Fixing the Facts

Years have passed since Tony Blair first suggested that the people wanted to "move on" from Iraq. Fortunately for anyone concerned with avoiding a rerun of the disastrous conflict, some people refuse stubbornly to do so. Foremost among them is Chris Ames, a freelance researcher from Surrey who runs a website dedicated to the dossier that publicized Saddam Hussein's - as it turned out non-existent - weapons of mass destruction. Yesterday his four-year campaign to secure release of an early draft of the document paid off.

Appeals and ministerial vetoes have been deployed at every stage to postpone the release of this document, written by the former Foreign Office press man, John Williams. Its publication is a heartening sign of the difference that freedom of information legislation can make. Before the Iraq war, Tony Blair was advised that in America the "facts were being fixed around the policy". The Williams draft contains new evidence that something similar may have been going on in the UK. Where the intelligence in a previously released earlier draft had suggested that Iraq was seeking to obtain materials with a nuclear application, in the Williams draft the same materials were being obtained for use in nuclear weapons. Language about mobile weapons laboratories was also toughened up. The earlier draft had said that Iraq was seeking to acquire them, but Mr Williams asserted that Iraq had developed them.

These changes survived into the draft that Mr Blair published. Despite protestations that the intelligence services had been in the driving seat, yesterday's document provides the latest evidence that the demands of communication were allowed to compromise the content. But that is hardly news: it is already public knowledge, after all, that the chief of staff at No 10 made even more important changes. Suggestions that the document would prove that Mr Williams was the author of the infamous claim that Saddam could launch weapons within 45 minutes were not fulfilled. The damage has been limited further because some of Mr Williams' more excitable prose did not make it into the published version.

The Williams draft, then, does not prove that one communications man was responsible for the dodginess of the dossier. That, however, was never likely - the mixing up of evidence and spin was a process, not an event. What it does provide is one more sign of how that mixing worked. Press officers should not be involved in manufacturing a prospectus for war. Even if many of his words were not in the end used, Mr Williams has been shown to have done just that. With that revelation, the case for an inquiry only grows.