By Jo Wilding
July 18th

So the Butler Report came out. This, for the benefit of those who may have missed it, is the report of the committee convened to decide whether the Prime Minister, the intelligence services, the Joint Intelligence Committee or anyone else lied about the evidence relating to Iraq’s alleged weapons which were, in case anyone forgot, the alleged reason for the all-too-real bombardment and invasion of Iraq.

Not too complex a brief, one might suggest. Still, to make sure that only the finest minds were applied to the task, Tony Blair himself handpicked the committee. I’m sure that, as with the Hutton Report on whether the government, the BBC, the deceased’s immediate superiors, the tooth fairy or anyone else bore any responsibility for the death of weapons expert David Kelly, someone will send me an explanation of who Lord Butler is and how close and cosy are his ties to the Prime Minister.

In the meantime, consider this. Ann Taylor was the Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, appointed by the PM to hold the security services to governmental account. As such she was the only person outside of the Joint Intelligence Committee invited to comment on the September dossier of ‘evidence’ on Iraq’s weapons.

She made a number of suggestions on strengthening the language, making the evidence appear more solid, suggestions which were incorporated into the final document. Ann Taylor was also appointed, by Tony Blair, to the Butler Committee, to consider who lied and misled whom.

According to the Independent, on Friday, Ann Taylor was on one side of an argument over how critical the report ought to be. Evidently learning the lessons from her previous experience, she insisted that the report should be toned down, should be less critical of her party leader, Tony Blair.

Hello?

You might have thought, given the number of lawyers inhabiting the Houses of Parliament, that someone would have pointed out the fundamental principle of justice, that no person shall be the judge in her own case. You might have thought that would preclude Tony Blair selecting the committee himself, let alone his picking the person who wrote the story to decide whether it was any good or not.

Predictably enough, the report says Tony Blair didn’t lie. The government ‘has been cleared’ of deliberately misleading anyone. But only by Lord Butler. Preview copies of the report went to the three main parties, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories but not to the smaller parties nor to independents, who got copies at the same time as the press. As my Iraqi friends used to say, with heavy sarcasm, ‘This is the freedom.’

As it happened, I had lunch in the House of Commons the day before. Amid lime green corridors, over coffee in the House of Lords, my friend-on-the-inside and I quietly conspired and plotted.

The dinner lady remarked apologetically that it was a bit like school meals. But the members were all a-chatter with ‘breaking up’ at the end of next week, which is exactly what schools do at the end of each term. The overwhelming majority of the catering and cleaning staff were black or other ethnic minority groups while the majority of the ones in suits were white.

Women in big hats decorated the terrace, on their way to the Royal Garden Party. You don’t often see Blair out on the terrace, according to my friend on the inside. You see Jack Straw about from time to time. He uses the gym as well, so you see him in there. And the Attorney General, what’s his name? Somebody Goldsmith? He always looks at you when you pass as if he’s waiting for something bad to happen, always looks beleaguered.

The way out is currently filled with a walk through exhibition called ‘House to Home’, asking how to bring the Houses of Parliament closer to the homes of the people, how to bring the government closer to the governed. There were little tents where you could stick up post it notes saying what you thought ought to be done. As if the government cared what the public thought.

It’s a bit like the Prime Minister handpicking a committee to decide whether he and they lied. It’s asking how to bring government closer to the people while in the same building they’re centralising everything, taking all the real decisions away from local government, privatising public services so that people have no right any more to elect the people who make those decisions.

I saw Ahrar again in London, the Iraqi journalist who was held prisoner with us in Falluja, for the first time since the Imam dropped us back from there. She started telling the story to the assembled group of Iraqis, most of them members or relations of the Iraqi Women’s League. Her family were violently angry with her for having been there. She lost her job but got a better one, in television. She started to sing, for the first time since Falluja.

She came to the UK accompanying a girl called Zeynab. Zeynab is eleven, from Basra in the south of Iraq. Seventeen members of her family, all but her father, were killed by a coalition bomb dropped on their house during the invasion. She swings on crutches, one leg of her jeans hanging empty. She had a fitting for a prosthetic leg in the morning. “It was beautiful,” she said, her face full of glee.

Because of the chaos there are no agencies or organisations in Iraq now making prosthetic limbs, though Iraqi doctors are among the most advanced in the world in plastic surgery after the carnage of the war with Iran. It’s not practical to bring any number of kids to the UK for treatment and the hope is that we can set something up in Jordan or somewhere else close by. I’ll let you know when you can help with that.

Meanwhile, please protest loudly and disruptively against the ongoing manufacture and sale of cluster bombs, the continuing occupation of Iraq and creation of conditions which make it impossible for NGOs to clean up the mess and repair the maimed children and the lies of our governments.