caveat - noun - warning or proviso of specific conditions. ORIGIN Latin 'let a person beware'

Such is my anger and sense of injustice at the outcome of the Butler Inquiry, that I find it difficult to articulate.

But basically it boils down to this: Tony Blair's government deliberately misled the British people and the wider world about why war should be declared on Iraq. Yet he still fails to admit it.

Without retreading too much of what Lord Butler and his crew said (there are people better qualified and more willing than me to do that), the inquiry found that between leaving the intelligence services or the Joint Intelligence Committee and being unveiled to the nation by Tony Blair, important reservations and caveats were omitted from the text.

According to Butler, some of the intelligence gathered by spooks was "vague", "ambiguous", "unreliable", "open to doubt", "limited", "sporadic", "unproven", "patchy" and, of course, "seriously flawed". It would appear that MI6 and JIC were quite open about this. But making the case for war in September 2002, Tony Blair didn't let the caveats in the intelligence stop him being "satisfied to its authority."
 
In fact he didn't think to mention the caveats at all.

Why were they removed? It's not like a document of this gravity should need a low word count. But no one seems to think that we need to know why the misgivings and provisos were excluded.

After Butler Blair said,"No one lied. No one made up the intelligence. No one inserted things into the dossier against the advice of the intelligence services."

This may be true. But what is also true is that someone, somewhere in the Blair regime deliberately took things out of the document that the intelligence services had meant to be there.

By removing the ifs, buts and howevers, someone significantly and purposefully changed the tone and meaning of the intelligence agencies' findings. As the former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said, "They put exclamation marks where there should have been question marks."

Someone decided the war would not have widespread support if any doubts were expressed by the government. Someone decided the British public could do without the full story. And so somewhere along the line someone - whether elected representative or political appointee - distorted the truth. Call me old fashioned, but isn't that pretty much the definition of lying?

And whether he knew about the changes or not, shouldn't Tony Blair be responsible for such gross malpractice within his administration?

The report vindicated BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan over his claim that the dossier on WMD was sexed up (even if a little of the detail was incorrect). It vindicated the Today programme's decision to run the story, and Greg Dyke's decision to back his man to the hilt. And it meant all the upheaval the BBC endured at the beginning of the year was unjustified in its origin, if ultimately good for the Corporation. The BBC was right about the dossier being sexed up, and the government punished it for its impudence.

Unlike Hutton (which you just know I loved), I don't think Butler was a whitewash. The committee was able to suggest that all was not perfect in Tonyland. It just didn't have the courage of its convictions when it came to deliver its judgment. When compared with the (reasonably) honest way in which America has so far dealt with fessing up to lousy intelligence, Butler makes me ashamed of my country and its institutions.

I'm sure I'll be accused of being hopelessly naive, but despite its old school tie, don't rock the boat mentality, I had hoped that there was a shred of honour left in Whitehall.

Obviously not.

There's a lot more that can be drawn from the Butler report, most notably Blair's style of decision-making, and the suitability of John Scarlett as Britain's top spy, but one truth is inescapable...
 
We've been lied to, folks. And no one's willing to take the liars to task.