Chris Ames | ukwatch.net

Flying in the face of reason

eddie — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:46:31 +0000

The wheels seem to be coming off the Heathrow expansion, if you’ll forgive the expression. The plans from the Department for Transport (DfT) for a third runway and more flights in the meantime don’t even convince the environment secretary, let alone the Environment Agency. The idea – if you can call it that – that we must facilitate an inexorable growth in air travel has taken a quite a hit lately.

Officially, the government is carrying out an extended consultation over proposals for a new runway and a sixth terminal at Heathrow from 2020, with extra flights from around 2012 through mixed mode (allowing both runways to be used at the same time for take-off and landing). Until recently, approval for expansion has seemed a foregone conclusion, mainly because the consultation was so obviously fixed in that direction.

But this week there have been reports that the cabinet is split over the runway and the Environment Agency has continued to express its opposition. As I reported yesterday on newstatesman.com, Chris Smith, a former Labour minister and chairman of the agency, has criticised the government’s attempt to delay new European air quality rules while increasing pollution from Heathrow. With an economic downturn and the government apparently deciding not to give aviation a free ride on carbon emissions, the prevailing wind may be blowing away from a bigger Heathrow.

The government’s case has always been that expansion will only go ahead if “strict environmental conditions” are met but the extent to which it has fiddled the figures, engaged in wishful thinking and moved goalposts makes its consultation the dodgiest official publication since the Iraq dossier.

Fortunately, unlike the dossier, we can see through the deception before the decision is taken. For example, we have seen how the DfT colluded with airport owner BAA to amend its modelling to give the right answers on air quality. Much of the DfT’s claim that pollution following a third runway will be within legal limits depends on disputed assumptions that planes and the cars on roads nearby will by then be so much cleaner that it won’t matter that there will be more of them.

Similarly, the Dft claimed in its consultation document:

“We believe that full mixed mode (540,000 ATMs) by 2015 would be compatible with compliance with the EU air quality limits for PM10, and NO2 in the vicinity of the airport without the need for further mitigation measures.”

If not an outright lie, this is tight-fisted in the extreme with the truth. The DfT was claiming here that in 2015 – the date by which mixed mode operation can be used to squeeze the maximum number of flights into two runways – pollution in the immediate area will be within the limits set out in the European Air Quality directive. Just as well, as the directive will definitely be in force by then, even if the government achieves a five-year delay.

What the DfT was reluctant to admit was that its own predictions show that the directive will be breached at Heathrow (and elsewhere) even before any expansion and that increasing flights from around 2012 would make things worse. If you get to “full mixed mode by 2015” by building to it up from 2012, then that isn’t “compatible with compliance with the limits”. The government’s case is that it won’t breach the limits because it will delay their implementation, but that isn’t the same as complying with them.

And neither the Environment Agency nor EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas is convinced by the DfT’s claims that breaches of the directive after 2015 will magically disappear.

This kind of sleight of hand should make us worry that the government will fiddle the carbon figures too. In spite of dodgy claims from the aviation industry that the per kilometre carbon footprint of flying will soon be as low as a congestion charge-exempt car, even the government isn’t claiming that more flights to and from Heathrow won’t mean more carbon emissions.

Climate change campaigners have welcomed the government’s agreement in principle to include international aviation and shipping in the legally-binding UK carbon budget. Some see it as inevitably restricting aviation expansion while others worry that limits will be sidestepped by purchasing notional carbon reductions from other countries.

Will the economic downturn be the final nail in the coffin of Heathrow expansion? It’s tempting to think so, but the government is looking further ahead. It imagines that demand for air travel will rise over 10 or 20 years and worries that Britain won’t be competitive without a piece of it. But with demand falling in the short term, the sense of urgency around expanding aviation should abate. Perhaps the government won’t let the aviation industry and business bounce it into an early decision.

The government-sponsored Sustainable Development Commission has been arguing that decisions on expanding aviation shouldn’t be rushed, while there is so much dispute over the facts, never mind the policy. It said in September that the debate looks “immature”. Perhaps it had in mind a crass piece of triangulation from former Business Secretary John Hutton that: “we will help make flying greener rather than restricting people’s opportunities to fly altogether”.

If that’s the strength of the case for expanding Heathrow, no wonder people are increasingly seeing through it.

What Does Gus Know?

Ellie Keen — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:35:43 +0000

In the sporadic debate about when we will have an inquiry into the Iraq war, something very important has been forgotten. Last year, just before he became prime minister, Gordon Brown announced that he had asked cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell to ensure that a debacle like the Iraq dossier would never happen again (not in those words, of course). I wrote here that the question of who really wrote the dossier went to the heart of what Sir Gus had been asked to find out. At the time, Brown said it was too early to hold a full inquiry but that there were “lessons to be learned for the future”. So what did Gus teach Gordon?

