Responding to recent developments in the Chilcot Inquiry, CND’s General Secretary Kate Hudson said:

‘When someone is guilty of a murder, we naturally baulk at the injustice of their walking free.

‘But the British establishment has bloodied its hands by shielding those responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Iraq. David Cameron may as well be helping to hide the bodies.

‘The Chilcot Inquiry has been years in the making – costing millions to British taxpayers who rejected the Iraq War in the first place. The sole purpose of the inquiry should be to identify culpability for war crimes and to lay bare the process by which the UK ended up in a catastrophic and bloody war of aggression. It has turned into a macabre charade.

‘Discussions between Bush and Blair are fundamental to understanding this rush to war: and for Cameron’s government to block all but the “gist” of these conversations (from over one hundred records) from being published makes a grim mockery of the inquiry.

‘The people of Iraq, and the people of Britain, deserve no less than to see justice done.’