Where Are We Up To Now? The Hutton Report

WHERE ARE WE UP TO NOW?

In his column in The Independent, Simon Carr recently wrote: “You have to keep a good grip on yourself when you allow the Prime Minister into your mind.”

“Yes indeed,” I thought, “But how? How do I stop my mind gawping vacantly and letting it all pour plausibly in? There seems to be no faulting it”. Now I’m old and slow, I can’t form instant judgments, nor do knee-jerk dismissals because I’m not on somebody’s side. In fact I don’t think I am on anybody’s side, I would just like, somehow or other, to find out ‘how things are’.

I have come to the conclusion that one way to do that is to let it all pour in, and then, remembering it as best I can, undo its packing and carefully take it apart. It’s a bit like assembling a Japanese electronic gadget, only in reverse. Instead of trying to find out which bit joins on to which other bit in order to assemble it, one has to take the ready-made artifact carefully to pieces, and ask oneself what the bits actually are, whether they really do fit together, and whether there are other bits missing.

It’s a bit like conducting a question-and-answer session inside one’s head. I tried it with some of Mr Blair’s recent words. He told the House, as an incontrovertible fact, that Iraq had weapons-of-mass-destruction ready to be used against us at 45 minutes’ notice and that consequently we must go to war. Later he said that, if he had happened to have been mistaken about that, history would forgive him because, by causing the country to go to war he had helped to get rid of the despicable Saddam, who was in breach of many United Nations Resolutions.

I can see three component parts here. One is that Saddam had these WMDs poised, another is that history is going to forgive Mr Blair if he was wrong, and the third is that he had the right to take us to war with Iraq because Saddam was horrid and in breach of UN resolutions.

Well, is the first one right?

No, we now know it is wrong. There was no such incontrovertible fact. The headline in The Sun newspaper: FORTY-FIVE MINUTES TO DOOM, was crap.

Yes, but maybe, in his heart, Mr Blair may have believed it was true that Saddam had these WMDs.

OK, but did that have anything to do with his job as Prime Minister?

Yes, it had, definitely. As Prime Minister, Mr Blair’s job was to find out for certain whether or not it was true and tell us at once. His own chosen impartial judge, Lord Hutton, has since ruled, albeit about somebody else, that any purveyor of serious information has an absolute obligation to ensure that what he says is true is true, and that valid evidence that this is so is available, before making it public and acting upon it.

So?

So Mr Blair completely failed to do this.

And?

And his failure to do that, whether accidental or intentional, was a breach of duty and trust, and maybe the people of the country, whatever their political affiliations, could be forgiven for wondering whether or not they really want such a person to continue as their Prime Minister.

But he says history is going to forgive him if he made a mistake because by taking us to war he helped to get rid of Saddam who was not only nasty but was in breach of a number of UN Resolutions.

History may make its own decisions about that, if it gets the chance.

But wasn’t Saddam absolutely vile and needing to be removed?

Yes, definitely, no doubt about that. But the question is: ‘whose job was it to do it?’ Saddam was in breach of a number of UN Resolutions, but that was no excuse for Bush and Blair to go charging mob-handed into Iraq in direct defiance of the expressed will of the United Nations.

Why not?

Well, for two reasons. One is technical. They had no right to do so. However vile a regime may be, no other single nation has the right to invade it simply because it doesn’t like what is going on there. That sets a totally unacceptable precedent. Under International Law, which the United States subscribes to, the United Nations is there to make sure that sort of thing doesn’t happen.

As far as breaches of its resolutions are concerned, the United Nations itself has the sole right to deal with them. And what it also has under International Law is the right to ask its members for help in doing so. It is pretty clear that it was President Bush himself who was in breach of his responsibility to the United Nations, and to the whole world, when he insulted the United Nations’ Security Council by telling it that, whatever Resolution it might come to, the United States was going to invade Iraq anyway.

The other reason is that the United States was not properly equipped to do it. In fact it has made a grandiose pig’s ear of the whole performance, killed uncounted numbers of Iraqis and has set the scene for a bloody chaos that will fester for decades unless the unfortunate United Nations can eventually find a way to clear it up. There is no doubt in my mind that, possibly with the help of the United States and Great Britain, the United Nations could have made a much better job of it.

How?

Simply by knowing the language for a start! All the Americans could do was shout at or shoot at people and knock their doors down. By knowing how things work in the Middle East, and also because, although many of the nations in the area are rightly baleful about the motives of the United States, they too thought Saddam was an absolute bastard, and would have been willing to join in and help if the United Nations had been in charge. That would have made for a quieter, more sensible solution.

You don’t know that.

No, but I can see that the US couldn’t have made a worse job than it did. It knows that itself now, and is proudly demanding that the United Nations should come in and rescue it.

Aren’t you getting a bit overwrought?

Yes I bloody am. Neither I nor history are going to forgive this monstrous episode of mendacious arrogance.

Are you sure history won’t?

No I’m not. History will very likely be instructed by Mr Blair and Mr Bush. They are in power and their version will prevail.

But what about Lord Hutton’s Inquiry? Surely that was impartial. Wasn’t that set up to find out what exactly did happen.

