The headline seems ominous, but read the article. It disingenuously omits any real surprises, and indeed fails to open any watershed doors for the prescribed media assumption that the British government somehow “sexed up” a report about Saddam, Iraq, and WMD deployment. Jack Straw confirmed that he had requested a strengthening of a paragraph regarding Saddam’s defiance of the United Nations.

Mr Straw requested that part of the document be “strengthened” to highlight the “centrality of WMD to Saddam Hussein’s role”, according to an e-mail presented to the Hutton inquiry.

“This is an accurate reference to an e-mail that was sent on my behalf by a private secretary, and what I wanted was to raise the prominence of Saddam Hussein’s defiance of the United Nations over 12 years. I still do.”

As such, the headline completely blows the entire story out of proportion, just as the entire Andrew Gilligan/BBC reporting has managed to do with the case for Saddam’s WMD program.