Several years ago I wrote about the "dodgy dossier", the intelligence report British Prime Minister Tony Blair used to support his claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. At the time, a whistleblower claimed the dossier had been "sexed up", and that there was political pressure to alter the dossier to make the WMD evidence seem more convincing. The British government vehemently denied this accusation, and even pressured the BBC to fire a reporter, Andrew Gilligan, for making it.

Now the Cabinet Office has released documents showing that the accusations were true.

A memo reveals the pressures facing Sir John Scarlett, then head of the joint intelligence committee, now head of MI6. The memo, dated 11 September 2002, was sent to Scarlett by Desmond Bowen, a senior Ministry of Defence official seconded to the Cabinet Office.

Bowen stated: "You will clearly want to be as firm and authoritative as you can be. You will clearly need to judge the extent to which you need to hedge your judgments with, for example, 'it is almost certain' and similar caveats."

He added: "I appreciate that this can increase the authenticity of the document in terms of it being a proper assessment, but that needs to be weighed against the use that will be made by the opponents of action who will add up the judgments on which we do not have absolute clarity."

The published dossier ignored the caveats, with the executive summary including the now discredited claim that some of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons were deployable "within 45 minutes".

Another email says: "We have suggested moderating the same language in much the same way on drafts from the dim and distant past without success. Feel free to try again!"

Cabinet Office papers reveal Iraq dossier fears

We have more evidence that "Support the Troops" was just a slogan for the Bush administration. This report was prepared by the US Air Force in 2006. It was recently leaked to Wikileaks. From the report summary:

It is amazing that the burn pit has been able to operate without restrictions over the past few years without significant engineering controls being put in place. I would hope in the future that issues such as burn pits are identified early on and engineering controls such as incinerators would be used to mitigate these hazards. It seems that money has been the issue of why engineering controls are not currently in place.

Burn Pit Health Hazards. Note that whoever submitted it to Wikileaks spelled the name of the air base wrong. It's Balad, not Balard.