Hutton enquiry hots up
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.