Maybe that’s what it looked like, but if we take that to pieces as well and look at it more closely, we can see what it really was.

What was it?

Well, to appoint a retired High Court judge to conduct an Inquiry to investigate and rule impartially on why the unfortunate Dr Kelly died, did at first seem to be a reasonable way to settle that question once and for all. But that was the only question it was supposed to answer. The ‘remit’: the amount and nature of the evidence that the Inquiry was permitted to consider, was strictly limited to that subject when the Inquiry was set up.

So?

So although the Inquiry was allowed to examine and pronounce judgment on some people, it was not allowed to do the same on other people, unless they were directly implicated in the death of Dr Kelly.

So what effect did this have?

For one thing it meant that the Inquiry could not be impartial. It meant that although it could condemn Mr Gilligan of the BBC for not making absolutely sure his story was true, and thereby possibly contributing to Dr Kelly’s death, it was not allowed to condemn Mr Blair for doing exactly the same sort of thing and thereby committing the country to a war that certainly caused the death of many people.

So, all right, the Inquiry was about only one subject. Inquiries often are. Does it matter?

It wouldn’t have mattered much if the Inquiry had been treated as if its findings were confined to its remit. But, although the evidence collected by the Inquiry was quite clear within that remit, and is publicly available, there are a lot of well-qualified people who take the view that the Conclusions and Condemnations subsequently issued by Lord Hutton are not supported by that evidence and it is also apparent that although these pronouncements are supposed to be confined to matters within the Inquiry’s remit, they are none the less being promulgated by the government as being universally applicable as if they were legal judgments which should be respected and acted on as if they were the equivalent of law.

Aren’t they?

No. An Inquiry is a fact-finding mission, not a court of law. The facts, the evidence, is the only thing that matters. His Lordship’s Conclusions and their accompanying Condemnations do not in reality any more weight than the conclusions of anybody else who has considered that evidence. Also, being specifically confined to the incident of Dr Kelly’s death, his Lordship’s Conclusions and Condemnations cannot be said to have any wider application. Therefore the Government has no right to use them selectively to condemn persons or institutions for any matters outside that remit. Nor has it the right to claim that the Inquiry has magically exonerated the government itself from complicity in any matters that the Inquiry was not able to consider.

What difference does that make?

Well, for instance, if the Governors of the BBC did not themselves genuinely share Lord Hutton’s condemnation of their alleged misbehavior, there was no need whatever for them to lay their heads on the block simply out of deference to his lordship’s late office. To have done that would not so much have been an honorable gesture as an act of folly, or even of misplaced snobbery.

Does everybody think that?

I don’t know. Mr Blair doesn’t seem to. He has recently let it be known that as Lord Hutton has now delivered the final definitive judgment, and, as this has exonerated the government from any part in any deception, it is time to draw a line under the whole shoddy business.

Is it?

Not on your Nellie! The one thing that Lord Hutton’s Conclusions definitely cannot be said to provide is an excuse to draw a line under matters that were not in his remit. There is still one question that still needs to be answered.

Is it ever going to be asked?

Who can say? Mindful perhaps that it might be asked, and in order to settle once and for all what he might call: ‘any residual doubts’, Mr Blair has generously agreed to institute a new Inquiry into the behavior of the Intelligence Services.

What will that be like?

Same dog, only washed. The remit of the proposed new Inquiry is going to be limited so as to exclude exactly the same subjects that were excluded from Lord Hutton’s Inquiry. This means that it will have no opportunity to consider the one really crucial question that faces the people of this country.

Which is?

This: “Exactly how accurately did the Prime Minister and his associate advisers choose to interpret and convey to the nation the Intelligence which they had received?”

How will we know what that Intelligence was?

We won’t. That part of the evidence will be kept secret for ‘reasons of security’, so nobody will be allowed to know anything more than is already known about the Intelligence that was said to justify our going to war. But, as with the Hutton Inquiry, the Chairman may finally issue Conclusions and Condemnations which the Prime Minister’s office may decide to regard as being the definitive answers to all remaining questions.

So what will the Inquiry be?

What would you call it? Once again, the accused cabal will be appointing the judge, choosing the defendants and setting limits to the Inquiry’s areas of investigation. But this time it will not be making the evidence public. Nevertheless it will be taking to itself the right to interpret and promulgate the Inquiry’s Conclusions in a way that suits its purposes. So, in the end, what will it be? It looks as if it will be no more than a tricksey way to get the government off the hook and supply history with a plausible but possibly bogus version of some very dubious goings on.

Can anything be done about it?

Yes, but only if Parliament gets tough.

Parliament?

Yes. It’s still there! Only if, as a result of strong political pressure within Parliament, the new Inquiry’s remit can be forcibly widened to include the real question, will there be any chance that the British people will ever be allowed to know why all those people had to die. Nor, unless that happens, will they ever be able to recover their trust in the honesty of Mr Blair and his advisers.

Is that likely to happen?

Not very. It could happen if the government were to come clean and apologise for making a mistake and attempting to deceive the country, but that sort of action can be only be taken by people of stature.

Oliver Postgate

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