ABSTRACT
The Butler Report, which is the result of an investigation conducted in 2004 by a high-profile Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Lord Butler of Brockwell, marked the culmination of a ‘season of inquiry’ into British intelligence reporting on Iraq prior to the invasion of that country in March 2003.1 The report is the fourth of a series of official inquiries conducted in 2003-4 2 It was drafted within a context of intense public criticism in the United Kingdom over the government’s policy toward Iraq in general and its use of intelligence to justify this policy in particular. This criticism paralleled similar charges levelled against the Bush Administration in the United States, which also commissioned a series of official investigations into American intelligence reporting on Iraq. 3 The published reports resulting from these various inquiries provide a wealth of information concerning the manner in which secret intelligence on Iraq was collected, collated and analysed by British and American intelligence services. They therefore constitute an important source for the study of foreign and security policy-making at the opening of the twenty-first century
The Butler Report will be of particular interest to scholars of British intelligence. It provides extensive excerpts from the assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). This material is supplemented by numerous references to, and quotations from, key policy documents (several of which have since been leaked to the press) that serves to set the collection and assessment of intelligence information within its wider policy context. In addition to bringing this material into the public domain, the report also discusses in detail the nature of the human intelligence reports provided by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) as well as the role these reports played in the assessment process. All of this is without precedent in the history of British intelligence. The excerpt of the report printed below is the Butler Committee’s ‘Conclusions on Iraq’. While these conclusions are fascinating in their own right, they can only be understood properly when they are read within the wider context of the rest of the report. This introductory essay is therefore a discussion of the report as a whole with specif c
reference to the findings and recommendations of the committee concerning th case of Iraq.
