The Hutton Report

And: how dodgy is Murdoch's anti-BBC agenda here?

Interesting side point, The BBC is reported on Slashdot to have bought Google ad words related to kelly and hutton. Although this appears not to be true, no combination of significant words has brought up a BBC sponsored link. However I wonder which lazy hack will repeat the story until it must be true.

Blair will therefore be in a position analagous to a guilty man who is let off for lack of sufficient evidence and then trumpets his innocence and the clearing of his name. This is the fault of the media, who should all along have been much more sceptical about the rationale for holding this enquiry and the likelihood of it arriving at any kind of truth. The media's need to find (or create) "important" news events means that they have given the verdict of this shabby, pointless enquiry an apparent validity that it doesn't deserve. The anti-Blair press especially need to examine the way they have connived at his "exculpation".

Whether Hoon should go is a different matter. I can't see that he has done much wrong, except toe the party line. People who want to see him go probably want to see him go because he's an obnoxious, oleaginous creep rather than because they think he's guilty of anything.

Of course, we're expecting him to have any kind of moral rectitude for him to recognise himself in those statements, or recall saying them. I think we both know he's demonstated he has none.

The leak does matter because it's another Murdochian assault on the BBC.

I still think he'll be quietly shuffled off to the sidelines, though.

Hoon should have gone when the revelations about kit came out, he only hung on we thought so that he could resign today. That still could happen.

The leak is arguably the most significant part now (and if the Sun report is true, Michael Howard should concentrate on nothing else when questioning the PM). To believe Downing Street's protestations of innocence is to believe that somebody who comes out badly from the report has leaked it to someone who has roundly criticised them since the Inquiry began.

Howard is obv pissed off that he doesn't get to leap in with priviliged knowledge.

Oh, well if the news editor of The Sun says so then it must be true.

Enrique - it was TK that got the leaked extracts by telephone and though he obv. didn't reveal his source, he volunteered that it was someone who had nothing to lose or gain from the report's findings. I suppose he could have been lying, yes.

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.

Uh-huh.

On the 45-minute claim: Gilligan's report did not distinguish between long-range battlefield and strategic weapons.

Neither did the government's own warnings: very deliberatey we ended up with BIG NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST IF WE DON'T INVADE headlines.

Gilligan's allegation that government probably knew its 45-minute claim was wrong was unfounded - even if the claim is proved to be wrong in the future.

This is tricksy indeed -- probably fair, but also not: the government lied its ass off, used old Ph.D. theses... why give them the time of day?

Nick, I accept your point, I suppose after yesterday the look forward articles would have been all very "Blair survived yesterday, will he survive to day" type stuff.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1128825,00.html

http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/report/index.htm

xpost

If you want an report into the war then lobby your MP.

Now Blair doing jig of contrition before resuming jig of victory.

If this had been a court case about who was responsible for Kelly's death, do you think the motivations of all the principal suspects and the surrounding context would have been judged inadmissible?

You cannot understand this picture, these events, without understanding that the BBC and Kelly acted the way they did because of a profound conviction that the war was wrong -- just as profound as Blair's conviction that it was right. Without that framing, the events are the senseless and malicious acts of deranged, incompetent and malicious individuals.

But who are these 'deranged, incompetent and malicious individuals'? Gilligan, Kelly, Greg Dyke... Their conviction was that people should not die in a pointless war. They had the majority of the British public on their side. It is not just they who are insulted today, it is the British public itself. We are all in one of the scales, and Blair is in the other, yet our collective weight still does not tip the measure. I think people will recoil at the obvious injustice, and deliver Blair a stiff electoral kicking.

The BBC inserting information they know full well to be false is still wrong even if you agree with the point they are trying to make, Momus. Heaven knows, I opposed the war as much as many people here, but something about the way the BBC handled the Gilligan affair leaves a nasty taste in my mouth - its very much a case of "one rule for them, another rule for us" which bothers me so much about the British media and I'd hoped that the BBC was above all that.

The public audience; they showed a good deal of intelligence, and a sort of righteous anger at this clear whitewash that is heartening. The support for the BBC - even Letwin gave a great little tribute - was just the sort of response that's needed. One only hopes the wider public feels similarly... in a large polling turnout, 82% of viewers thought that Dyke should not have resigned, which I hope is similar across the board.

I share the despair that the Pinefox feels about the whole situation; but clearly, analysis is going into this situation now, after yesterday's startled surprise, within which the Govt ingloriously crowed as if they were back to before Bush wanted to start this war! A justified backlash is happening; people can see through it. Hutton has possibly done his job *too* well for Blair's liking... it draws people's minds to the clear white gaps which form a chasm in these "findings".

