They lied then, they are lying now, and Chilcott is letting them get away with it

Carne Ross was Britain's first secretary to the United Nations when Tony Blair was scheming to bounce the UK into supporting George Bush's illegal war in Iraq. He resigned in Summer 2002, no longer able to tolerate the lies and deceptions he saw being concocted.

Carne Ross is a man with too much to say to mince his words. Britain's erstwhile first secretary at the UN saw a lot of how Britain got into the Iraq war, but his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry went much further, with some very harsh words for the inquiry itself.

The classic establishment inquiry, especially one with "lessons learned" as its highest aim, finds that mistakes have been made but that everyone did their best and no one lied.

Previous Chilcot witnesses have played this game and, while it remains to be seen whether the inquiry will play along, they have rarely been challenged. Ross (not Sir Carne, you will note) is now saying pretty bluntly that people lied before the war and are still lying and that Chilcot is not equipped to deal with it. That's what happens when you let a known whistleblower in.

In a very hard-hitting written statement, Ross has again made clear that he did not see any case for war, either on the basis of the supposed failure of the policy of containing Iraq or based on the threat from its alleged weapons of mass destruction.

On the first point, he is very well-placed to challenge the claims of previous witnesses, having been responsible for negotiating the policy at the UN until the middle of 2002. On the latter, he was less well-placed, although he does say that he saw all the intelligence.

Ross said it was "inaccurate to claim, as some earlier witnesses have done, that containment was failing and that sanctions were collapsing". This claim was made from the first day of the inquiry, by witnesses such as Sir William Patey, who, Ross points out, said that sanctions were "leaking all over the place". In a footnote, Ross says that "this was not the official assessment at the time and is a judgment that is not borne out in the relevant policy documents".

Ah, the documents. Ross rams the point home at the end of his statement when he addresses the inquiry's failings:

"It is striking that in my preparations for this testimony, I found several documents germane to the inquiry whose existence was not revealed by earlier witnesses, including those who authored them. Other documents by certain officials contradicted the testimony they have given at this inquiry and yet these witnesses were not questioned about these contradictions."

Ross uses his statement to reveal the contents of some of the documents that he has seen. But he has also been censored: "I was informed by the inquiry staff that I was not in public session to refer to or reveal the contents of classified documents which I reviewed in preparing my testimony." Two of his footnotes have been "redacted on grounds of international relations".

When it comes to the threat allegedly posed by Iraq, Ross says this was "intentionally and substantially exaggerated in public government documents", notably by the drafters of the September 2002 Iraq dossier.

It happened "in a way that allowed those participating to convince themselves that they were not engaged in blatant dishonesty. But this process led to highly misleading statements about the UK assessment of the Iraqi threat that were, in their totality, lies."

Elsewhere, Ross talks of possible "perjury" by Chilcot witnesses and of "mendacity". These are not the sort of words you are supposed to use at an establishment inquiry.

Carne Ross on how the Iraq Inquiry let Tony Blair off the hook

The Iraq war was not a solution to the terrorist threat but the cause of its dramatic increase

Baroness Manningham-Buller, head of the British secret service at the time, tells Chilcot the unnecessary war in Iraq led to a huge increase in the threat of terrorism, as a whole generation of young people were radicalised by their outrage over the invasion.

Baroness Manningham-Buller said the terrorist threats resulting from the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left MI5 "swamped"

The invasion of Iraq "substantially" increased the terrorist threat to the UK, the former head of MI5 has said.

Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller said the action "radicalised" a generation of young people, including UK citizens.

As a result, she said she was not "surprised" that UK nationals were involved in the 7/7 bombings in London.

She said she believed the intelligence on Iraq's threat was not "substantial enough" to justify the action.

Baroness Manningham-Buller said she had advised officials a year before the war that the threat posed by Iraq to the UK was "very limited", and she believed that assessment had "turned out to be the right judgement".

Describing the intelligence on Iraq's weapons threat as "fragmentary", she said. "If you are going to go to war, you need to have a pretty high threshold to decide on that."

Baroness Manningham-Buller, head of the domestic intelligence service between 2002 and 2007, said the terrorist threat to the UK from al-Qaeda and other groups "pre-dated" the Iraq invasion and also the 9/11 attacks in the US.

However, she said the UK's participation in the March 2003 military action "undoubtedly increased" the level of terrorist threat.

A year after the invasion, she said MI5 was "swamped" by leads about terrorist threats to the UK.

"Our involvement in Iraq, for want of a better word, radicalised a whole generation of young people, some of them British citizens who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam," she said.

MI5 did not "foresee the degree to which British citizens would become involved" in terrorist activity after 2004, she admitted. "What Iraq did was produce fresh impetus on people prepared to engage in terrorism," she said. "If you want me to produce evidence, I can do that."

Baroness Manningham-Buller was part of the government's Joint Intelligence Committee before the war, which drew up the controversial dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction in September 2002.

The dossier stated the weapons could be activated with 45 minutes of an order to do so.

Asked about the dossier, she said she had very limited involvement in its compilation but it was clear, with hindsight, that there was an "over-reliance" on certain intelligence.

She added: "We were asked to put in some low-grade, small intelligence into it and we refused because we did not think that it was reliable."

She said MI5's responsibility was to collect and analyse intelligence and to "act on it where necessary" to mitigate terrorist threats but stressed it was not her job "to fill in gaps" in the intelligence.

A year before the war, the former MI5 chief advised Home Office officials that the direct threat posed by Iraq to the UK was "very limited and containable".

In a newly declassified document, published by the inquiry, Baroness Manningham-Buller told the senior civil servant at the Home Office in March 2002 that there was no evidence that Iraq had any involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

While there were reports of links between the regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, there was no intelligence to suggest meaningful co-operation between the two.

In that letter, she said the possibility Iraq might use terrorist tactics to defend its own territory in the event of an invasion could not be ruled out.

But she stressed Iraqi agents did not have "much capability" to carry out UK attacks, adding her view of this never changed.