I was listening to the Today program on Radio4 this morning and there was a report about the first dossier produced by the Government about the Weapons of Mass Destruction that Iraq was purported to have. Just to be clear, this dossier was before the 1441 resolution and wasn’t the later one that the Government just copied from the Internet.

In the dossier, which was presented to the recalled House of Commons, Tony stated that Saddam had weapons that could be used within 45 minutes of the order to use them being given. Obviously that sort of information focussed MPs minds, especially when Jack Straw pointed out that our troops based in Cyprus are within the range of an Iraqi Scud missile…

However, it appears that that particular piece of information was from a single source that the security services didn’t completely trust and thought might be unreliable. The first version of the dossier didn’t include this information, but according to the BBC’s source was added at the request of Government to make the report more lively.

The official response has been to deny any interference from Government and that all the information in the dossier came from the security services. Personally, I don’t like the idea that the Government published information that the security services didn’t trust without any qualifications attached to it and presented it as fact. Especially information that seems so blatently wrong. It smacks of Propaganda to me, not a “Security Assessment”.