Inquiries in UK and Oz

It’s been a riveting week at the Hutton Commission of Inquiry in the UK, and next week promises even more fireworks with Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon called to appear next Wednesday and none other than Tony Blair next Thursday.
Meanwhile in Oz, PM John Howard is also coming in for some tough questioning regarding allegations that people in his office, too, had “sexed up” the intel on Iraqi WMDs in an attempt to shoe-horn the Australian public into supporting the launching of the war.
Down under there, there hasn’t yet been any development as dramatic as last month’s killing (or suicide) of British WMD expert David Kelly, which forced Blair to appoint an indpendent judicial inquiry under Lord Hutton to investigate all the circs surrounding Kelly’s death. Lord H is keeping up a cracking pace of near-daily hearings, calling 6-12 witnesses per week. He plans to adjourn the hearing and start writing his report on Sept. 25.
In Australia, the venue is a parliamentary inquiry, and the pace more leisurely. Today, that inquiry heard a blistering attack on Howard from former Office of National Assessments senior analyst Andrew Wilkie– the same guy who resigned in March to express his outrage at the launching of the war.

The Melbourne Age reported the following about the intel assessment that the Australian government published in the run-up to the war:

“It was sexed up,” Mr Wilkie told the committee. “Sometimes the exaggeration was so great it was clear dishonesty. I will go so far as to say the material was going straight from ONA to the Prime Minister’s Office and the exaggeration was occurring in there.”

Howard, also present, denied that charge absolutely.
The Age noted that as late as February, Howard had tried to sell the parliament on the old canard about Iraq trying to procure uranium from Africa– a claim that by that time was so thoroughly discredited that even the Americans had stopped using it.
I don’t know enough about Australian politics to tell what effect all this will have on Howard’s premiership. In the UK, by contrast, it is already clear that Blair’s formerly commanding position in British politics has already been very badly dented by the mounting evidence that “sexing-up” of the assessment was indeed undertaken by key people in his office.
Lord H’s questioning this week has focused quite closely on who inside the government made the decision to let David Kelly hang out to dry, as part of the government’s ongoing spat with the Beeb. On several occasions, his questions have seemed indicate great distaste for the way his government bosses treated the late scientist.
While cruising the almost addictive transcripts on the Hutton Inquiry’s website, I noted the number of times Blair’s chief spinmeister Alastair Campbell made elaborate mention of the “diaries” he’d been keeping while in office. Those diaries have not, it seems, been subpoenaed in full (correct me if I’m wrong, someone). But from time to time during his time on Lord H’s witness stand Campbell offered excerpts from them to help bolster his presentation of his recollections.
Some folks I talked with in London last week were convinced that Campbell is publicizing the fact of the diaries’ existence–and the possibility that they might reveal many other internal secrets from No.10–as his insurance against himself being hung out to dry by the man generally (and slightly pathologically) known in No.10’s inter-office emails as “TB”.
From cruising round the Guardian’s website today I also learned:
(1) That David Kelly had been a member of the pacifist Baha’i faith for the past few years– which might help to explain the comment he reportedly made to an FCO friend back in February to the effect that if the UK did go to war he “might be found dead in the woods some day.” (Numerous other explanations are, of course, possible.) and
(2) That he used to attend Baha’i worship in a worship center in my birth-town Abingdon, which is not far from where he lived.
All very interesting (especially to someone who’s a member of a pacifist church.) It makes Kelly’s situation seem all the more tragic.
The political side of me, however, notes that it would be a huge step forward if somehow here in the US we could have some similar process underway by which someone– a senior judicial figure, or a legislative body– could hold our national leadership truly to account for the deliberate fashioning of lies that it undertook as it led this nation–and the UK, and Australia, and all the rest of the world–into this terrible and misguided war.
Who could do it? Where, oh where is anything that acts at all like a decent political opposition here?