The Truth Will Out?

The revelation today that 'Bush's Brain', former senior adviser Karl Rove, has admitted he was 'proud' of the use of waterboarding as a form of 'information gathering' may be startling to some - simply necessary to others.

Under legal notes passed at the time, Bush's administration effectively relegated waterboarding to a 'non-torture' status therefore allowing its use in extracting information from alleged terrorists. It was the non-torture method of choice in places like Guantanamo and if that was considered non-torture, then the mind boggles at what methods were used in the name of 'getting the truth' on non-US territory.

Waterboarding is a lovely method of 'questioning'. It involves putting a prisoner into a position where water is doused over their face so that they cannot breath, therefore making them think they are drowning. Clearly, it is a method which may not work first time and so it is repeated ad nausea until the information required is extracted. For anyone who has been in the very terrifying position of believing they are going to be drowned, there are few more dreadful feelings in life, especially when you know that the difference between you living or dying is entirely controlled by someone else.

Under such pressure, it is argued from laymen to eminent psychologists then the prisoner will say anything in order to stop the torture. Often prisoners will say many things, much contradicting what they have already said in an avalanche of extracted information in the vain hope that the investigators get what they believe they are looking for. In fact, so primal is the whole thing that more intelligent people than I would strongly argue that any such information extracted under such duress is most likely to be unreliable.

Rove reckons that umpteen terrorist plots were foiled by using such methods. Perhaps it could be argued that umpteen plots that US investigators wanted to believe were to be perpetrated were uncovered. After all, amid the failures in Intelligence Agencies leading up to the Iraq War to get even the basics right, the last thing you would want is that new, more aggressive methods, actually found that no new attacks were known about. It could be argued that success rates were written by the investigators in order to justify their methods and their jobs, for that matter.

Anyway, it's a moot point as the method is rightly outlawed by the Obama Administration and Guantanamo hardly achieved a thing with only one tribunal enacted so far. Even the famous case implying MI5 knowingly gleaning information from torture seemed to come from a person who was ultimately freed with no charges against him, to be hailed as some kind of hero. But, with the definition of 'non-torture' afforded to waterboarding and its enthusiastic approval by Government officials, would it not be interesting to find out what would have been revealed had we used the methods in official inquiries such as the Chilcot Inquiry?

Perhaps the sleek, svelte calm of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell would have been broken. Perhaps the contradictory evidence from Jack Straw might have been tested for veracity. Perhaps we would have easily got Gordon Brown to tell the truth about his spending policy when many officials before him had attested to it.

But in reality it is all about the skill and tenacity of the questioner to obtain information. Sir John Chilcot and his team seem to be just writing down whatever is said with no cross referencing or rebuttal questions to test the truth. I watched the film 'Frost/Nixon' last night and saw how devastating good questioning can be in terms of putting powerful, intelligent people on edge and taking them into territories in their minds that they do not want to go - forcing the real truth out of them. I am an exponent of testing truth in interview techniques as I have a firm belief that those coming for jobs only want to talk about what they want to talk about and highlight themselves to their own advantage. Getting at the truth in an interview is vital as only under pressure will you find out how people will really perform.

The Chilcot Inquiry has had lines of questioning which frankly could have been put together by school kids and the follow ups to answers have been woefully absent. Ministers have gone before the Inquiry and basically said what they want with impunity from challenge, even when others have already said something entirely contradictory. It's as if the whole thing is choreographed and scripted to once again suit the Government and the stooges involved.

Perhaps Karl Rove is right - waterboarding and the like does get at the truth. Personally, I think it would be far better if we got a bunch of investigators in the Chilcot Inquiry who really want to get at the truth and who have a healthy cynicism about how Politicians and their mandarins lie to protect themselves. We will have spent millions, learnt nothing and will repeat the same mistakes time and again until we find out just why Iraq was so important for us all to be lied to in order to justify a war.

With that central question asked, perhaps we would have got somewhere near the truth.

The Last Straw?

Round Two for Jack Straw. Having given evidence earlier, then the Chilcot Inquiry heard from Tony Blair and two of Straw's legal advisers, it seemed things did not add up so he was called back to explain himself further.

Today Mr. Straw got a second grilling in which he described himself as a 'broken record' when talking about UN Resolution 1441. It seemed that he, and the Government's legal team, had actually gone back over and read the resolution to help them 'clarify' their story - suddenly he claimed to be an expert on the matter having 'intense history' on the subject. It seemed that there had been a good deal of legal advice from Civil Servants advising Straw which pointed to a an invasion as being an 'Act of Aggression' and that Straw had 'ignored' this evidence. He denied this and pointed out that there were two views on this - his, and the supporting evidence for it, could be read in the papers of the time, he claimed.

His main trail was that, while a second resolution validating an invasion was preferable, Straw argued that UN 1441 had a second stage which did not require a second resolution which allowed the use of force. This is interesting, as I have researched the resolution and looked for any second stage and while it points toward Iraq meeting its obligations at no point does it mention, or does any further stage document, the result of non-compliance allowed any state to use force - that is absolutely clear to be seen.

Breach of UN 1441 did not give anybody the right to use force in any way. Such was the intrigue at the time that the US admitted they had kept taps on the communications of the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Anan.

Of course, this also presupposed that all the intelligence regarding WMD and imminent threats of a 'rogue state' like Iraq actually existed when Hans Blix's team had found no evidence. We had the stupid circular argument at the time that Saddam had blocked the Inspectors and lied about the WMD but Blix could not find any evidence - therefore Saddam was hiding them and lying. No one bothered to attempt to believe Saddam or Blix as the convenience of a liar and an apparently duped person was all they needed to justify their case - that and a dossier that could have been compiled by a 10 year old. OK, so I exaggerate on the dossier but the evidence was clear. The Resolution had not been technically violated as there were no WMD found anyway.

