Lord Hutton
leaves the WMD question unanswered - from
The Insider -
The
official report into the death of Dr David Kelly, the British government expert
who leaked the fact that the case for the war on Iraq was a lie, is being
described as just another government "white wash".
Lord Hutton(1)
utterly failed to address any of the questions about the suspicious
circumstances surrounding David's death. He also refused to address the to
question of why the UK government invaded Iraq when they had no justification
whatsoever for doing so. If the politicians think the public are going to fall
for this extravagant ploy, they are most grievously mistaken.
Dr Rodrigues-Walsh, an expert in cases like Dr Kelly's who came to hear the
report in person, was so surprised by Lord Hutton's verdict of suicide that she
interrupted his speech to express her amazement in public. This remarkable
incident went unreported by most mainstream media outlets, and not a single word
of this vocal complaint was published.
Do not let this soap opera distract you from the real issue. They lied,
thousands died, and the oil and arms companies made billions. Life for the
people of Iraq is measurably worse under the US puppet regime than it ever was
under Saddam Hussein.
They told us Iraq had WMD to win our support for their war. But there were no
WMD, and they knew it: http://www.thedebate.org
Lord Hutton's report is a curiously unbalanced document. He opens by saying that
no one could have contemplated that David Kelly would take his own life as a
result of the pressures he felt, at which point he could have stopped. Several
hundred pages later, blame has, by implication, been apportioned. What is
extraordinary about the report is that it has all been allocated to one
institution, the British Broadcasting Corporation.
However, Lord Hutton failed to settle the crucial question of whether Mr Blair
took Britain to war in Iraq on a false prospectus. After he ruled that the
intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was beyond his terms of
reference, the Tories and Liberal Democrats renewed their demands for an
independent inquiry into the build-up to war.
He also asked: "Are his conclusions on restricting the use of unverifiable
sources in British journalism based on sound law and, if applied, would they
constitute a threat to the freedom of the press in this country?" Mr Davies's
comments reflected anger at the BBC at Lord Hutton's surprisingly strong
criticism. One BBC insider described it as "an old man's report that is simply
wrong".
On Dr Kelly himself, Lord Hutton said the government scientist broke civil
service rules by his unauthorised meeting with Mr Gilligan and said he was "not
an easy man to help or to whom to give advice".
In a final submission to Lord Hutton, published last night, the Kelly family
said: "The Government made a conscious decision to cause Dr Kelly's identity to
be revealed..."
The Independent, "His lordship looks down on our masters and takes their word
for it", 29 January 2004.
Faced with whitewash of this quality it's impossible to curb one's instinct to
cover it with graffiti. All right. One thing that Lord Hutton said. If the
various components of the Government's action were looked at "in isolation", he
told the court, "it would be possible to infer, as some commentators have done,
that there was an underhand strategy by the Government to leak Dr Kelly's name
to the press in a covert way".
The Scotsman (UK), "Leak Leaves Eager Public Feeling Deflated", 28 January 2004.
[ http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2463592 ]
Journalists and members of the public eagerly piled into Court 76 at the Royal
Courts of Justice in central London to hear what Lord Hutton had to say.
Many present in court had hoped the extensive leak in The Sun was not the whole
picture and something even more spectacular would be revealed.
But the predicted condemnation of Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, former No 10
director of communications and strategy Alastair Campbell and even the Prime
Minister himself never materialised.
In fact, so unconcerned were they that the Government’s barrister Jonathan
Sumption QC did not even bother to attend.
There was palpable disappointment that the main political players appeared to
have got away scot-free.
For more than an hour and 20 minutes, Lord Hutton held forth before the hushed
court, pausing only to take the occasional sip of water.
Only once was the silence broken by an aggravated member of the public who
remained convinced Dr Kelly was murdered last July.
Rejecting Lord Hutton’s conclusion of suicide, criminal psychologist Patricia
Rodrigues-Walsh caused a stir at the back of the room as she insisted the
Government scientist had been killed.
Her theory was greeted with a polite “thank you” by an unperturbed Lord Hutton,
before he carried on with his conclusions.
Speaking in his characteristically measured way, he raised laughter at one point
by drily referring to The Times’s desperate bid to name Dr Kelly by flinging 20
names at the Ministry of Defence press office.
With the threat of legal action, the retiring law lord gathered up his papers,
and left – leaving a room full of reporters feeling strangely deflated.
Hutton identifies five key areas in Kelly affair, but No 10 escapes all censure
over its role in the tragedy of a weapons scientist
From virtually the first words he spoke, Lord Hutton made clear that he did not
feel it was within his remit to assess fully the whole issue of weapons of mass
destruction.
The Iraq Survey Group is looking increasingly likely to rule that no weapons
existed in Iraq, at least since the Gulf War in 1991. But for many people, while
Labour MPs howled with relief in the Commons, this was the dog that didn't bark
yesterday.
Lord Hutton said that it was also not up to him to decide whether the
intelligence in the dossier, including the 45-minute claim, was "unreliable" or
not. He said twice that the issue was "a separate issue".
Lord Hutton correctly pointed out that the allegation by Andrew Gilligan, the
defence correspondent for BBC Radio 4's Today programme, was that the Government
used such intelligence "knowing it to be untrue".
But for many people, the reliability of some of the claims in the dossier are
what really matter a good deal more than the row between the BBC and the
Government. ...
The Independent, "WMD: Now it is Bush's turn to face uncomfortable truths", 29
January 2004.
[
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=485688
]
The Bush administration was in full retreat yesterday over its claims about
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as the man with the task of uncovering that
arsenal sought to shift the blame away from the White House and on to the
intelligence community.
Footnotes:
(1) Lord Hutton is an
established Freemason. (Wes Penre's note)
Created & Posted:
Thursday, January 29, 2004 07:03:56 -0800