Welcome to the 'Warnings from the Archive' project document collection! On this website, we host hundreds of archival documents relevant to the two public inquiries at the centre of our research: the Mesopotamia Commission (1916-1917) and the Iraq ‘Chilcot’ Inquiry (2009-2016). All documents are searchable by creator, date, and type (e.g. transcript, statement, memorandum).
We catalogued and published these documents for two main reasons: firstly, to allow scholars from all over the world to freely research the inquiries, conflict in the Middle East, and British foreign policy. Secondly, to preserve and democratise access to the Chilcot Inquiry documents as the National Archives' digitisation process precludes public access to all the documents. We have extracted these documents through multiple freedom of information requests, despite having been declassified by the Cabinet Office, and viewing all archived versions of the original Iraq Inquiry website. We believe that these documents should be made easily accessible to all researchers and academics, and that they should be searchable and referenceable to a permanent online host (rather than to a dead link).
All documents are published with worldwide distribution rights purchased from the British National Archives in 2021.