Two weeks ago, I wrote to Sir Gus, inviting him to pass on what he had found out regarding the influence of “communications professionals”, special advisers and politicians on the dossier. I invited him to do so in the interests of transparency, arguing that public confidence in open government and government itself would be better served by a voluntary disclosure than by having the information dragged out by means of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

I have not had a reply and so today I’ve submitted a new FOIA request to the Cabinet Office in these terms. I can imagine that they might try to string it out as usual and use one of the many exemptions in the Act. In fact, there is one exemption based on an intention to publish something “at some time future date, whether determined or not”. You can have the truth – just not yet.

Putting it that way would make the politics of concealment hard to justify. In March, the House of Commons held a debate on a Tory motion for an inquiry now. The government’s position is that an inquiry cannot take place until all troops have left Iraq. Conveniently, they aren’t leaving any time soon and most aren’t doing much either.

Interestingly, it was reported last week that special forces (eg, the SAS) are engaged in Basra. Of course, the British government has a policy of not commenting on the activities of its special forces, except when it suits them to feed misinformation to the media. This raises the intriguing possibility that the 4,100 visible troops might come home some time, but there will still be no inquiry because of some unseen activity that we can’t be told about and may not actually be happening.

The main – quite preposterous – argument for delaying an inquiry is that it would distract people involved in the ongoing “overwatch” operation. In his letter promising an inquiry, Brown showed the weakness of his “not yet” argument by resorting to preposterous hyperbole: “the whole effort of the government and the armed forces is directed towards supporting the people and government of Iraq.”

You could point out that this is rather worrying for the troops in Afghanistan – and explains why Gordon has taken his eye off the ball elsewhere – but it’s also quite laughable to suggest that a democracy cannot ask how and why it went to war because some of its troops are engaged in a training mission. Not to mention that we have already had four inquiries along the way.

Professor Peter Hennessy has said that a paragraph in Brown’s new national security strategy was “the nearest we are going to get to an apology from the government for the way Tony Blair took this country to war in Iraq.” Brown has so far only hinted that the dossier was “sexed up”, but did say sorry yesterday over the 10p tax rate. Hennessy argued that: “[...] we must have a proper inquiry into the road to the Iraq war, the invasion and its aftermath if Gordon Brown means what he says in [the strategy]. He can do no less; and we can wait no longer.”

The thing about the promise of a future inquiry is that it changes the dynamics of the debate. Where people say, with some justification, “this was all a long time ago”, the government’s line is now that it is too early to start digging into it. But whatever Sir Gus has found out, he has already found out. Any attempt to conceal an existing account of exactly how the case for war was “sexed up” would make very clear that it’s not learning the lessons but sharing the knowledge that’s being delayed until, say, after the next election.

Or, perhaps, there never was any attempt to “learn lessons”. Perhaps the whole thing was just another dodgy PR stunt.

Sleight of Hand in Iraq

Ellie Keen — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:02:27 +0000

Since the Iraq war began five years ago, a lot of the spin has been aimed at showing that Britain and “the international community” are winning. We are repeatedly told that UK troops are to be reduced to the point where we will leave southern Iraq altogether, a land of peace, freedom and democracy. Now Gordon Brown’s latest “troop reduction” turns out to be another bit of wishful thinking, or spin. But are British troops being kept in Iraq – in danger and at great expense – so that Brown doesn’t have to have an inquiry into the war?

This week it has become increasingly clear that Brown’s claim last autumn that numbers would be cut to 2,500 in “the spring” is unlikely to happen any time soon. At the risk of making everyone dizzy, it’s worth recapping the various promises of the last six months.

It was during a visit to Iraq in October used promises of troops cuts as a weapon in the propaganda war (against the Tories). In the middle of the Conservative party conference and with Brown considering an election, he “announced” a reduction from 5,500 to 4,500.

The announcement backfired badly when it emerged that it was a classic recycling exercise, with half the reduction already promised and 250 of those troops already home. This was the first of a series of banana skins that led to last autumn’s non-election.

Brown then made a more formal announcement in the Commons that troops would be cut to around 4,000 by Christmas, followed by a cut to about 2,500 in the spring. Troop levels did indeed come down to a current figure of around 4,100.

But on Monday, the Telegraph revealed that senior military sources were against any further cut, partly on operational grounds and partly “because they fear that the mission would become ‘meaningless’ if numbers dropped further”.

On Tuesday, the Ministry of Defence was conceding that the cut might not happen in the near future. Today, with defence secretary Des Browne visiting Iraq rather quietly, the BBC is reporting that “BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said he had been told it was ‘highly unlikely‘ the figure would drop to anything like that amount [2,500].”

