirement at best.

> It was presumably clear to those in MI6 that Blair had already decided to go to war, so what would have been in it for them to try and persuade him otherwise? Probably an early retirement at best.

It's deeply saddening to think that hundreds of people were more interested in protecting their position and pension than they were in doing the right thing. It's an astonishing failure of moral courage.

I suspect anyone suspected of "moral courage" never makes it to the higher reaches of the civil service or the military.

Mind you, places like ARRSE are fond of pointing out that many a senior general seems to rediscover their morals in their memoirs once they retire!

Shortly before his demise Dr Kelly attempted to be a source that the 'dodgy dossier' was 'sexed-up' to journalist Andrew Gilligan.

The BBC was chastised & curtailed for standing by journalism that in hindsight was true and important.

> Probably an early retirement at best.

Or an early grave. As in the case of the person who did try to blow the whistle.

I'm always surprised by the number of conspiracy theorists on HN. Perhaps I shouldn't be?

In this case you shouldn't be. Dr David Kelly was a UK weapons inspector who told the government that he had informed his superiors that there were no WMDs. The government and the media were particularly harsh with him and he committed suicide.

There are conspiracies surrounding his death, but regardless of them it is fair to say that he was driven to an early grave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

Yeh; to be clear this is what I was aiming it. I think it's entirely fair to say that the Govt. had some not-insignificant part in driving Dr Kelly to commit suicide.

Whether a black op or not... it's certainly discouraging to a potential whistleblower.

I forgot about David Kelly. However I was referring more to this idea

> It was presumably clear to those in MI6 that Blair had already decided to go to war, so what would have been in it for them to try and persuade him otherwise? Probably an early retirement at best.

Which was replied to with a comment about ending up in an early grave. David Kelly, even if you believe he was killed by the government, was not killed because he tried to convince the Prime Minister not to go to war. His untimely demise came from pressure related to him leaking confidential information to the press. In my opinion those are two different things and I intended to address the former not the latter.

Also, to be clear. I think David Kelly was right and what he went through was incredibly fucked up.

There is also an interview which may be on youtube - Ive seen it in docos of Rumsfeld before 9/11 saying how they had got rid of all his WMD. Then post 9/11 suddenly he had them back

You should not. The vast majority of "conspiracy theories" are outlandish, improbable and not founded in visible fact.

However, it is a useful mental exercise to listen to a hypothesis, perform research, synthesize your own theories and form a well rounded opinion on a topic that may, on the surface, seem impossible.

I'm partial to a good conspiracy theory and this one has it in spades... The circumstances of Kelly's death are very odd. And didn't Robin Cook (most prominent and influential opponent on the front bench) meet with an accident after this also?

David Kelly definitely died. At the very least, he was hounded into suicide under intense media, political, professional and personal pressure, without even getting into conspiracy theories.

If this is unavoidable, why bother with the thing at all and just have a skeleton staff of actors to roleplay the yes-men?

(A point I keep trying to make about the War on Terror is that trying to do it invisibly, with intelligence agencies, is tempting but ineffective. These agencies cannot be effectively reviewed, and produce intelligence which cannot be used in court or presented to the public. So we end up with a long series of unaccountable murders by drone feeding into whatever the next Arab civil war is.

Whereas a policing approach would produce evidence for inspection in public, after which those convicted of terrorism could be imprisoned with our consciences clear.)

> If this is unavoidable, why bother with the thing at all and just have a skeleton staff of actors to roleplay the yes-men?

Arguably it is the responsibility of leaders not to tilt their hands before the intelligence is available.

But it's the inclination of leaders, and everyone else, to lean toward their desires and preconceptions.

There's a difference between an inclination and obviously not wanting to hear something different.

>Whereas a policing approach would produce evidence for inspection in public, after which those convicted of terrorism could be imprisoned with our consciences clear.

How do you police land that you don't govern or control? Drones are used in Pakistan tribal areas, Yemen, and Somolia. Three places without US forces to make apprehensions. Places that if you were to land US forces, they'd get met with armed resistance. There is no police approach that would actually work.

How do you police land that you don't govern or control?

Traditionally, you don't; police services have jurisdictions within which they operate. We're not sending the British Metropolitan Police over to investigate the murder of Alton Sterling, for example.

The lack of availability of legal means does not legitimize the use of illegal means. The "Operation Wrath Of God" retaliation by Israeli security forces going round murdering terrorists in Europe went down incredibly badly but fortunately stopped after the first misidentified target. How would you expect the US to react if Chinese security forces started bombing US apartment buildings to kill Chinese expat dissidents?

