Iraq inquiry: Chilcot admits he cannot set publication date

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/04/iraq-inquiry-chilcot-mps-fight-secret-documents

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Sir John Chilcot, the chairman of the Iraq war inquiry, said on Wednesday that he was unable to set a date for the publication of his report as it emerged that some witnesses have received papers from the inquiry running into hundreds of pages.

As he faced intense questions from MPs over the delay in the publication of his report, Chilcot blamed the holdup in part on “very long and difficult and challenging discussions” with two successive cabinet secretaries over the release of secret government documents, including correspondence between Tony Blair and George Bush.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, agreed last May that redacted versions of the correspondence could be published. Lord O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary who was in post when the inquiry was established in 2009, had resisted publication on the grounds it would make future US presidents reluctant to talk frankly with British prime ministers.

Chilcot, who informed MPs on the foreign affairs select committee that a member of his inquiry panel, the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, had died overnight, has been adamant he could not publish his report without releasing the Blair-Bush correspondence.

He said he could not begin the process of “Maxwellisation” – asking for comments from witnesses who are subject to criticism in the report – until he had reached agreement over the publication of the documents.

Sir Menzies Campbell, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, suggested that at least one witness had been sent several hundred pages from the inquiry team as part of the Maxwellisation process, claiming the number was so high because the papers include lengthy footnotes and government documents related to their evidence.

Chilcot did not challenge Campbell’s claim – and repeated the figure about hundreds of pages – as he explained that the Maxwellisation process would take some time. He said: “I think it is inherent in the Maxwellisation process that, while we are not allowing indefinite amounts of time for people to respond, we have in concert with the rules of natural justice to give people a reasonable amount of time. If a particular witness has been given – you mention anecdotally hundreds of pages – that is rather different from someone who has got three paragraphs to respond to. People must have a proper and reasonable amount of time if we are to be fair.”

Chilcot said Heywood eventually agreed last May to publish the notes of Blair’s discussions with Bush after lengthy negotiations.

He said: “The initial view taken by the previous cabinet secretary was that the notes, for example that Mr Blair had sent to President Bush, were not disclosable. There was a strong convention that interchanges of that sort should not be disclosed in public.

“As we went through, point by point, with the current cabinet secretary, it became increasingly clear that on the balance of argument he would agree that a certain passage or a certain point could be disclosed because of the essential nature of our inquiry which related to the workings of our central government.

“That came to a point where it was no longer possible to sustain a doctrine that these documents, as a category, could not be disclosed. But it took a long time to get to that point.”

Chilcot confirmed the inquiry had seen 150,000 government documents and was negotiating over the declassification of 7,000 documents. These negotiations are ongoing, although Chilcot said they were nearly complete and were not a reason for the continuing delay.

The list of documents include 200 minutes of cabinet and cabinet committee meetings; 30 notes from Blair to Bush; records of conversations between Blair and world leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Jacques Chirac; records of conversations between cabinet ministers and their overseas counterparts, such as those between Jack Straw and Colin Powell; the legal advice to ministers; and a “huge quantum of papers, agendas, minutes from a wide ranging of meetings and discussions all across Whitehall which include chiefs of staff meetings; intelligence assessments by the joint intelligence committee and by the defence intelligence staff and other “intelligence product”; and telegrams from ambassadors.