The long-awaited inquiry by Sir John Chilcot into the British invasion of Iraq in 2003 has infinitely less freedom than the inquiry into how Britain secretly helped to arm Saddam Hussein decades earlier, the Guardian has been told.
Speaking before the 20th anniversary of the release of his arms to Iraq report, Lord Scott said he had been given complete freedom to publish what he wanted.
Scott, now a retired law lord, told the Guardian that he had “huge freedom” over what information relating to his inquiry, which opened in 1992, could be disclosed. “I had the final decision on publication,” he said.
In contrast, the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, will have the final say on what is published in the inquiry report on the invasion of Iraq. Scott’s 1,800-page report, which has striking contemporary resonances, castigated official secrecy, in particular over weapons exports. The then Thatcher government did not tell parliament the truth about the UK’s arms sales to Saddam “for fear of strong public opposition”, Scott noted in his report.
Scott heard that soon after the Iraqi leader gassed Iraqi Kurds in Halabja in 1988, an official in the private office of the then foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe wrote: “It could look very cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage over the Iraqi treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.”
A senior Ministry of Defence official responsible for arms exports told Scott: “Truth is a very difficult concept.”
The 1996 report roundly criticised the way ministers, at the behest of their officials, casually signed “public interest immunity” certificates telling judges what information should be kept secret.
He said the Whitehall practice whereby secrecy was imposed over broad classes of information, such as advice to ministers, should be abandoned, and described as “unacceptable” the argument that Whitehall advice should be secret to preserve “candour between civil servants and ministers”.
Instead, PII certificates should be judged only on the content of a particular document, and embarrassment should never be a reason to withhold information, Scott found.
Scott withheld only a few pages – passages dealing with current MI6 activities – of a report that provided great encouragement to those campaigning for more open government, eventually leading to the 2000 Freedom of Information Act.
He told the Guardian that the advantage of a judge leading an inquiry was that they were accustomed to making decisions based on evidence. “The only person who can decide is the judge”, Scott said.
“You have to be demonstrably fair. When I was a judge, I believed the most important thing in a trial was to leave the person who was going to lose satisfied that he/she had had a fair trial.”
Scott, like Chilcot years later, was sharply criticised by ministers and Whitehall officials, who said the judge did not understand how Whitehall worked. His supporters responded that Scott knew this only too well.
Chilcot, a former Whitehall mandarin, has faced criticism for the delays to his report, sometimes from the people debating what he can or cannot publish. His inquiry was set up by the then prime minister Gordon Brown in 2009.
His report has also been held up by the “Maxwellisation” process, whereby witnesses that the inquiry intends to criticise are given relevant draft passages to which they can respond.
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