In general terms, the government is proud of the special intelligence relationship, and we are told that British ministers spoke to their American counterparts almost daily during the run-up to war. But Butler and his colleagues produced a report with just eight references to the United States, and several of these are to US publications.

On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, British intelligence material is discussed in public. The most recent report from the US Senate even had a section blacked out that discussed a British spy.

Butler does mention in passing that members of the Australian, Canadian and US intelligence communities take part in joint intelligence committee (JIC) discussions. In reality, several former officials have told me that the CIA sits in the JIC almost as a matter of course. So, were there any CIA or other US officials in the JIC when the dossier was being compiled or any other discussion on Iraq took place? The Butler committee does not appear to have looked at whether any of the invalid material was sourced in the US.

Once a comparative analysis of what the British and American services were saying is undertaken, it will become far clearer that the case for war was fabricated. The Pentagon's defence intelligence agency (DIA) has a close relationship with the MoD's defence intelligence service (DIS). And interestingly, both the DIA and the DIS concluded that they had no firm evidence that Saddam had chemical or biological weapons.

This then brings us to the mysterious evidence that Brian Jones, the head of the relevant team in the DIS, never saw. The obvious question is if the "information" prepared by Donald Rumsfeld's office of special plans - cherry-picked from unanalysed reports and tailor-made by Iraqi expatriates - was ever shared with the UK.

Perhaps this intelligence was fed to MI6 or to No 10. Perhaps it was only seen by one civil servant and the prime minister; perhaps that might have been the permanent secretary with responsibility for security and intelligence, Sir David Omand. By concentrating on the work of the JIC, Butler conveniently ignores information that reaches No 10 without going through the JIC.

Even a reading of public sources reveals American information that Butler and his colleagues ought, by any common-sense understanding of the public interest, to have discussed in their report. Just turn to Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack, page 173.

He quotes General Tommy Franks, the officer responsible for planning the attack on Iraq, as saying, on September 6 2002 (just two weeks before the British dossier was published), that: "Mr President, we've been looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for 10 years and haven't found any yet, so I can't tell you that I know that there are any specific weapons anywhere. I haven't seen Scud one." Now Franks believed that Saddam had WMDs, and he prepared to fight them. It is just that he, with all the intelligence resources at his command, could not find any.

The next question is why Whitehall officials and ministers cannot ever mention the information provided from the US? Is it provided under rules that say the British can never mention it, while US officials can say what they please about duff British intelligence? Or is it that nothing must be done either to upset the Americans, or to reveal the extent of Britain's dependency on the US to the British public or even to most Whitehall officials?

The UK's dependency consists of the supply of intelligence and also, critically, of the supply of WMDs. All through the Iraq debates there was another secret negotiation hanging over the British state. This was the renewal of the agreement under which the US and the UK trade in WMDs and through which the British retain the pretence of independent nuclear status. Are we expected to believe that the American officials at no point made any linkage or applied any leverage on the UK? That they were happy to help out Tony Blair with a 10-year deal on the supply of nuclear arms and missiles without any conditions?

The reality is that in our two-dimensional world, the British will continue to march in step with Washington into future adventures, and will find themselves accepting a new generation of nuclear power plants and Star Wars missiles on the Yorkshire Moors, to keep the supply of weapons of mass destruction from being interrupted. But these are matters for the grown-ups, while the public and the press can be kept happy with the pomp and circumstance of a report from a committee of Her Majesty's privy councillors.

· Dan Plesch is the author of The Beauty Queen's Guide to World Peace, published next month by Politico's

danplesch@aol.com


The Butler report
14.07.2004: Lord Butler's key findings
Download the full report (pdf, 1MB)

Special reports
The Butler report
The Hutton report
Politics and Iraq
Iraq: the war and its aftermath

Explained
12.07.2004: Q&A: The Butler report

Hutton report
Full coverage of the Hutton inquiry and report
Read the Hutton report (pdf, 2MB)

Intelligence and security committee report
Download the MPs' published report (pdf)
11.09.2003: ISC report: key quotes

Foreign affairs committee report
07.07.2003: Conclusions and recommendations
Read the MPs' report in full (pdf)

The government dossiers
The government's September dossier on Iraqi WMD (pdf)
The government's February dossier on Iraqi WMD (pdf)

Useful links
The Butler inquiry
The Hutton inquiry
The intelligence and security committee
The foreign affairs select committee