UK: Blair Accused of Iraq War Cover-up

Local Editor

Members of Tony Blair's Cabinet were "deliberately" excluded from seeing key documents drawn up by officials examining the case for war against Iraq, a former head of the UK Civil Service revealed.
Lord Butler, who led the Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction in the aftermath of the invasion, said there was no shortage of "very good" information available to help ministers evaluate the case for war in 2003.
In remarks to a Foreign Office seminar, Butler suggested that the former Prime Minister had intentionally kept the documents away from the majority of the Cabinet. "A lot of very good official papers were prepared," he said. "None was ever circulated to the Cabinet, just as the Attorney General's advice [on the legality of the war] was not circulated to the Cabinet.

"So, the Cabinet was not as well-informed as the three leading protagonists: the Prime Minister, the Defense Secretary and the Foreign Secretary... I think that was deliberate, and it was a weakness of the machinery that underlay that particular decision."

Butler chaired the independent Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2004 and remains in close contact with senior civil servants who were working in Whitehall at the time.

Lord Butler added that his understanding was that Blair used presentations to summarize briefings on Iraq to the wider Cabinet. But he said he did not think these were a satisfactory substitute for access to full documentation.
"There were a lot of PowerPoint presentations, which is not nearly as good," he said.

He later added: "One of my greatest criticisms of the Blair government was what I felt was a decline of collective decision-making."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team