The first day of the Iraq inquiry was characterised by the emergence of a potential “attack dog” in the shape of Sir Roderic Lyne and the appearance of some almost incomprehensible live transcripts.
And so concludes the first day of the Chilcot inquiry. Hopefully you’ve been able to follow at least some of the hearings via our IraqInquiryBlog Tweets or on the inquiry’s own website. Make sure too to watch Gary Gibbon’s take on the day at seven, and via his own blog.
The pace picked up right at the end when Sir Roderic Lyne got Sir William Patey (ex-FCO) to concede that, militarily at least, Saddam Hussein was effectively “caged” in the early 2000s – it’s early days yet but I suspect that Sir Roderic might turn out to be the committee’s “attack dog”. Professor Freedman also impressed.
Tomorrow sounds like it’s going to be pretty technically-dense; during his closing speech Sir John practically implored the public to brave coming along to listen to the inquiry take evidence on the key question of Iraq’s WMD programme(s).
There’ll be two new FCO witnesses this time: Sir William Ehrman (Director of International Security between 2000-2002 and Director-General of Defence and Intelligence from then till 2004) and Tim Dowse (Head of Counter-Proliferation 2001-2003).
From them the inquiry will want to hear how the UK and US governments drew up their assessments about Saddam Hussein’s WMD capacity – and then how, as with the admitted advantage of retrospect we now know, they got them so disastrously wrong.
Finally, Short Straw Award of the day goes to the inquiry’s live stenographer. Through even the driest of civil servants can surge the strongest of passions, and talk of no-fly zones and sanctions proved too much for one unnamed witness (well OK, Simon Webb).
At one stage his live transcript read, “I’m not sure I get quite as far as you do. [inaudible] [inaudible] military [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] nawd and this was a country.” No wonder “mandarinese” came out earlier as “man retain east”.