The instability of those areas and lack of traditional policing isn't incidental to the threat of terrorism, it's completely connected to it. The only way out of this in the long term is to expand impartial rule of law. Remote assassination without trial is contrary to the rule of law.

In UK terms the large number of trials of would be terrorists would suggest that our agencies are working rather well. To what extent it is domestic versus overseas, human verus signals agencies, their co-operation and foreign partners we don't know.

> our agencies are working rather well

To what extent do our agencies "create" the terrorists that they're rewarded to fight against?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-p...

Ever hear the phrase "bad facts make bad law?" You'd badly distort the domestic criminal justice system if you forced it to accommodate investigations and trials of foreign belligerents.

I'm generally receptive to the bad-facts-bad-law argument, but would like to hear more about how a civilian criminal enforcement program against foreign terrorists would distort our legal system.

One issue could be that the crimes foreign terrorists are accused of tend to be particularly heinous, so courts would be more likely than usual to make one-sided rulings to make sure they got convicted. A potential example can be seen in the recent trial of domestic terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, where serious questions about the impartiality of the jury were apparently ignored:

https://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/01/23/just-another-term-o...

The decision not to change venue was later upheld on appeal, with a dissent:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Perhaps in this particular case the decision wasn't wrong but it's not hard to imagine other, worse scenarios. And in these foreign terrorism cases there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on, like bribing random governments to identify and kidnap suspects for us to interrogate. Faced with the choice of (a) not doing that kind of stuff anymore, (b) letting the accused terrorists go free because our questionable activities violated their rights or tainted the evidence against them, or (c) interpreting the law to make all this stuff allowed, I'm not sure I want to find out what we would pick.

If a terrorist is on U.S. soil, we have to give them a criminal trial. So here, we're talking about giving criminal process to terrorists located abroad. That runs into problems at every step:

1) Warrants. In general, you need to go to a magistrate judge in the district where property or a person may be found in order to get a warrant. There is a "terrorism exception" which allows a magistrate judge to issue warrants for people or things outside their district. In my opinion that's a bad exception. The venue requirement has the important benefit of requiring local cooperation for an investigation that's probably run out of D.C. The "terrorism exception" to venue gets rid of that. And giving process to foreign terrorists would entail expanding that exception so judges in D.C. would routinely be asked to issue warrants for people and places totally outside their jurisdiction in foreign countries.

2) 4th Amendment. The 4th amendment inherently requires a balancing between the legitimate needs of policing and the rights of individuals. Giving foreign terrorists due process will require extending the 4th amendment to them, but also in the process adding new holes necessitated by doing police work in a foreign country. It's not inconceivable that some "exigent circumstances" hole originally created for terrorists embedded within armed groups abroad gets applied to domestic criminals embedded within organized gangs.

3) Due process rights generally. It's very likely that the due process rules will be relaxed when applied to foreign terrorists, out of exigency if nothing else. Due process is a luxury the government can afford domestically because it has a near-complete monopoly on violence on U.S. soil. Do you stop and read someone their Miranda rights while in the mountains of Pakistan? When foreign terrorism is considered a military rather than civilian matter, there is in effect a "firewall" that keeps domestic due process rights from being watered down. Remove that firewall, and you'll see precedents from terrorism cases flowing back into organized crime cases on U.S. soil.[1] That sort of diffusion is inevitable in a common law system.

4) Trials in abstentia. The right to face one's accuser is fundamental to due process. So what do you do with a foreign terrorist that you can't capture alive? It will never be acceptable to people to just let them go. If you require criminal process for those people, you'll inevitably end up with some kangaroo-court trial in abstentia. And you'll end up with precedent that says: "well, sometimes, facing your accusers isn't required by due process."

[1] You already see this effect in U.S. law, where laws like RICO designed for mobsters or precedents developed for the drug war are being levied against non-violent criminals.

Richard Clarke spoke out about it, and was promptly sacked.

I do not believe for a second that either Blair or Bush actually believed in those mythical weapons of mass destruction or Iraq's capability or intention to use them.

I sometimes wonder if the WMD excuse was made up to convince the public to go along or to cover their butts later on. In Europe, as far as I remember, hardly anyone believed that excuse. Accept for Angela Merkel who travelled to Washington just to tell Bush that she would join the invasion without hesitation if she was chancellor.

