[Peace-discuss] Hutton inquiry

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

and this is how the bad guys clear themselves.....





Hutton Inquiry: A black day for democracy in Britain
Statement of the Socialist Equality Party (Britain)
3 February 2004


Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the death of whistleblower Dr. David Kelly has 
revealed the advanced stage of decay of British democracy. It is a watershed in 
the attack on democratic rights that has been waged for more than two decades 
by successive governments and which has dramatically accelerated under the 
Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The fundamental question underlying the inquiry was: Do the British people 
have the right to hold their government accountable on matters pertaining to 
life and death?

Hutton’s verdict was a resounding “No.” He has come down squarely in favour 
of a quasi-dictatorial form of government, in which those who hold power are 
not answerable for their actions to the people. He has, moreover, set in motion 
a witch-hunt against any section of the media that maintains the slightest 
independence from the government and subjects its claims to critical review. His 
findings clear the way for an unprecedented attack on freedom of the press 
and free speech.

To understand the import of Hutton’s findings, it is necessary to review the 
circumstances under which the inquiry was convened.

Months before hostilities against Iraq began, Blair decided to line his 
government up behind the drive of the Bush administration for war. He launched a 
propaganda offensive aimed at terrorizing the population and stampeding it 
behind the war drive, making blood-curdling claims about Iraqi weapons of mass 
destruction and an imminent threat to the safety of the British people that have 
since been proven to be utterly false.

Blair pursued his war policy in the face of the indisputable opposition of 
the majority of people in Britain, not to mention the popular will of broad 
masses of people in the rest of Europe, the US, and around the world. Some two 
million people marched in London on February 15, 2003 to oppose the coming war, 
in the largest political demonstration in British history. This and similar 
expressions of popular opposition and anger showed that a large majority of the 
population had made its own evaluation of Blair’s WMD assertions, and concluded 
they were not credible.

Blair’s response was to declare that the essence of democracy was the conduct 
of state policy in defiance of the popular will.

His drive to war provoked significant differences within the state apparatus. 
This included factions within the intelligence services that objected to the 
manipulation and misuse of intelligence for the purpose of justifying a 
predetermined policy of military intervention. The eventual response of the Blair 
government was to silence all such opposition by “outing” one of its chief 
critics from within the intelligence establishment—Dr. Kelly—and making an 
example of him.

The dossiers of September 2002 and February 2003 making the case for war 
aroused serious criticism as soon as they were published. September’s dossier 
contained the by now infamous claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass 
destruction within 45 minutes, and the charge that Iraq had sought to purchase 
nuclear materials from Africa. The claim that Niger had supplied yellow cake uranium 
to Saddam Hussein was exposed as a fraud by the International Atomic Energy 
Agency only weeks after it was made a centrepiece of US and British propaganda. 
Within a matter of hours, the February 2003 dossier was found to have been 
largely plagiarised from a US student thesis that was based on intelligence more 
than ten years old.

Blair hoped that victory in Iraq would allow him to suppress such 
uncomfortable facts and to cow his political critics. Instead, the declaration of an end 
to hostilities was followed by mounting popular resistance within Iraq to the 
joint US/British occupation, prompting fears that it would prove to be a new 
Vietnam.

Under these circumstances, sections of the security apparatus sought to 
exonerate themselves and pin the blame for the Iraqi debacle firmly on Blair. Hence 
the decision of Kelly, Britain’s top weapons inspector and a man intimately 
involved in the preparation of the September, 2002 dossier, to give an 
unscheduled interview to the BBC’s Today reporter, Andrew Gilligan.

When Gilligan reported at the end of March, 2003 that his anonymous source 
(Kelly) had spoken of significant discontent within the security apparatus as to 
the bona fides of the September dossier and had blamed Blair’s Director of 
Communications Alastair Campbell for having made it more “sexy,” the government 
decided to mount a campaign to silence the BBC and demand a retraction.

The government made it known that Kelly was the source of the Gilligan report 
and forced him to testify before two parliamentary inquiries. On July 18, 
Kelly was found dead in the woods near his home.

This event led to demands for an investigation not only of the circumstances 
leading to Kelly’s death, but also of the way in which the war had been 
prepared and whether false intelligence claims had been employed by the government.

Blair could not countenance any such investigation, and determined that any 
official inquiry would focus exclusively on Kelly’s death and his government’s 
dispute with the BBC. To this end Blair appointed Lord Hutton to preside over 
an inquiry that was designed to conceal rather than reveal the truth.

Hutton, a former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, had made his 
reputation defending British soldiers in Northern Ireland during the inquiry into 
Bloody Sunday 1972, and prosecuting alleged terrorists in the no-jury Diplock 
courts. Considered a “safe pair of hands”, he was given a narrow remit that did 
not extend beyond examining the immediate circumstances leading up to Kelly’s 
death. Though he went on to take oral and written evidence from leading 
figures within the civil service and the government, right up to Blair himself, that 
dealt extensively with the preparation of the September 2002 intelligence 
dossier, Hutton’s verdict is entirely consistent with this initial proscription.

