Chris Ames's blog

Today, with the help of colleagues and the support of openDemocracy and others, I am launching a new website to cover the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain's participation in the Iraq war. The site has big ambitions: it intends not only to be the definitive resource on the issue but also to hold the Inquiry itself to account. It will also be open and participative, even if the Inquiry isn't.

The site is called Iraq Inquiry Digest, which hopefully conveys an intention to make digestible both the existing information and the Inquiry's forthcoming public hearings. Its strapline is "everything about the Chilcot Inquiry in one place" and in pursuit of this the site already includes a lot of information. It aims both to be helpful to the Inquiry and  to challenge it to be transparent and not engage in an establishment fudge. It can be found at www.iraqinquirydigest.org.

I'm the site's editor and main contributor. Another significant contributor is Dr Brian Jones, who was head of the weapons of mass destruction analysis branch of the UK Defence Intelligence Staff until shortly before the Iraq war and gave evidence to the earlier Hutton and Butler inquiries. Also supporting the project and likely to contribute are Dr Chris Lamb, who made a freedom of information request for the  minutes of two key meetings of the British Cabinet; Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Iraq; Dr Glen Rangwala who exposed the "dodgy dossier" on Iraq's alleged concealment attempts and MPs from each of the major UK political parties. Journalists Peter Oborne and Michael Smith, who published the internationally famous Downing Street documents, are also supporters, as are Index on Censorship.

So far we have attempted to assemble the existing evidence and define the questions that the Inquiry needs to answer. The overriding questions, which should be of interest to people across the world, not least in Iraq, are how did Britain come to sign up for the US-led invasion and what responsibility does it bear for the chaos and bloodshed that followed?