A common quality amongst many "leaders" in our society (and by "leaders", I mean a particular brand of relatively high functioning psychopath/narcissist that tends to thrive in such environments, be it politics or the boardroom/management/e-suite) is the ability to believe whatever they need to believe to paint themselves in the best possible light and achieve their ends at that particular time. If you do not have that little voice that whispers what you're doing is wrong, or that you're a fraud, or that you really shouldn't be doing that, or that its not fair or right... or even any internal concern with objective truth or fact, you will find it remarkably easy to climb in many hierarchical structures, because you don't have to pay the cognitive costs many of the the others need to pay to remain there.

Now I, unsurprisingly, don't know Bush or Blair. Maybe they're actually people...who cynically make up facts, spread lies, and throw away lives for their own political agenda.

Or maybe they're just ignorant fools who went into it all based on emotions and all the spineless yes men just set them up with a self-reinforcing circle jerk, like a government level facebook filter-bubble. That's probably the best/most flattering possible interpretation...

But given I believe there are a disproportionate number of "reality-warpers" in leadership positions, I must at least concede its POSSIBLE they really did believe there were weapons of mass destruction.

In reality, its probably some banal mixture of all the above...

I tend to believe in similar structure. What amazes me is how this bubbling is so natural for societies. What is it that groups like in this kind of individual ? massive lack of doubt that appease flocks ?

Psychopaths are unusually charming and persuasive.

Business, law, and politics are all about persuasion, not truth or honesty.

So by default they're environments in which psychopaths can thrive.

I think there's exactly one political problem - how to keep psychopaths away from money, power, and influence. Everything else that goes wrong in politics and business is a direct result of feedback loops that reward psychopathic traits instead of excluding them.

The world would be an infinitely more pleasant and more effective place if this could be achieved.

this doesn't answer the question, or at least not the whole question. Why do most people seem to really like people with "leadership" traits even when they seem obviously disingenuous?

on a more personal level, I find this question even more confusing, because I seem to have a fairly strong negative emotional response to people with "leadership" traits. "Why would you follow that slimebag?" is usually my response.

Most people today are brought up in education systems that encourage conformity and obedience to authority. To some degree, some amount of conformity is required to prevent total anarchy. But that system of encouraging obedience is indoctrinated early and is very very strong. A leader simply emulates the same traits as a person of authority and thus is able to "hijack" that neurological response.

Personally, coming from an education system that places an even stronger emphasis on conformity than the American one, it took me a long time to figure out just how much it affects me and my friends. I don't know if it can be reversed but I'm glad to be aware of it at least.

I think this question inverts the causality. The slimeballs are playing a meta strategy, developing the traits that engender trust etc in the majority of people.

It doesn't matter that a few see through this (and gradually develop a strong aversion to them), as long as the majority continues to be tricked. It's an evolutionary game - if the majority start to get wise, the slimeballs up their game, change messages (/faces), or in the worst case back off slightly.

Therefore it's not a matter of trying to keep "these people" out of positions of power, but reducing the centralization of power that inherently attracts and enables metagamers.

Or more why isn't that bug tamed in some way. It seems that people let it happen, then forget, or move on. Then a new set of people will elect a moron. Etc etc .. There's no memory or structure to control or avoid that "more effectively".

wow, that's pretty fucked up. i could understand having a negative reaction to someone lying or being disingenuous, but to react that way to people that are charismatic and assertive suggests more that there is a problem with you, not them?

>suggests more that there is a problem with you, not them

Hm, I see we have another confident and charismatic person here!

but seriously, I am told that what is wrong with me is that I understand confidence as "The level of aggression appropriate to the social station one is emulating"

I don't understand how anyone finds that a pleasant quality, aside from the fact that it indicates you don't have too much aggression for your social station.

Of course, all of the "socially skilled" people I talk to tell me that I'm missing the true meaning of confidence, but then they describe something that has nothing to do with the observable qualities of the leaders who are described as confident.

politics, business and law are pretty much all about truth and honesty, as well as persuasion.

do you people genuinely believe that 'all politicians are liars' or some variant thereof? that's pretty sad, and suggests falling victim to certain cognitive biases, particularly confirmation bias and some kind of negative reinforcement effect. in the real world, most politicians are honestly trying to make things better for their constituents, with minor exceptions to that rule as always.

Supposedly Reagan was admired by his political colleagues for his ability to genuinely believe in what he was saying. They just had to pretend.

My view prior to the report and from what I've seen so far in the Bush-Blair correspondence is the exact opposite.

They and the intelligence services were so convinced about WMD that there was next to no questioning, at high levels, of the flimsy evidence for their continued existence. I believe that they thought they were justified and that finding WMDs would be vindication.

It doesn't seem reasonable that such astute political operators would make WMDs the centre of their justification if they didn't think that they existed. The failing was that this blinded them to the possibility that the Iraqi regime was bluffing.

