Category: Blair’s Britain (vintage)

Britain’s Hutton Inquiry is supposed to be putting the whole text of Lord H’s final report up onto its website sometime today. It hasn’t happened yet.
In the meantime, I guess Lord H is reading out some portion of it in his hearing-room, and Tony Blair seems to be answering questions on it during Prime Minister’s Question-time in Parliament.
(Now there’s a fine institution–PMQ, the practice whereby the head of government regularly has to face probing questioning from the people’s elected representatives–whose introduction into the US would do a lot to temper the increasingly imperial qualities of the present-day US presidency…)
However, it’s clear already that Lord H gave Blair an almost complete pass regarding some of the more damaging allegations…

Continue reading “Blair gets a pass from Hutton”

One little-noted feature of the deal signed in Teheran yesterday between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Germany has been precisely the make-up of that trilateral alliance of interveners.
Intra-European relations were of course badly on the skids earlier this year after Britain (and Spain, and a few members of Bombs-Away Don’s much-vaunted “new Europe”) decided to join Bombs-Away Don’s assault on Iraq while France and Germany led the resistance to giving that adventure any international legitimacy.
But now, here are the three of them undertaking the significant overture to Iran together. Good for them!
I don’t know whether this collaboration came about more through flexibility on the British side, or on the side of the French and Germans. Quite possibly, in the wake of the recent unanimous resolution at the UN over Iraq, a little bit of both.
What it means is that if the unreconstructed neo”con”s in the Bush administration try to proceed much further with their plans to ramp up the esclation against Iran, they can no longer count on Blair’s crowd to give them the kind of international cover they got from them in the push against Saddam.
It also means that London has decided to restate its longstanding affiliation with the general European approach of using constructive engagement toward Iran, rather than the made-in-the-US approach of gratuitously prancing around and provoking that country’s leaders.
What? You mean the lap dog has finally jumped off the lap? Whatever next!

Lord Hutton’s enquiry into the circumstances of British WMD specialist David Kelly’s July suicide has been getting very exciting. This week, lawyers for the Kelly family and for BBC journo Andrew Gilligan have been allowed to cross-examine some of the high-ranking government witnesses.
Today, Kelly’s supervisor at the Ministry of Defence Andy Shuttleworth told the enquiry that Kelly had been “actively encouraged” to talk to the press since 1991. Part of Kelly’s regular performance review was in fact based on how often he had done this, Shuttleworth said. Kelly also had wide latitude in doing so and was not required to get advance permission…
So much for the MoD/spook types who had told Hutton earlier that Kelly had gone ways beyond the bounds in talking to numerous journos, including Gilligan.
In another development, deputy chief of defence intelligence Martin Howard admitted that Dr Kelly was not specifically asked for his consent before the MoD leaders decided that they would confirm, if asked, that he was indeed the person who had come forward to admit having talked to Gilligan. (Once again, putting the lie to claims made earlier by MoD types that they thought Kelly had received advance notification that he was about to be skewered in public.)
Howard was being X-examined by Kelly family barrister Jeremy Gompertz. At one point, Gompertz asked:

“The procedure adopted, Mr Howard, I suggest, amounted to a parlour game for journalists, would you agree?” said Mr Gompertz, “or was it more like a game of Russian roulette?”

I am starting to develop a little theory about the uniquely constructive role independent judicial enquiries can make, in parliamentary democracies, in uncovering the murkier aspects of domestic politics that the elected leaders would rather not talk about….
Earlier this month, we had the very significant report of the enquiry in Israel headed by Supreme Court Justice Theodore Or. He was looking into the causes of the confrontations in early October 2000 between the Israeli police and many thousands of rioting Israeli citizens who are ethnic Palestinians.
Or took a long time to report, but his 3-man team did what I think is a great job of explaining why, 55 years after Israel’s creation as a specifially Jewish state, the 18 percent of the citizens who are ethnic Palestinians still feel badly discriminated against and marginalized at every point… You can read an English-language digest of the 831-page document if you go here.
Did I mention that during those events, the Israeli police shot dead 13 Palestinians, 12 of whom were citizens of Israel. (Which is why they got an enquiry, while the 2,400-plus Palestinians in the occupied territories who have been killed by Israelis– mainly by members of the security forces– never did get one.)
It also makes me think of the important role that the commission headed by Judge Goldstone, in South Africa, played in helping build a climate of accountability by his country’s until then notoritously brutal and trigger-happy police…
Let’s hope Or’s enquiry and the Hutton enquiry can have the same kind of wide-ranging effectiveness in changing state practises that Goldstone’s did.

