Spectator (UK): Hutton Whitewashes Blair

[AmericanErrorist]

(Warning: Conservative magazine, though you wouldn't know it)

So what were you all waiting for? You surely could not have been expecting an inquiry, headed by an eminent law lord, to deliver an indictment of the government? They don’t do that, law lords. Certainly they haven’t in my lifetime. And it hasn’t happened now, with Lord Hutton.

...Lord Hutton has flung the whitewash around with a copiousness, a completeness, which must have surprised even the inhabitants of Downing Street. The only thing we can learn from the Hutton report is that next time we yearn and clamour for an inquiry into some piece of governmental chicanery, we should avoid at all costs importuning a senior member of the legal community to write it. Instead we should get someone a little more sentient, a little more observant, a little less inclined to accept without question the protestations of innocence of the ruling political elite. A plumber, for example. Or maybe the members of Atomic Kitten. Be a bit cheaper, too.

The Hutton inquiry established in the public mind — beyond all question — the government’s disingenuousness and deceit over the gravity of the threat posed by Iraq to the West. And then the Hutton report passed over, or ignored, or rather airily dismissed all of this stuff.

...the BBC was not merely justified in but should be congratulated upon broadcasting a story that was important, significant and in the public interest. There are some, around here, who consider it the most important political story of the last 20 years or so.

...the story was not merely fundamentally correct as it stood on 29 May, but has since been endlessly corroborated. The story was this: a senior member of the intelligence community had deep misgivings about the way in which the government was using the information he and his colleagues had gathered — and that, what’s more, it was Alastair Campbell or his office that was primarily responsible for ‘sexing up’ the September dossier which so wilfully exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2004-01-31&id=4213