As a partner of the Iraq Inquiry Digest, OurKingdom will be carrying its feed in its right sidebar
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?
