Introduction: The Challenges of Legislative Oversight of Intelligence

Abstract

On 24 September 2002, Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, walked into the House of Commons carrying under his arm a dossier comprising intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The dossier had been published earlier that day to coincide with the recall of Parliament to debate policy towards Iraq. As the Butler Inquiry later observed, the so-called September dossier broke new ground by using secret intelligence in a public document in order to make a case for international action (Butler, 2004). While there were significant reservations within Parliament about the need for military action, there was broad acceptance of the information included in the dossier. When, almost eleven years later to the day, David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister of a coalition government, stood before a recalled House of Commons to seek parliamentary support for military action in Syria, the Prime Minister once again invoked the ‘key independent judgements of the Joint Intelligence Committee’ (JIC) (Hansard — 29 August 2013, col. 1426), which this time took the form of a letter from the Chair of the JIC. On this occasion, however, Parliament was less accepting of that evidence, and the overwhelming response of those MPs who voted against military action was to press the government to publish more intelligence.