Butler Report Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors - 2004

OUR TERMS OF REFERENCE
1. On 3 February 2004, the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary announced in the House
of Commons:
My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has decided to establish a committee to
review intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. This committee will be
composed of Privy Counsellors. It will have the following terms of reference: to
investigate the intelligence coverage available in respect of WMD programmes in
countries of concern and on the global trade inWMD,taking into accountwhat is now
known about these programmes; as part of this work,to investigate the accuracy of
intelligence on Iraqi WMD up to March 2003,and to examine any discrepancies
between the intelligence gathered,evaluated and used by the Government before
the conflict,and between that intelligence and what has been discovered by the Iraq
survey group since the end of the conflict; and to make recommendations to the
Prime Minister for the future on the gathering,evaluation and use of intelligence on
WMD,in the light of the difficulties of operating in countries of concern.
My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has asked the committee to report before the
summer recess. The committee will follow the precedent in terms of procedures of
the Franks committee. It will have access to all intelligence reports and assessments
and other relevant Government papers,and will be able to call witnesses to give oral
evidence in private. The committee will work closely with the US inquiry and the Iraq
survey group.
The committee will submit its final conclusions to my right hon. Friend the Prime
Minister in a form for publication,along with any classified recommendations and
material. The Government will,of course,co-operate fully with the committee.
OUR WORK
2. The Committee met for the first time on Thursday 5 February and four of us were sworn in
as Members of the Privy Council on Wednesday 11 February. Mrs Taylor was already a
Privy Counsellor.
3. In view of the very tight timetable for our Review, it was essential to make a rapid start. We
are therefore especially grateful for the speed with which the Security and Intelligence Co-
ordinator, Sir David Omand, supplied us with accommodation and an excellent team of
support staff in the Cabinet Office. We are also grateful to the Intelligence and Security
Committee and their staff for enabling us to use theCommittee’s roomin theCabinetOffice
for our hearings, and for the forbearance and co-operation they extended to us.
4. Since 5 February, we have met 36 times. We have visited Washington, where we met the
co-Chairs of the President’s Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United
States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Governor Charles S. Robb and Judge
Laurence H. Silberman and members of their Commission; General Brent Scowcroft,
Chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; and senior members of
the Administration and the Congress, including Senator Pat Roberts and Senator John
Rockefeller, Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Intelligence Committee;
Congressman Porter Goss and Congresswoman Jane Harman, Chairman and Ranking
Member of the House Intelligence Committee; Dr Condoleezza Rice, National Security
Adviser; General Colin Powell and Mr Richard Armitage, State Department; Mr George
Tenet, Director, and staff of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Vice Admiral Lowell
Jacoby and staff of the Defense Intelligence Agency. We are grateful to Sir David
Manning, HM Ambassador atWashington, and his team for making the arrangements for
this visit. We also visited Baghdad and we express our particular appreciation to Major
General Keith Dayton, Brigadier Graeme Morrison and Mr Charles Duelfer and their staffs
for being willing to receive and brief us at a very difficult and busy time, and to staff of the
Ministry of Defence and the Royal Air Force for organising the visit and arranging our safe
journey there and back.We also had useful discussions with representatives of a number
of other countries.
5. The tight timetable for our Report has caused some difficulties for us. The main one is that
the Iraq Survey Group, with whose findings our terms of reference require us to compare
the intelligence received by the British Government, have not yet produced any publicly
available report. They produced an interim report in September 2003 and a Status Report
in March 2004. We have had access to these. We were very grateful to General Dayton
and Mr Duelfer for also briefing us about their progress. We have undertaken not to
anticipate their findings but, on the basis of the information they gave us, we believe that
our conclusions are not inconsistent with what they have discovered so far. The much
longer timetable given to the US Presidential Commission has had the result that, while we
had useful initial discussions with them, we have not been able to fulfil the Foreign
Secretary’s statement that we would work closely with them.
6. On the other hand, we were greatly helped by the evidence given to Lord Hutton’s Inquiry,
by the report of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee on “The Decision to go
to War in Iraq” (HC 813) and above all by the report of the Intelligence and Security
Committee entitled “IraqiWeapons of Mass Destruction—Intelligence and Assessments”
(Cm 5972). We should like to express particular thanks to the Intelligence and Security
Committee for giving us access to the classified evidencewhich underlay their report. This
saved us much spadework.
7. It may be asked what further we could add by going over such heavily traversed ground.
One answer is perhaps that, as in the search for weapons in Iraq, one can never do too
much digging. But others are that we have had the considerable advantage of the further
passage of time which has allowed us to consider the evidence that has emerged since
the war on Iraqi nuclear, biological, chemical and ballistic missile programmes and the
results of post-war validation by the Secret Intelligence Service of their relevant human
intelligence sources. More importantly, we have had much wider access to the
Government’s intelligence and policy papers. Even so, we do not pretend that ours can
be the last word on every aspect of the issues we cover.
OUR APPROACH
8. Our approach has been to start with the intelligence assessments of the Joint Intelligence
Committee (JIC) and then to get from the intelligence agencies a full list of the underlying
intelligence, both accepted and rejected, which was available to inform those
assessments. We have then compared that intelligence with the JIC’s assessments and
considered whether it appears to have been properly evaluated. In the other direction,we,
like the Franks Committee, have obtained from Government departments those policy
papers which their Permanent Secretaries have certified as containing all the material
relevant to our Review, to allow us to establish the use which wasmade of the intelligence.
Finally, where outcomes are known, we have compared the prior intelligence and the
assessments made of it with those outcomes.
9. We have received 68 written submissions frommembers of the public and have taken oral
evidence from47witnesses, some of whomgave evidencemore than once. Exceptwhere
witnesses asked for their identity to be protected, we list our witnesses at Annex A.
10. We have focussed on the intelligence available to the British Government and the use
made of it by our Government. Although that inevitably has led us to areas of UK/US co-
operation, we have deliberately not commented in this Report on the actions of the US
intelligence agencies, ground that is being covered by the Presidential Commission.
11. We have been conscious of the Foreign Secretary’s statement that our report should be
submitted to the Prime Minister in a form fit for publication. We have also been conscious
of the overriding need not to prejudice continuing or future intelligence operations or to
endanger sources and have shaped our report accordingly. We are confident that what
is published here gives Parliament and the public a fair representation of our conclusions
and views.
12. In furtherance of this, we have exceptionally included in our Report extensive quotations
from assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee. We have ensured that in all cases
our quoting these will not have implications for national security. The Government has
made clear that our action in doing sowill not be accepted as a precedent for putting those
assessments into the public domain in the future.