'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Blair gets a pass from Hutton

Posted by Helena Cobban at January 28, 2004 09:48 AM

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...

Namely (1) that Blair had been responsible in some way for the decision to "out" David Kelly's name to the press-- the decision that led, along the line to the weapons scientist's suicide last July; and (2) that Blair had somehow forced his intel people to skew their WMD findings re Iraq in a way that would bolster the case he needed to make to go to war.

Here, from the Guardian are the main findings Lord H made regarding Blair and Kelly respectively:

On Tony Blair

· No 'dishonourable, duplicitous, underhand strategy' by the prime minister

· There was nothing dramatic in Kevin Tebbit's evidence that Blair chaired the meeting that agreed to confirm Kelly's name, or any inconsistency in their evidence

· The desire of the PM to have a strong dossier may have subconsciously influenced John Scarlett and the Joint Intelligence Committee to produce a strongly worded document

On Dr David Kelly

· Kelly 'took his own life'

· Cause of death were self-inflicted wounds to left wrist and Co-proxamol painkilling tablets and clinically silent coronary artery disease. No sign of a struggle

· 'No one was at fault for not contemplating that Dr Kelly would take his own life'

· Kelly was highly regarded as weapons inspector and it 'appeared' he was considered for knighthood

· Kelly knew his name would come out, says Hutton

· Kelly was not suffering from mental illness at time he took his life

· Kelly 'did not realise the gravity of the situation he would create by discussing intelligence matters with Andrew Gilligan'

· Kelly 'not an easy man to help'

I'm honestly not sure what that last comment means, or whether it might be an unkind slur on a sad, beleaguered man. I note that there was apparently one aspect of Kelly's personal life, in particular, that may have caused him and his wife great pain and whose seeming irreconcilability with other aspects of his value-system may have added to his desire to "end it all." But this matter of "not an easy man to help" doesn't seem related to that...

I can't tell yet what kind of questioning Blair is facing in his PMQ. Lord H's reported finding that "The desire of the PM to have a strong dossier may have subconsciously influenced John Scarlett and the Joint Intelligence Committee to produce a strongly worded document" seems like some kind of an indirect criticism of Blair's handling of his government's intelligence organs. However, Lord H is also reported as judging that the JIC assessment that did come out--even after whatever massaging it was given by Number 10-- "was in line with available intelligence."

The Guardian report also noted that, "Hutton's terms of reference did not include WMDs or reliability of 45-minute claim." It would be of some significance if Lord H, who seems to be a man of great judgment and probity, also explicitly spelled out this limitation on his view of his mandate ("remit ", in English-English) in his report. Because obviously, in Britain as in the US, people still want to know how the pols and at least the top echelons of their intelligence organs got the assessment on Iraq's WMDs so terribly wrong. (As I noted here, a couple of days ago.)