Budget day seems to be a good day to bury bad news as the cut to 2,500 becomes the latest in a long history of troop cuts that arrive slightly later than promised. Some of the promises have been off-the-record briefings to friendly journalists, some have been formal announcements. I’m sure they all seemed plausible enough at the time.

But it’s worth going back to that reported comment from a military source about the need to maintain a meaningful level of troops in Iraq. Since the remaining troops have been reduced to an “overwatch” function, they haven’t been doing very much apart from “force protection”, although sadly they remain at risk. For some time, people like me have suspected that the reasons for keeping them in harm’s way are political – partly to appease the US, partly as a reason to reject opposition calls for an inquiry into the origins and conduct of the war.

I’ve been very critical of the inquiries we’ve had so far and it’s a valid concern that another inquiry could cost quite a lot of money and still pull its punches, as establishment inquiries inevitably do. But with the costs of the non-war now reaching £1.6 annually, we’ve perhaps got the most expensive non-inquiry ever.

Marginal Benefits

Ellie Keen — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:11:47 +0000

It’s lose, lose, lose for the Foreign Office as the Guardian publishes the secret evidence of the Foreign Office witness who tried, successfully at first, to stop us finding out that before the war someone in government compared Israel to Iraq in its “brazen” pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and defiance of the UN.

It could hardly have turned out much worse for the hapless FCO. First, the information tribunal shot its fox by pointing out that it could publish the John Williams draft of the dossier without the marginal note that makes this comparison. Then it was careless enough to let the evidence into the public domain, providing a readymade story. And, of course, it has been caught trying to conceal something, which just adds to the story.

I was at the tribunal hearing in December and was aware that Neil Wigan was giving oral evidence, and who he was. He was incredibly indiscreet as he chatted across me with Stephen Pattison, the other FCO witness, about the latest thinking on the Middle East.

David Leigh is critical of the process by which the FCO managed to suppress the note. You could either see its case as very desperate or very clever, but in the end it backfired spectacularly.

Whatever the merits of the Freedom of Information Act – it allowed the Williams draft to be released only after a three-year delay – the most important things often come into the public domain through leaks.

Martin Bright has a terrific piece in the New Statesman today, about the Williams draft but also about the marginal note. He points out that the government sent the draft to the Hutton inquiry without any request that it be censored. As he also points out, the draft never got to the other parties to the inquiry. Neither did it get on the Hutton website. Perhaps the government knew this would happen.

Since the draft was published this week, people have been asking who wrote the marginal notes. The tribunal pointed out that there are two different handwriting styles, and that the fact that people were commenting on the draft contradicted the FCO claim that it was immediately put aside.

Some comments, such as the one that identifies British bases in Cyprus as being within the range of Iraq’s missiles, have already attracted attention. Now that we know about the Israel comment, people will really want to know who wrote it.

Is Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, a candidate? Williams himself has said he does not think so. But it is clear from the emails going around the Foreign Office on September 11 that Straw was looking at the redrafting very closely and almost certainly saw the Williams draft. I am told that, as the remarks of the serving secretary of state, Straw’s comments would have been in red. Can we have a colour copy of the draft please?

As the Guardian makes clear, with its comprehensive coverage, the significance of the story in relation to Israel has many interesting layers. It is clear that, inside the Foreign Office, people were aware of the possible charge of hypocrisy in going for Iraq while ignoring Israel’s weapons of mass destruction and its defiance of the UN. It is also clear that the Foreign Office is very sensitive to the charge that it is anti-Israel, and that Israel is able to exploit this.

The great irony is that whoever wrote the comment was aware that the claim that Iraq was unique provided a hostage to fortune, inviting people to talk about Israel. Neil Wigan’s evidence was the greatest hostage to fortune you can imagine. People are certainly talking about Israel now.

Yes, it was Dodgy

Ellie Keen — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:19:36 +0000

Make no mistake, the John Williams draft of the Iraq dossier, finally released yesterday, is a smoking gun. The document proves that Williams (a spin doctor friend of Alastair Campbell) who gave his own view of the affair in an article for Cif on Monday, was in the thick of drafting the document that took Britain to war. He wrote what became the dossier’s executive summary. When the dossier was published, false claims from Williams were presented as “judgements” of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). It does not get any more serious than that.

The first thing the Williams draft does is to show that the government lied to the Hutton and Butler inquiries and to parliament when it claimed that the Williams draft did not influence subsequent versions and was put aside when JIC chairman John Scarlett made a “fresh start” the next day.

Here’s what the Williams draft said in its bullet-point summary:

“Our judgement is that iraq is covertly attempting to acquire technology and materials for use in nuclear weapons.”

