The Hutton Saga
- A sideshow
By Seumas Milne
The
Guardian
30 January , 2004
We
have been here before. In April 1972, the former brigadier Lord Widgery
published his now notorious report into the killing of 14 unarmed civil
rights demonstrators by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland three
months earlier on Bloody Sunday. Widgery cleared the soldiers of blame,
insisting, in defiance of a mass of evidence, that they had only opened
fire after coming under attack. The Widgery report was so widely seen
as a flagrant establishment whitewash, and continued to be such a focus
of nationalist anger, that a quarter of a century later Tony Blair felt
compelled to set up another Bloody Sunday inquiry under Lord Saville,
still sitting today.
Lord Hutton - a
scion of the Northern Irish protestant ascendancy who himself represented
British soldiers at the Widgery inquiry - has, if anything, outdone
Widgery in his service to the powers that be. Hutton's embrace of any
construction of the evidence surrounding David Kelly's death that might
be helpful to the government is breathtaking in its sweep. Instead of
a prime minister who took the country to war on the basis of discredited
dossiers about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, it is the BBC that
now finds itself in the dock - and its chairman who was last night forced
to resign. Hutton's report could scarcely have been more favourable
if it had been drafted, or even sexed up, by Tony Blair's former spinmeister
Alastair Campbell himself. The prime minister certainly knew his man
when he appointed the one-time Diplock court judge to head the inquiry
into Dr Kelly's death.
Fortunately, we
have the inquiry transcripts to test against Lord Hutton's almost comically
tendentious conclusions. We know, for example, that Blair's chief of
staff Jonathan Powell asked the joint intelligence committee's John
Scarlett to redraft that part of the September dossier which suggested
Saddam Hussein might use chemical and biological weapons "if he
believes his regime is under threat" - and Scarlett did so, by
taking out the qualifications. We know that Campbell asked Scarlett
to change a claim that the Iraqi military "may be able" to
deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes to "are
able". But Lord Hutton is of the view that this is not at all the
"sexing up" that the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan quoted Kelly
as complaining about. We also know that Blair chaired the meeting at
which the strategy for outing Kelly was adopted, even though the prime
minister later denied having anything to do with it. But, in the Alice-in-Wonderland
world of Lord Hutton, that was entirely consistent and honourable.
There are different
ways of reading the spectacular one-sidedness of Hutton's conclusions.
One is that the Ulster law lord might be a touch naive about the seamier
side of 21st century political life; another, that the legalistic defence
offered by Blair, Hoon and senior civil servants naturally appealed
to a conservative judge far more than the BBC journalists' case that
the main thrust of their story was in fact right; a third that, as a
lifelong servant of the British crown, he knew where his duty lay when
the credibility of the state was at risk.
But whatever the
mixture of motives, Hutton's unqualified endorsement of the government's
behaviour is bound, in the current climate, to be widely regarded in
the country as a cover-up. It will have no credibility for millions
who opposed the war on Iraq; it will merely add to the sense that the
political system is unable to deal with the crisis triggered by Britain's
participation in the illegal invasion and occupation.
The Hutton saga
has in reality been a very British sideshow to that central issue -
and the now barely-contested consensus that the reasons given for joining
the war were false. Next to the national and global implications of
what has been done - and the more than 15,000 people estimated to have
died as a result - a loosely worded 6.07am BBC radio broadcast, and
even the grim death of Dr Kelly, pale into insignificance. By setting
up an inquiry into the Kelly affair, Blair created a partially successful
diversion from the far more serious - and more threatening to him personally
- questions raised by the war itself.
Those are the questions
- rather than the BBC's systems of editorial control - that need urgently
to be addressed. Armed with Lord Hutton's report, Tony Blair will now
try to "draw a line" under the war and "move on",
as he likes to say. That will be impossible. The failure to turn up
any of the weapons used as the pretext for Britain's unprovoked attack
on Iraq last March has been cruelly highlighted by the queue of US officials
and politicians now prepared to concede publicly that they didn't actually
exist.
Last summer, Blair
was telling us to wait for the Iraq Survey Group to produce his smoking
guns. Now David Kay, who has been in charge of the group, says of the
phantasmic Iraqi weapons: "I don't think they existed". His
replacement, Charles Duelfer, thinks "they're probably not there".
Meanwhile, the misery
of the occupation of Iraq grows, as US and British claims to have liberated
the country are exposed as a fraud. While the resistance continues to
inflict daily casualties on the occupation forces in the centre and
north of Iraq - regardless of the capture of Saddam Hussein - the Shia
religious leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani has put himself at the head of
a mass popular movement for democracy, opposed by the very US occupiers
who insisted they were invading to trigger a democratic revolution across
the Middle East.
There are now around
13,000 Iraqis imprisoned without trial; evidence of torture and brutality
by US and British occupation forces is growing; and the CIA has warned
that Iraq is at risk of slipping into a three-way civil war. For most
Iraqis, life has got worse under the occupation and even on the crudest
calculus, many more have been killed since Saddam Hussein was overthrown
than in his last period in power: as the US-based Human Rights Watch
pointed out this week, Saddam's worst atrocities date from the days
when he was backed by the west.
This is the legacy
of the decision by Tony Blair and George Bush to invade a country that
posed no threat either to Britain or to the US. There is no way in which
the Iraq war can somehow be put behind us. That is not only because
of what is now happening on the ground in Iraq, but because of the increased
threat of terror attacks it has brought about, the precedent of pre-emptive
war it has created, and the poison released in the British political
system by a war launched on a false prospectus. Nor is it enough for
the prime minister to say he believed there was a threat at the time.
If that is the case, he is guilty of reckless incompetence.
The priority must
now be to bring the Iraqi occupation to an end and for those who launched
the war to be held to account. That process could begin in Britain with
the independent inquiry into the war demanded by the opposition parties
and anti-war movement. But it needs to go further. The Hutton report
is no more likely to lift Iraq's shadow from British public life than
Widgery did Bloody Sunday's. Until the prime minister who took the decision
to go to war has been brought to account, that shadow will remain.