The Public Transcripts 10 Major General Graham Binns

Major General Graham Binns General Officer Commanding Multi-National Division South East, Aug 2007 – Feb 2008 talks about exactly how the UK forces supported the Iraqi General Mohan in Basra who commanded using a mobile phone...

The Public Transcripts 9 - Sir William Patey

Sir William Patey the British Ambassador to Iraq  from June 2005 to July 2006 talked a lot about electricity and moaned that the Iraqis wouldn't spend their own money...

The Public Transcripts 8 - Plugs and Sockets

 I can't remember who this was.  Someone military.  Made some comments about plugs and sockets...

The Public Transcripts 7 - Sir David Manning ponders on whether George W gave the wrong speech to the UN...

Sir David Manning ponders on how George W Bush's administration was so bitterly divided amongst its self that they didn't even know what George W Bush would say to the UN before he said it to the UN ....and after he had said it Condoleezza Rice rang up to say that when he'd told the UN what they thought they wanted to hear about a second resolution that was only because he'd been reading the wrong draft of the speech because there were so many they got mixed up....?

The Public Transcripts 6 - Edward Chaplin on how things could have been handled differently and instability and sectarian violence avoided...

The Foreign Office's Political Director for the period from September 2001 through to July 2003 Edward Chaplin ponders on how things could have been handled differently and instability and sectarian violence avoided...

The Public Transcripts 5 - Tim Dowse former head of the Non-proliferation Department in the Foreign Office in 2003 on what exactly is a WMD

What exactly is a WMD?

The Public Transcripts 4 - Tim Dowse on what the Foreign Office Knew about WMD - no evidence of passing chemical or biological weapons to terrorists...

Tim Dowse the former head of the Non-proliferation Department in the Foreign Office in 2003 comments on the level of Iraq's actual WMD capability as far as he knew.

The Public Transcripts 2 - Sir Jeremy Greenstock

 

Jeremy Greenstock the United Kingdom Ambassador to the United Nations for five years, from 1998 to 2003 explains how there is no supreme arbiter of international law ...

The Public Transcripts 1 - Sir Christopher Meyer

The Inquiry started with Christopher Meyer the United Kingdom Ambassador in Washington throughout the run up to the war telling the Inquiry about George W Bush's lack of belief in his own competence in the area of foreign policy and how, as a result, he hired the Vulcans.

The Vulcans were led by Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz ... and included Richard Armitage, Robert Blackwill, Stephen Hadley, Richard Perle, Dov S. Zakheim, Robert Zoellick and Wolfowitz protegé, Scooter Libby.

The Inquiry Team

All Inquiries need members to sit on them or someone to chair them.  The Iraq Inquiry had 5 such members  - they were ... from left to right :

Sir John Chilcot (ex-senior Civil Servant) Chairman

Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman (Military Historian)

Sir Martin Gilbert (Military Historian)

Sir Roderic Lyne (ex-Ambassador and Diplomat)

Baroness Usha Prashar (professional sitter on committees and boards of things)

Introduction

This blog is the best of what's left of the Pear Shaped Iraq Inquiry Inquiry ... A while ago I took down the old pages because they were difficult to maintain.  Also since Youtube lost the animations (It took the Intervention of the UK Data Commissioner to recover them) rebuilding the pages would take some effort.  And... well... it seemed like ancient history.  Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell are all pushing up the daisies these days ...so what's the point?  And then the Queen knighted Tony Blair so I thought I'd bring it back again - if only to give the Youtube animations the context they have lost since the original pages have gone...

So here we go again...

The Chilcot Inquiry started in 2009 and The Pear Shaped Iraq Inquiry Inquiry started as something to do in about 2010 ...a one off article to comment on it.  As I didn't have the rights to TV footage I used some software and scripting skills to animate the inquiry transcripts in a new voice to speech service called Xtranormal which subsequently went bust...  

Originally the animations were placed actually in the transcripts to show where they had been taken from in an attempt to counter claims that they were decontextualized.  This is no longer an issue since the report of the Inquiry in 2016 so I here present a paired down version ... if you want to trail through all the original and sometimes heavily redacted transcripts they're all on the government website...

For historical reference this is not a review of the actual inquiry - it was a review of the Inquiry transcripts in the period between the launch of the Inquiry in 2009 and the publication in 2016.  The main problem in coming to any understanding from the Inquiry is the sheer volume of material.  The transcripts are long and, taken in their original form, extremely dull.... often running to hundreds and hundreds of pages.  

Even an extremely extremely abridged transcript would be enormous to behold.  

Added to this its terms of reference of the Inquiry were extremely wide meaning that information on pre-war build-up and post-war operations are confused and overlapping and testimony is not always chronological meaning the casual reader has a hard time understanding it.   

Many of the witness tell slightly similar versions of the same stories and there is much repetition of evidence so the idea was made more difficult by these factors.  

A cynic might say that this is, of course, how the Inquiry was supposed to be experienced.