Many commentators who followed the inquiry’s proceedings expressed 
incredulity over Hutton’s final ruling. From the standpoint of the facts placed before 
him—the mass of evidence showing that the government must have known its 
intelligence was dubious, at best, and that it had sought to “sex up” the dossier, 
as Kelly had claimed—Hutton’s findings make no sense. But politically, Hutton 
has performed the job with which he was charged.

In order to arrive at his absurd conclusion—clearing Blair and the rest of 
his government of any wrongdoing and instead attacking both the BBC and 
Kelley—Hutton declared that the objective fact that no WMDs were found in Iraq and the 
government’s claims were proven to be false was irrelevant! All that mattered 
was whether Blair knowingly used false intelligence claims, and since there 
was no proof as to the prime minister’s mental processes as the time, he had to 
be given the benefit of the doubt and politically vindicated.

Hutton’s pose of agnosticism toward Blair’s intelligence claims did not 
prevent him from declaring—without any substantiation—that the government and the 
security services had acted in good faith in proclaiming that Iraq 
represented a real and immediate danger. Nor did it prevent him from denouncing as 
impermissible any questioning of their “integrity”.

Even with regard to Kelly’s death, the government was found to be blameless, 
and its representatives of having acted impeccably. Hutton ignored all 
testimony showing that the government outed the scientist as part of a campaign to 
silence its critics, including the diary entry of Campbell explaining that 
naming Kelly would “f—k Gilligan”.

Sole blame was placed on the shoulders of Gilligan and the BBC.

Gilligan was found to have committed the cardinal sin of impugning the 
integrity of the government and the security services, especially by his remark that 
the government “probably” knew its claim that Iraq could launch WMD within 
45-minutes was wrong. The BBC’s board of governors was found to have 
“defective” editorial structures because it had allowed his story to stand and was 
condemned for having defended their reporter from Campbell’s witch-hunt.

Hutton also concluded that Kelly was “partially responsible” for his own 
misfortune, underscoring the ruthlessness of the British state, even against one 
of its own.

Thus, reality has been turned on its head.

Gilligan and the BBC are held to an exacting account for a never repeated 
remark made during a one minute, early morning radio broadcast. In contrast, the 
government and its spy chiefs are not required to answer for using untrue 
statements to drag the country into a war that has killed thousands of innocent 
people, as well as nearly sixty British soldiers, and reduced a country to ruins.

The verdict against the BBC has major implications for the future of the 
corporation and more broadly for press freedoms in Britain. The entire future of 
the BBC as a public broadcaster may be thrown into question when its charter is 
due for renewal in 2006. The commercial stations may be allowed a greater 
share of the market, with one of the major beneficiaries being the government’s 
most fervent supporter—Rupert Murdoch.

Hutton’s report marks a black day for democratic rights in Britain. In 
overriding the right to publish a story so clearly based upon the public interest, 
Hutton has confirmed the contempt felt by the political elite towards the 
popular will. His findings prove that all avenues through which working people were 
once able to exert some form of control over the government and the state 
have been closed down.

His conclusions must be set in the context of the offensive against civil 
liberties that has accompanied the government’s so-called “war on terror”—from 
the detaining of people indefinitely without charge to plans to implement 
legislation enabling parliament to be bypassed in the event of a state of 
emergency being declared.

Not even during the Second World War, when Britain did face a real threat of 
invasion, have so many basic democratic freedoms been jettisoned.

This cannot be attributed to the personal failings of Blair or his cabinet. 
The government has faced virtually no opposition to its warmongering and 
attacks on democratic rights, whether from the judiciary, the opposition parties, 
the media or any other section of the establishment. And it has been able to 
build on a legacy left to it by previous Conservative governments.

The establishment of a legal framework for a de facto dictatorship must 
express profound social and economic processes. It manifests an international 
phenomenon that finds its most finished expression in the United States.

Political and economic power has become concentrated in the hands of a 
super-rich financial oligarchy, which rules over a society riven by historically 
unprecedented levels of social inequality. In Britain, the richest 1,000 
individuals have a combined personal wealth of more than £155 billion, largely 
accumulated as a result of government policies aimed at slashing corporate taxation 
and cutting public spending. The aim of these policies is to transform the 
country into a cheap labour platform for global investors.

So pronounced are class antagonisms, so great is the contradiction between 
the interests of the rulers and the ruled, that the democratic process has 
become atrophied and sclerotic. The broad mass of the population must be excluded 
from the political process in order that there can be no check on the 
activities of an elite whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the 
working class.

This common pro-big business agenda ensures that none of the old parties 
enjoy mass support. This is especially true of the Labour Party, whose traditional 
working class consistency is the target for its right-wing policies. Whatever 
their tactical differences, all sections of the ruling class are in full 
agreement with the programme of imperialist aggression and the destruction of 
workers’ living standards that is being spearheaded by Blair’s government.

Only this can explain why Hutton and Blair believe they can get away with 
such a crude whitewash.

The necessary conclusions must be drawn. Working people cannot look to any 
section of the establishment or to dissenting elements within the state to 
oppose war and defend their essential social interests and democratic rights. 
Popular hostility to the government must find independent political expression 
through the construction of a new workers’ party based on a socialist programme. 
As part of this fight, the demand must be raised for the immediate withdrawal 
of all occupying forces from Iraq, and for Blair and Bush to be held to account 
for their war crimes.

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