This is going to take things more off topic further than anything else I have seen on this board, but c'est la vie.
The full set of transcripts of evidence gathered as part of the Hutton inquiry are available on his own website for you to peruse (and it does make interesting, if extensive, reading):
http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/
There is *nothing* whatsoever stating that Blair did not sex up his documents, and the UK-government-agreed-fact that they provided a 12-years old post-graduate student's paper with words changed to "terrorist" rather than "dissident" and "may possess" wmd to "do possess" wmd suggests (IMHO irrefutably) that the UK government absolutely did "sex up" documents in the build up to war. That is within the evidence in the Hutton Inquiry and nobody has yet refuted it (and I would be greatly surprised if they did now). It was his unease at these changes which led David Kelly to approach the BBC, something which he has apparently no history of doing.
The remit of the Hutton Inquiry was to look into David Kelly's suicide and not to consider the reasons for war anyway, I hasten to point out.
It is very clear that Mr. Gilligan made mistakes. He very clearly has attributed some of his own inferences to Kelly, you can call that lying if you want. It was at best an error on his part and the BBC retracted those statements, as the Hutton inquiry does point out. I am also fairly happy to see Gilligan resign over that, as it does maintain the integrity of the organisation. Greg Dyke's resignation was less called for - but it is interesting that a guy appointed by Blair with extremely close links to the labour party found fault with and was in turn screwed over by his former allies, which gives some indication of the sort of government in place within Britain at the moment.
It is also important to consider Hutton's background. He is from the protestant esatablishment within Northern Ireland, with whom it is not an uncommon traditional viewpoint that the British government should be quietly left to get on with whatever "has to be done" (and by this I am largely alluding to religious genocide) and such annoying people as the press merely serve to get in the way with their negative reporting on institutions pursuing a "final solution". These are views that I am all to familiar with, and would rather not see being accepted.
And it is standard within UK governments that you *never* launch an inquiry unless you already know the results, and a major part of achieving that is in choosing the right chap to carry it out. British judges cannot be coerced, so you pick one who does not need to be. The sad thing for Blair et al, is that they picked a bit too well and for them to come off this blameless looks far worse than some basic amount of blame would have. Clearly Blair has been positioning Jeff "Buff-" Hoon as the potential fall guy for sometime (even to the extent of keeping him in government over issues where his resignation would typically be expected - such as the incident with a soldier who died from a friendly fire incident which he would have survived had he not had his armour taken away and given to our infantry due to government penny-pinching, and similar criticism from Black-Watch that they had no anti-Biological warfare equipment, which given that they were being sent in to fight a war against a force which we believed was equipped with Biological weapons is pretty horrifying) so this is a bit of a PR disaster for them all.
And it is also the government's responsibility to protect their scientific advisors - something which they absolutely did not do in the case of David Kelly IMHO. He seems to have been thrown to the wolves in the investigations into Gilligan's report and revealed as an unreliable link in the chain to both MI5 and MI6, who have a slightly negative anecdotal history with regard to their handling of moles. You can primarily blame either the BBC or the government for his naming, but to say that one is blameless flies in the face of the British government's responsibilites.
Furthermore, upon being named, the current UK government described Kelly as being a junior scientist in the intelligence community. It was only later after much further pressure that they admitted that he was Britain's top expert in the field of WMD. Not really the sort of person that I feel especially comfortable finding to be ill at ease with the nature of what is being told to the public with regard to Iraq's weapons capabilities, your mileage may vary.
And yes, if you read through Hutton's publicly-available evidence and then consider his conclusions, I personally think that it cannot defensibly be called anything other than a white-wash.
I also believe that this whole incident may well have cost the current British government their re-election, which is quite impressive given that they even still do not really have a credible opposition in place...
You may come to the conclusion that I do not much like Blair and his cronies...
Oh, and I drank a Brussels White, an Adnams SSB, a Nice Chouffe, a Propeller ESB, a Jacobite Ale, a Black Oak Nutcracker and a Black Oak Nut Brown Ale (to continue to remain relevant to the forum).
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: borderline_alcoholic on 2004-02-04 03:07 ]</font>