Straw was asked about why March 2003 of all dates? Chilcot seemed fascinated by that particular date as no new evidence had been found, diplomacy had not been exhausted and there had been no imminent or new threats? What galvanised the UK and US around that specific date and why had it become so important?

Straw was visibly flummoxed as if this was not a question he had anticipated. He stammered a little before whining on about rogue states, destabilisation of the region and testing international authority. While all this seemed vaguely relevant, it did not address the question - what was special about that date and time? What had happened that had put a deadline of 'compliance' to UN 1441 and why had the US and UK stopped working to a new resolution, which in Straw's own words would have 'toppled Saddam without a war'? Too late, Straw waffled his way around the subject and gave us nothing. All he could then offer was that the purpose of the war was not regime change, but echoing the rewriting of history and rejustification offered by Blair, he claimed that most Iraqis would not want to now go back to pre-March 2003. That is a fine position now but UN 1441 gave no mandate for regime change alone, let alone violence of any sort.

I cannot read Chilcot - he summed up the proceedings so far as if he meant business but he had clearly probed Straw but asked no follow up questions or challenged any assumption. It was as if he had asked the scripted question because it was on his piece of paper and that was all that was required. In those brief minutes of Straw's reply, there was not a single piece of insight as to why March 2003 had been important to the US and the UK as the rally point or deadline. There was no follow up as to why it had been deemed necessary to pull out Blix and his team when they pleaded for more time, the pursuit of second resolution was dropped, and diplomacy with Iraq ceased. War had become inevitable but there was no earthly reason why. Even the most rudimentary intelligence officer should have realised Saddam's capability to launch anything more than a rubber band at the West was trashed and he was a spent force. Why was there a need to talk him up as if he had re-armed under our noses, defied sanctions to gain a huge new capability and be of danger to our sovereign territory? And why in March 2003 was it most important of all to take action above any other date?

Chilcot is in danger of becoming another joke Inquiry which has been fully briefed what to ask and, crucially, what not to ask. As if to answer my question, in his summing up, Chilcot said that the hearings were merely the visible surface of an enormous Inquiry, the core of which were thousands of documents, many of which have been published but many will remain classified. In other words, we would have to trust him that within those documents lie the answers to the questions he did not ask Straw.

If you believe Chilcot then you will easily believe it was necessary to invade Iraq in March 2003 - no sooner, no later. If, like me, you believe Iraq was a spent force and that the whole WMD charade was just a convenient excuse to invade a country rich in oil and convenient to be a new staging post in the Gulf then you will find no satisfaction in this or any other Inquiry.

The question of why March 2003 was one of the most crucial to be answered and we got waffle. This could about sum up the whole Chilcot Inquiry. Another missed opportunity to get anywhere near the truth. There simply had to be a compelling answer to that question or none at all.

Perpetuating The Lie

Quite what the Chilcot Inquiry will achieve is very unclear. The one thing we can be certain of is that we will never get the truth.

Today, and live now, Alistair Campbell gives his version of events for the inquiry. Campbell was the spin-doctor at the heart of creating the myth that Iraq represented a threat to British Sovereign Territory and was the butt of Andrew Gilligan's assumptions on the 'Sexing Up' affair of the evidence document released to justify our decision to invade Iraq along with the US. Amid innuendo and spin, Dr. David Kelly, who allegedly whistle blew to Gilligan, committed suicide rather than apparently face the music.

Even as we speak, Campbell has already told the enquiry that Blair did not back regime change beforehand when Blair already told Fern Britton on BBC TV he did back regime change. The Guardian has previously reported that George W Bush and Blair had decided on going to war with Iraq at Camp David a year before the final button was pushed. Now Campbell is trying to say that WMD were never the main reason of why we invaded - even though this was the only legitimacy via the UN. But these are the things you will not hear truthfully - history has changed; history we lived ourselves and saw with own eyes.


The web of deceit surrounding that whole period of history will be spun yet further today by Campbell. Incredibly, at the height of the storm over the Kelly suicide, he stormed into Channel Four Newsroom and demanded to be put on prime time TV and explain his side of the story. Arguably then, and now, this showed that Campbell had become bigger than anyone in the country and that propaganda sinisterly ruled.


Nothing much has changed. Tony Blair has already tweaked his version of events to suit the facts over a period of time, culminating in his recent interview with Fern Britton in which he said that he would have removed Saddam anyway even if WMD did not exist saying, "I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat."


The Chilcot Inquiry was dead before it got under way as it was politicised from the start - Gordon Brown will not give evidence until after the election even though there is no earthly reason why that makes sense. So you can assure yourself of some facts - there will be no blame apportioned, no real truth will emerge, no new evidence will gain credence, no former ministers or spin doctors will lose the earnings on their biographies and Britain will still be vilified in the eyes of the wider world community for openly lying about the reasons it went to war.


I am sure, as it did not change the last one, that it will not affect the outcome of this election either. Too much skill, spin, changing of the facts and equivocation will ensure that nobody is blamed. That makes you think that if no one really was to blame then everyone from the Intelligence Community to Government Ministers to the PM himself must have so rubbish at their jobs as to be incompetent.

Hey ho, it only cost us many £billions and the lives of some young heroes. As long as Tony and Alistair's income stream is not interrupted then no one has REALLY lost out, have they?