Why do I find the Hutton Inquiry so addictive? Is it because I wish so much we had something similar here in the US?
My engagement with it is a bit episodic. Like, late at night when I’m too tired to get on with the work I should be doing. But anyway, it strikes me that some really interesting things have been happening this week, though the Inquiry has not been sitting in public session. Lord H decided to take a week’s hiatus from that, in order to plan his endgame, the details of which will be announced tomorrow (Friday) morning.
So today– or yesterday?– the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) suddenly, and belatedly, decides to make available to Lord H the transcript of a closed session it held July 16 with David Kelly testifying.
The day before DK killed himself…
I gather that somehow the text of the transcript had gotten leaked someplace, so then shamefacedly (or who knows, maybe brazenly?) the ultra-hush-hush ISC folks told Lord H, oh hey, you might just want to take a look at this transcript we have??
Weird-oh. I mean, Lord H has shown his determination to get to the bottom of Kelly’s death. he’s subpoenaed all kinds of internal spooks’ email, etc etc., not to mention calling Tony Blair and Defense Sec Geoff Hoon to appear in person…
But the ISC sat on this stuff for all these weeks??
Hutton to his immense credit– I jjust love these senior judicial types once they git the bit between their teeth– immediately posted the transcript on the Inquiry’s website. It’s in PDF, so I can’t easily reproduce a lot of it here. Below here is one key portion that I quickly keyboarded: in it, DK is admitting that, yes, he did express doubts to Beeb reporter Andrew Gilligan about the veracity of the infamous “45 minute” claim regarding Saddam’s alleged CBW readiness.
In another portion, DK admits that he told numerous people–including Gilligan– that he thought that while he was 100% sure that Saddam’s people had CW programs, he was only 30% sure that they had the actual chemicall weapons.
Actually, the transcript is worth reading for lots more details as well as the general atmospherics that it reveals.
The ISC, by the way, is a committee of folks appointed by the PM and reporting to him, rather than to Parliament (which the Foreign Affairs Cttee reports to). So the political dynamic at the ISC is, ahem, not necessarily one of open accountability to the people’s elected representatives, to say the least.
Anyway, here’s the small portion of the transcript that I just keyboarded:

Continue reading “Kelly/Hutton redux”

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.

Continue reading “Inquiries in UK and Oz”

Those of you who are close observers of UK affairs will already know that the Hutton Commission, whose mandate is “urgently to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding [the recent death of British WMD expert Dr. David Kelly]”, has a well-organized and informative website.
The Commission’s staff manages to get the transcripts of each day’s hearings up onto the site within hours, and they are also putting up all the key pieces of documentary evidence as PDF files. Thursday, all relevant sub-poenaed documents that have not already been introduced as evidence will be put up onto the site in a batch.
I had a fascinating time last night, as I cruised the site reading internal memoes between Blair spinmeister Alistair Campbell and other cabinet and civil-service employees about the production of last September’s “dodgy dossier”…
My main impression to date is that, in the the UK as in the US, the political leaders first determined what they wanted to see presented as the “facts” regarding Iraq’s still oh-so-eulsive WMDs, and then told their intel people to go and find any evidence they could that would “support” those “facts”.
Then, when the inevitable questions arose about the quality of that evidence–as happened in London much faster than in Washington– the pols worked hard to bring the intel bosses into line with the views that (1) they had always thought the “evidence” was sound at the time it was presented to the public, and (2) there had never been any political tampering with the sanctity of the intelligence-assessment process.
Hence these sad spectacles of George Tenet being brought into line by the Prez here in the States, and a similar process occurring in the UK.
Of course, the long-term implications of all this for the integrity and morale of the professional intelligence-analysis apparatuses in these two countries are quite horrifying to think about.