Hutton Inquiry Update

by Mary

Lots of twists and turns in the Hutton Inquiry this Wednesday. Some damaging testimony that once again points to the Blair government "sexing up" the September dossier, testimony that raised some questions about the actions of Andrew Gilligan and the BBC, and futher testimony that asserted Dr. Kelly's death was most assuredly a suicide, although there certainly are still some reports saying this death was highly suspicious.

Some of the most damaging evidence given was by Dr. Brian Jones, the senior intelligence officer who had come forward a few weeks ago saying that there really had been objections to the dossier. Dr. Jones had been the Assistant Director in charge of Intelligence in the Ministry of Defence. In that role, he wrote to his superiors objecting to the overall thrust of the dossier. Dr. Jones testified that he thought the dossier had been "over-egged". He felt that the 45 minute charge was overly broad (was it supposed to be a biological attack or a chemical attack?) and said there was a question about whether this charge might be disinformation:

He said: "One of them was the way in which the information was reported did not give us any real feel - and I think there was some acknowledgement of this in the reporting - that the primary source, the source, the well-known source knew very much about the subject he was reporting on. And so we were left wondering: well, did the secondary source know these sort of things?"

He added: "We even wondered when discussing the issue whether he [the informant] may have been trying to influence rather than inform."

Dr. Jones also objected to referring to chemical and biological weapons as weapons of mass destruction:

The very title of it, Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, was for the first time called into question. Dr Jones said although the phrase applied to nuclear bombs, many biological and chemical weapons would "struggle to fit in that category". He said many biological weapons were designed to incapacitate rather than kill; they were lethal mainly in enclosed spaces, such as in the nerve gas attack on the Tokyo underground in 1995. Chemical weapons were even more difficult because they would need to be produced in large quantities to have any effect in battle, Dr Jones said.

The final, perhaps most damaging testimony that Dr Jones gave was that the final dossier had not been reviewed by the Joint Intelligence Committee before being signed off by John Scarlett.

Dr Kelly's widow and daughter also testified before the committee this week. The BBC reports that Dr. Kelly's daughter testified her father was "surprised" by Andrew Gilligan's report and felt it was much stronger than what he felt he had said. Both Dr. Kelly's widow and daughter reported that he was unusually stressed before being called to testify before the parlimentary committees and their testimony reinforced the belief that Dr. Kelly took his own life. Along with Gilligan's role in this controversy, the BBC admitted that it played up Dr. Kelly's position in the intelligence community -- which once again allows Blair's government to point to the faults of the BBC instead of having to answer their own critics.

All in all, the inquiry seems to be getting to the bottom of what was and was not reliable information in the dossier. With the testimony of Dr. Jones, it seems that the 45-minute charge has been largely discredited and that the Blair spin-meisters were manipulating the evidence to "sex up" the document has been proven. Note that the original charge of Gilligan that Alastair Campbell added the 45-minute charge has been disproven. Nevertheless, there can be no more question that the dossier was wrong about the threat of Saddam and that the war was waged on dubious and manipulated intelligence. This cannot be good news for Blair.