It makes sense when you consider they believed the war would succeed, in terms of installing a peaceful and compliant regime in Iraq. After all, nobody holds inquiries into military victories.

The success in shifting the justification for war from WMD to getting rid of Saddam, or even less plausibly, fighting terrorism, shows that marketing strategy partly succeeded. Blair still justifies the war in terms of having got rid of Saddam Hussein. In short: they didn't know, and didn't care.

Remember under Bush there was also Wolfowitz and Feith's Office of Special Plans, which supplied Bush administration officials with cherry-picked, dodgy, raw intelligence, bypassing the CIA.

WMD were never a credible excuse for war in the first place, rather (ironically) a legal argument. The mere existence of chemical weapons is not a reasonable premise to launch a war. Claiming a castrated Iraq was any kind of threat to the United States or Britain was ludicrous.

Finally, there was no bluff going on - that's revisionist history. Saddam was complying with weapons inspectors right up to the time the invasion began.

> WMD were never a credible excuse for war in the first place I couldn't agree more. Neither the UK nor US were under an existential threat. Even if they had reason to believe that there was a direct threat to an ally i.e. Israel, that is no reason to wage pre-emptive war.

> Finally, there was no bluff going on - that's revisionist history That's simply not true. The Iraqi government were deliberately dicking the IAEA inspectors around trying to maintain the fiction that they still had chemical weapons. They wanted the outside world to believe that they were a threat but gambled that there was no political will to do anything about it. They were right on the former and, until 9/11, right on the latter.

What I find shocking is the gullibility of the intelligence services and the politicians. What I consider heinous is that they were willing to wage pre-emptive war regardless of the motive.

I think another lesson is that you cannot conduct a "surgical" war. We have seen this in every failed military action since Vietnam.

If you are going to go to war, the strategy should be total destruction of your enemy and his complete surrender. If you're not willing to do that, it's not worth even getting involved.

I think it worked in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. That was one of the arguments made by Blair today.

There were weapons inspectors in Iraq prior to the invasion and the intelligence services weren't able to direct the inspectors to any WMDs.

So Bush and Blair would not only have to believe they had evidence WMDs exist - they'd also have to believe that the evidence was at once so /bad/ it couldn't direct inspectors to a single shred of evidence, and so /good/ it was believable in spite of that fact.

Intelligence services might not have directed the inspectors to any WMDs but they did find time to spy on the leader of the weapons inspectors, with an aim to "provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program" [1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/04/15/s...

I remember reading an article by a German UN inspector who described that they got some "hot" leads from the CIA. At each of them they didn't find any evidence of activity within a few a few years. The response of the CIA was not to talk to them anymore.

Since there was incontrovertible evidence that Hussein had used gas against his own people, and WMDs are rather low-tech and easy to make, having been widely used in WW I, I never really doubted the intelligence at the time. It played in to what we already knew, and a lot of smart people were convinced.

> Since there was incontrovertible evidence that Hussein had used gas against his own people

With the full support of the Reagan administration at the time, mind you.

The truly scary thing about the likes of Blair is that they can choose what they earnestly believe in to suit what is politically expedient.

Just think this through for a second. If they were bold enough to intentionally fabricate a lie to go to war, why didn't they fabricate some evidence of a WMD program?

So either they told a lie that they knew would exposed within a couple months of an invasion OR they were wrong. The later is much more likely.

Assuming malice actually turns us away from the real questions that should be asked. Why were they wrong? What did they do that led them down the wrong path? How can we make sure that doesn't happen again.

But if you just assume they were being badguys you miss all that.

yep. and of course, all the time saddam was playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship, pretending he had WMD in order to maintain iraq's position locally and globally, by refusing to allow inspections by the UN, and delaying and obfuscating facts when forced to comply. so it's no wonder the WMD line seemed plausible at the time.

The people I blame most are the MPs who voted for the war. It was pretty clear at the time that there was no evidence for the WMDs or for breaches of the UN resolution by Saddam. The MPs should have investigated the evidence and asked tough questions. Instead they just did what they were told by Tony Blair. So much for democracy.

The full report is actually here, all 58 sections of it:

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-report/

The link above is just Chilcot's press statement which was read out on air this morning.

If you were to print it out the whole report, all twelve volumes, it looks like this:

http://imgur.com/zRHDZyE

edit: ok, for the avoidance of doubt, there are multiple copies of the same volume in each stack, this was the pile made available to journalists so they could grab a copy of each volume.

That image is misleading - the report is only 6417 pages which is only 12 books at (on average) 535 pages each. The image shows multiple copies of each volume.

