The Butler Report

Originally Posted by kronas

the inspectors were not allowed proper access i agree, intelligence agencies from the quotes i saw on the BBC reports showed officials 'doubting' Iraq had WMD they neither confirmed or denyed but put 'reservations' on whether he had anything seen as the weapons inspectors aka hans blitz were so conviced he did not have anything.

Is that a Freudian slip in the typo of the weapon inspector's name?

[andygrif]

Originally Posted by Scooby

Kronas why does someone always have to be to blame?!?

I would agree with that, but whilst no-one may have been to 'blame' someone has to be accountable. Surely as Prime Minister the buck must stop with him. If there was any doubt whatsoever - which there was - then it was up to the PM to make a difficult decision.

Greg Dyke wasn't to blame for the 'innacuracies' of the BBC's reporting, but the buck stopped with him and he did the honourable thing (despite it being a huge loss to the Beeb), and resigned.

What annoys me today is that I had to listen to Blair saying that invading Iraq was the right thing to do anyway. I know that a lot of people think it was, but a lot of people think otherwise, and having to endure Blair trying to justify himself for the upteenth time just rubs salt into the wounds of the latter.

[kronas]

Originally Posted by andygrif

I would agree with that, but whilst no-one may have been to 'blame' someone has to be accountable. Surely as Prime Minister the buck must stop with him. If there was any doubt whatsoever then the PM had to make a difficult decision.

yep, i still maintain he should have done more to extract information out of intelligence. instead of going in thinking that it was all 'concrete'

Originally Posted by dr wadd

Is that a Freudian slip in the typo of the weapon inspector's name?

yes!

Originally Posted by andygrif

I would agree with that, but whilst no-one may have been to 'blame' someone has to be accountable. Surely as Prime Minister the buck must stop with him. If there was any doubt whatsoever - which there was - then it was up to the PM to make a difficult decision.

Greg Dyke wasn't to blame for the 'innacuracies' of the BBC's reporting, but the buck stopped with him and he did the honourable thing (despite it being a huge loss to the Beeb), and resigned.

What annoys me today is that I had to listen to Blair saying that invading Iraq was the right thing to do anyway. I know that a lot of people think it was, but a lot of people think otherwise, and having to endure Blair trying to justify himself for the upteenth time just rubs salt into the wounds of the latter.

Stop using the BBC as an example nothing should have happened there. I like how biased the sun, the times and to a small extent sky news was though. SOMEONE seemed to be telling them to rub salt in the bbc wounds...


Blair has to be servered but those people and the buck should stop with the head of JIC.

[BBKing]

Well, the buck stops with nobody, it was a 'collective' failure. Bull*****.

The reason we keep going on about Iraq is that there hasn't been a proper inquiry yet - the Hutton and Butler inquiries are the equivalent of the England cricket captain being allowed to select the Australian pace attack in next year's Ashes ('I'll have the chap with no arms and the old geezer in the wheelchair, please').

Both inquiries have inconsistent conclusions, which I'll look up later (the Butler one is fresh in my mind, the Hutton one isn't).

I think Blair lied, and I think I can prove it. Never mind that he should be apologising for misleading the house (the tradition that Damien objects to is the tradition of democratic accountability - I think that's worth preserving to be honest), here's where he had to have knowingly told an untruth.

It comes down to what Jonathan Powell and Blair wrote at the time and what Blair said in TV interviews.

In September 2002 Powell emailed that the dossier "does not demonstrate he (Saddam Hussein) has the motive to attack his neighbours, let alone the West" and "We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat". This was six days after Blair had first read the dossier. 'We' in this context means the No. 10 public relations machine.

Blair wrote in the foreword to the dossier "I wanted to share with the British public the reasons why I believe this issue to be a current and serious threat to the UK national interest.". The foreword was first written the day before Powell's email and five days after Blair first read the dossier.

Thus Blair claimed in public that Saddam was a current and serious threat despite his office saying *simultaneously* in private that the same dossier didn't prove that he was an imminent threat.

You can argue over the exact meaning of the words 'current' and 'imminent', as Jack Straw tried to do last night with the words 'present' and 'current'. I suggest that they are so alike in meaning as to make Blair a liar in this example.

In addition the original draft of the dossier the day before Blair read it said:
""Iraq continues to have the capability to produce chemical and biological weapons, and has probably already done so.""

Yet Blair's foreword written six days later said:
"What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons"

How can he believe it 'established beyond doubt' when the dossier said he has 'probably' produced weapons?

At the end of May last year Blair said in a TV broadcast regarding the search for WMDs:

""I certainly do know some of the stuff that has already been accumulated as a result of interviews . . . What we are going to do is assemble that evidence and present it properly to people,""

Where's the evidence and the proper presentation?

In the same interview:

"The two trailers that we've already discovered, our intelligence agencies, the American intelligence agencies believe that they are part of a mobile biological weapons production facility. There is no doubt at all that that is part of a weapons of mass destruction program that was continuing for a significant period of time."

No doubt at all?

"Two lorry trailers loaded with laboratory equipment were found in Iraq shortly after Saddam's regime fell. Coalition experts concluded the equipment had been used for making hydrogen for weather balloons."

Scary, those weather balloons. I bet they could launch them within 45 minutes and they could reach Cyprus given the right wind.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/speec...798049,00.html
http://middleeastreference.org.uk/llb030825.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...698571,00.html
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s869561.htm
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus...258610,00.html

Originally Posted by BBKing

"Two lorry trailers loaded with laboratory equipment were found in Iraq shortly after Saddam's regime fell. Coalition experts concluded the equipment had been used for making hydrogen for weather balloons."

Scary, those weather balloons. I bet they could launch them within 45 minutes and they could reach Cyprus given the right wind.

I`m surprised the government haven`t tried to argue that they were trying to turn the weather balloons into Rover from The Prisoner.

[andygrif]

Originally Posted by Damien

Stop using the BBC as an example nothing should have happened there. I like how biased the sun, the times and to a small extent sky news was though. SOMEONE seemed to be telling them to rub salt in the bbc wounds...

Not only are the two intrinsically linked, but you can also draw the fact that the two situations had public inquiries and reports published. I agree, the outcome was not a good one, but based on the findings of the Hutton Inquiry (cough, whitewash) Gavyn and Greg resigned. They were accountable, but they were not to blame.

The problem now is that we can look at these two reports and see that there is contradictory information. For example Andrew Gilligan was found to have got his story about the government going to war on unsafe inteligence. But now Butler finds that the inteligence was not beyond doubt. So how on earth could Hutton publish such findings before Butler produced his?

Surely this mitigates Gilligan, Dyke and Davies? Will they be re-instated? Of course not!

Originally Posted by Damien

Blair has to be servered but those people and the buck should stop with the head of JIC.

Sorry to go back to Gilligan again but with his investigation he found the intel was dubious. If a journalist on the outside can find this out then Blair can too. If the Head of JIC took the decision to go to war then I would agree with you, but it wasn't, it was Blair. He took the decision, the buck stops there.

The problem Blair has now is that he has personally lost a lot of face with an wful lot of people. Many who trusted him before now will not believe a word he says, and two separate inquiries (and a third on the way) that totally disconnect the Government and Blair from any responsibility or blame are seen (rightly or wrongly) as whitewshes.

The real problem Labour has now is whether they will be re-elected next year with Blair at the healm. The same goes for Bush, although his problem is little more urgent becuse it's in November.

Originally Posted by dr wadd

I`m surprised the government haven`t tried to argue that they were trying to turn the weather balloons into Rover from The Prisoner.

Or blame Saddam for Roswell...!