And here’s what Scarlett’s draft said:

“Our judgement is that iraq is covertly attempting to acquire technology and materials for use in nuclear weapons.”

The earlier versions of this claim referred only to technology and materials “with nuclear applications”. There was never any certainty that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons (it wasn’t). Obviously, any similarity between the two exaggerated claims is explained by the fact that one was based on the other. It is astonishing that the government is still claiming that the Williams draft was immediately “set aside”.

Some of Williams’ sexing-up didn’t survive the drafting process. But some did. Williams appears to have invented the claim that the Iraqis had developed mobile biological weapons facilities, where previous wordings only said that they had sought to do so. The claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction rather than just seeking them was key to the politicians’ and spin doctors’ claim that he was a current threat.

It’s clear now that Williams cherry-picked the intelligence that would make the best case and made some of it stronger. He remains a candidate for the insertion of the “45 minutes“ claim, at the meeting he attended after producing his draft. That claim also turned into a “judgement” when someone crassly rewrote the executive summary. Now, who could have done that?

Scarlett told Hutton that the 45 minutes claim, which was not a judgement in internal JIC reports, “became a judgement of the JIC” when the committee allegedly approved the dossier. For a spin doctor to be putting words into the mouth of the JIC is about as serious as it gets.

What is gratifying is that it is now widely acknowledged that the Williams draft was the first draft of the dossier. Anyone who can still remember the Gilligan/Kelly row will know that from the outset the government staked its case on Scarlett’s draft being both the first draft and produced without spin doctor interference.

Had the Williams draft been published five years ago, we would have known they were all lying then.

So Much For a Clean Slate

Tim Holmes — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 19:33:31 +0000

George Galloway has hinted that he might stand against Jack Straw in Straw’s Blackburn constituency at the next election. I’m not overly fond of Galloway or his Respect party, but I can see his logic. Straw, we are told, is certain to be in Gordon Brown’s cabinet and, having been foreign secretary and a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, will represent the strongest remaining link with that catastrophic decision. He was described in (this week’s) New Statesman as “that old survivor”, but then he has the advantage of knowing where the bodies are buried on Iraq. In fact, he buried many of them. In fact, he fashioned the shovel with which they were buried.

Although Straw has used spin and briefings to compliant journalists to distance himself from the war, he was in on the plan from the beginning. What evidence there is of his scepticism merely shows his complicity. He understood the lie that was being perpetrated, but went along with it anyway. For example, Straw was present at the July 2002 Downing Street meeting whose famous leaked minutes show that it was always Tony Blair’s plan to start a war on a cooked-up pretext. Having heard Joint Intelligence Committee chairman John Scarlett set out the latest intelligence, Straw said:

“It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.”

The sham of “going down the UN route” to justify a war that had already been decided on was as much Straw’s plan as anyone else’s. That Straw and Blair promoted this as an attempt to avoid war proves the hypocrisy of their foreign policy. This duplicity shows exactly what Straw had in mind when he asked for the September 2002 Iraq dossier to contain “a killer para on Saddam’s defiance of the UN”. The government wanted to make the case that the UN weapons inspectors would not achieve anything, even as it set out the case for their return.

As I have written before, it was Straw who cleared his personal spin doctor John Williams to write the first draft of the dossier, Straw who made statements to the foreign affairs committee hearing that have turned out to be untrue and Straw who personally – and wrongly – blocked my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the Williams draft.

I have also learnt this week that it was Straw, when foreign secretary, who blocked two more of my FOIA requests, even though the Cabinet Office was the public authority that was responsible for handling them. The first request was for some more “missing” documents. The second request was to know the authors of those documents, or at least whether they were spin doctors or intelligence officials, or failing that, the departments for which they worked. But according to the Cabinet Office:

“disclosure of department names, individuals’ names and designations is as inhibiting for government business as disclosing details of the responses.”

The exemption Straw deployed here was once again Section 36, “prejudice to effective conduct of public affairs”, described recently by the Guardian’s David Leigh as a “noxious ministerial veto”. It was Straw himself who, when home secretary, watered down the FOIA with this and numerous other get-outs. Now he was using it in the most cynical – and, frankly, laughable – way imaginable. If the disclosure of information as vague as this would bring Whitehall to a standstill, could anything ever be disclosed? Everyone who argued that ministers could not be trusted with such a broadly-based exemption has been proved right.

Many people feel, with some justification, that Gordon Brown could, and should, have made a stand over Iraq and that he will always be tarnished by his failure to do so. I continue to think that it is his insistence on sticking with Straw, without whose complicity Blair could not have taken Britain to war, that says most about Brown’s willingness to tell the truth about how and why it happened.