Fairly certain anyone looking at that image would actually realise this.

Perhaps, but this is likely to be quite a hot topic, so using misleading imagery isn't helping anyone.

Oh, c'mon, I like to think that everyone who frequents this site is quick witted enough to know that's stacks of multiple copies of each volume.

They are labelled as such; it's not even slightly misleading.

It really wasn't misleading.

If I say that I'm twelve feet tall, anyone hearing that would realize that I'm not, but that doesn't make it any less of a lie.

(Not saying you're intentionally misleading, but the effect ends up being the same.)

A table, with piles of books, organised and labelled by volume, just like in a book shop, really how hard is this?

I know this is Hacker News, I know we can be pedants, but jings!....I'm waiting for someone challenge my assumption that there's a table(s) holding them up.

You said if you printed out all twelve volumes it would look like that. That's simply not true, it looks like that if you print out many copies. Yes, we can figure out what you mean, but that doesn't make the statement correct or the image not-misleading given the description.

I think we generally wouldn't care, except that the context is people who used these sort of silly tactics to deceive people into supporting a terrible war. Even though you're not doing it intentionally and it's not remotely of the same severity, it feels like the very distant sibling of finding some 1980s-era Sarin in a bunker and saying "see, they really did have WMDs!"

Ah. It was delayed so much to allow time for printing. It all makes sense now.

I merged the whole thing into a single PDF:

http://ohuiginn.net/docs/chilcot/chilcot_report.pdf

6417 pages -- enjoy!

Thanks for that - know of any reason some civic-minded person couldn't make a plain text web version and post it (other than fear of hosting fees and lack of free time)?

The tldr itself would be a small book size

>The tldr itself would be a small book size

tl;dr: "From peace options, bad intel, to a bad war."

Thanks, I wget'd all the PDFs, but this is much better due to how they were named.

@iocounu made a poem about it on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/iucounu/status/750456730472091648

The Guardian - Key points from the Iraq inquiry:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/iraq-inquiry...

After killing a President, starting a new war and killing thousands in a decade, the report says, Umm it was all wrong. Earlier Blair had said sorry

I wonder whether West could give same options to the likes of Osama, Qaddafi, Aiman AlZaharvi or this luxury only available for non-Muslims only?

It's available to those in power, whether at global level (the US/West), or local level (e.g. local government). Not really a Muslim/non-Muslim thing. And it's not something unique or new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...

Seems the definition of power is as relevant as terrorism.

Is there anything to stop the UK government censoring this report? I pose the question after it was delayed for publication by the government last year for after the general election. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EJK8K0ypl4

It would take seven years to publish and would not seem conspiratory to suggest the delays have helped reduce public attention / demand for the report.

Would it be possible to gag order certain reports or use governmental powers to achieve this?

No, it's already been done and part of the reason the report took so long.

"But the main reason for the delay was the long tussle between the inquiry and the government over which classified material could be published alongside the report, or referred to in it." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36024725

While I agree with the substance of conclusions in the report, the media's coverage of it -- as well as how it's been publicly discussed by current and former (non-Blair) members of the UK government -- seems to add up to an effort to take a pound of flesh off of Blair in some kind of weirdly tribalistic cathartic exercise for progressives.

I think its understandable that the media, especially the BBC, is a bit bitter. Here is an article from 2004 where the BBC chairman had to resign because of pressure from a government report over the evidence to go to war over Iraq:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3434661.stm

Here is an excerpt:

BBC chairman Gavyn Davies has resigned in the wake of Lord Hutton's criticisms of the corporation's reports.

He quit after Lord Hutton said the suggestion in BBC reports that the government "sexed up" its dossier on Iraq's weapons with unreliable intelligence was "unfounded".

Here is another quote from the story, this time from a BBC journalist:

"In the end what it comes down to is a judgement by Lord Hutton - who he believes, whose motives he trusts most and in that, again and again, he comes down on the side of politicians and officials."

So, as you say, some of the reporting today is probably a carthartic exercise...

Where's the OJ-like vow from Blair and Bush to not rest until the "real" WMDs are found?

Why PDF? They should've published it as web pages so we could link to individual sections.

PDF is better for this kind of thing, because average people can easily download and keep the thing. Web pages disappear.

Waste of money (£10million)!

Chaos in the Middle east is great for any country who wants to suck its resources cheaply without having to be hold ransom for it by a dictator. "interest of the country" has cost 160,000 lives in Iraq, none gives a shit because the future of black gold is secured until the next invasion

I'm a massive hypocrite, I'm about to fill up my car with the exact same oil and go for a pointless journey.

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