The campaign to drive John Scarlett from his new post as head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service continues to gain intensity. In yesterday's Mail on Sunday (and summarised in today's Times), the TV journalist Tom Mangold reported claims -- made by what appeared to be a single disaffected intelligence source -- that Scarlett tried to insert lies into the Iraq Survey Group's report on WMD in Iraq in order to protect Tony Blair from further embarrassment from its conclusions that there were no WMD (sic). He also claims that the British government tried first to block and then to truncate the ISG's report earlier this year, which was eventually published in emasculated form.

What are we to make of all this? The first thing to say is that the knives are clearly out for Scarlett within the intelligence community. There are officers who believe he allowed intelligence to become politicised. There are officers who have a strong anti-war agenda themselves. There are clearly ISG officers who think their new head, Charles Duelfer, is a CIA stooge and who are accordingly running a campaign against him, too. And there are also running battles among the spooks about what bits of intelligence about Iraq were right or wrong. It is possible, after all, that Scarlett tried to offer his ten 'golden nuggets' of intelligence to the ISG because he genuinely believed them to be true, even though other officers believed them to be groundless. None of us can judge where the truth in all this lies. All we can do is assess the evidence that is in the public domain. And this is where doubts about this story principally lie.

For even if we accept that Scarlett and HMG did all the devious, mendacious and disreputable things that are being alleged, there are more fundamental assumptions running through this story which are not supported by the facts. In the original story, Mangold's ISG source told him:

'There had been numerous claims and allegations of WMDs, but we were able to show through really careful analysis that the stuff did not and could not exist [my emphasis]. It was as simple as that.'

Elsewhere, Mangold refers to David Kay, the former ISG head, telling the US Congress that 'he no longer believed the weapons were there'. And Mangold claims that that the ISG's 'conclusive' statement that 'the chemical bombs and nuclear plants famously referred to by Blair and President Bush during the long run-up to war just did not exist' was catastrophic for Blair because 'it had been the government that relied on the claims to justify invasion'.

Now, all these statements are either misleading or plain wrong. The most fundamental error is the premise that Blair made the case for war on the claim of WMD stockpiles. He did not. If you read his actual speeches and written statements, you see that the stockpiles were not the main point. The overwhelming emphasis was instead on Saddam's refusal to obey the binding UN resolutions, his resulting failure to prove that he had destroyed his WMD programmes and renounced his intention to continue developing WMD, and the unconscionable dangers posed by the axis of rogue states, WMD and terrorism. Sure, the existence of the stockpiles was inferred from the fact that the weapons inspectors had repeatedly itemised all the WMD that Saddam was known to have had and which was still unaccounted for. But those stockpiles were not the reason for war. It was rather that Saddam had failed to show he had renounced being an active player in the WMD business.

The second fundamental mistake is the statement that the ISG has showed that WMD 'did not and could not exist in Iraq'. Yes, Kay did say he thought the weapons were no longer there. But he also told Mangold that the ISG's (truncated) report earlier this year was 'a misleading and anodyne document'. What Mangold omitted to mention was what Kay himself said about the ISG's interim findings in his evidence to the Senate last January:

'We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:

'Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.'

He also said search efforts were being hindered by six factors:

'From birth all of Iraq's WMD activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program;

'The environment in Iraq remains far from permissive for our activities, with many Iraqis that we talk to reporting threats and overt acts of intimidation and our own personnel being the subject of threats and attacks. In September alone we have had three attacks on ISG facilities or teams: The ISG base in Irbil was bombed and four staff injured, two very seriously; a two person team had their vehicle blocked by gunmen and only escaped by firing back through their own windshield; and on Wednesday, 24 September, the ISG Headquarters in Baghdad again was subject to mortar attack.'

Let's recap on a couple of points there; the Iraqis had systematically destroyed evidence of their WMD programme to conceal it from the Americans, and some WMD may have been transported abroad; even so, dozens of clandestine WMD-related programmes had been found. That's what Kay said.

Now how does that square with the anonymous ISG officer's claim that the ISG had shown WMD 'did not and could not exist?' It is a complete contradiction. Mangold complains that the ISG's truncated report made 'virtually no impact' when it was published. Why didn't he include the facts above in his own story? Why have they received virtually no attention here in Britain? Just who is being selective here? In an interview on October 6 last year, Kay said this:

'Well, we certainly found that — have not yet found illicit arms. But that's not the only thing the report says. In fact, I'm sort of amazed at what was powerful information about both their intent and their actual activities that were not known and were hidden from UN inspectors seems not to have made it to the press. This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news.'

The reason that it was not and is not news at all, and that instead history is being systematically rewritten by one selective and misleading news report after another, is because both the British and US media and politcal/intellectual establishment have been consumed by a cult of irrationality, prejudice and hatred that has simply driven the truth out of public discourse altogether.