The Govt simply will not be able to install puppets in place of Davies and Dyke... there's no way this can happen now politically. Signs point towards all but Murdoch and his followers wanting the BBC to retain its public service credentials and continue to deliver high quality journalism.

Immediately after the Inquiry Blair appeared on the steps of Number Ten Downing Street dressed in the purple robes of a Roman Emperor and, leading a blind toothless lion on a gold chain, hog-called his constituents to come and get their appointments. The constituents rushed up grunting and squealing like the hogs they were.

Men who had gone grey and toothless in the faithful service of their country were summarily dismissed in the grossest terms - like "You're fired you old fuck. Get your piles outa here." - and in many cases thrown bodily out of their offices. Hoodlums and riffraf of the vilest caliber filled the highest offices of the land.

When the Supreme Court overruled some of the legislation perpetrated by this vile rout, Blair forced that august body, one after the other, on threat of immediate reduction to the rank of Parliamentary Lavatory Attendants, to submit to intercourse with a purple-assed baboon; so that venerable, honored men surrendered themselves to the embraces of a lecherous snarling simian, while Alastair Campbell, Blair and his strumpet wife, and the veteran brown-nose Lord Hutton, smoking a communal hookah of hashish, watched the lamentable sight with cackles of obscene laughter. Judge Blackstrap succumbed to a rectal hemorrhage on the spot, but Blair only laughed and said coarsely, "Plenty more where that came from."

Hutton, unable to control himself, rolled on the floor in sycophantic convulsions, saying over and over "You're killin' me, Chief. You're killin' me."

Judge Hockactonsvol has both ears bitten off by the simian, and when Chief Judge Howard P. Herringbone asked to be excused, pleading his piles, Blair told him brutally, "Best thing for piles is a baboon's prick up the ass. Right Hutton?"

"Right Chief. I use no other. You heard what the man said. Drop your moth-eaten ass over that chair and show the visiting simian some Southern hospitality."

Blair then appointed the baboon to replace Judge Blackstrap, "diseased."

"I'll have to remember that one boss," said Campbell, breaking into loud guffaws.

So henceforth the proceedings of the Court were carried on with a screeching simian shitting and pissing and masturbating on the table and not infrequently leaping on one of the Judges and tearing him to shreds.

"He is entering a vote of dissent," Blair would say with an evil chuckle. The vacancies so created were invariably filled by simians, so that, in the course of time, the Supreme Court came to consist of nine purple-assed baboons; and Blair, claiming to be the only one able to interpret their decisions, thus gained control of the highest tribunal in the land.

He then set himself to throw off the restraints imposed by Parliament and the House of Lords. He loosed innumerable crabs and other vermin in both houses. He had a corps of trained idiots who would rush in at a given signal and shit on the floor, and hecklers equipped with a brass band and fire hoses. He instituted continues repairs. An army of workman trooped through the Houses, slapping the legislators in the face with boards, spilling hot tar down their necks, dropping tools on their feet, undermining them with air hammers; and finally he caused a steam shovel to be set up on the floors, so that the recalcitrant legislators were either buried alive or drowned when the Houses flooded from the broken water mains. The survivors attempted to carry on in the street, but were arrested for loitering and were sent to the workhouse like common bums. After release they were barred from office on the grounds of their police records.

Then Blair gave himself over to such vile and unrestrained conduct as is shameful to speak of. He instituted a series of contests designed to promulgate the lowest acts and instincts of which the human species is capable. There was a Most Unsavory Act Contest, a Cheapest Trick Contest, Molest a Child Week, Turn In Your Best Friend Week - professional stool pigeons disqualified - and the coveted title of All-Around Vilest Man of the Year. Sample entries: The junky who stole an opium suppository out of his grandmother's ass; the ship captain who put on women's clothes and rushed into the first lifeboat; the vice-squad cop who framed people, planting an artificial prick in their fly.

Blair was convulsed with such hate for the species as it is, that he wished to degrade it beyond recognition. He could endure only the extremes of human behavior. The average, the middle-aged (he viewed middle age as a condition with no relation to chronological age), the middle-class, the bureaucrat filled him with loathing. One of his first acts was to burn every record in London; thousands of bureaucrats threw themselves into the flames.

"I'll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate," he would say, looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity.

(A detournement of William Burroughs' text Roosevelt After Inauguration by Quentin Crisp II)

We'll see what happens.

When Murdoch and co say that the BBC should be stripped of special status and license fee and made to fight in the marketplace, do they mean it should no longer be held to account, but merely indulged?

Doubtless they don't.

I could not hear what the man was saying on that broadcast that you have just talked about.

(Pam's always vaguely amused by my anger at stuff like this - "What else did you expect? It's Fox.")

An only possibly interesting fact is that the images on their own were not obviously offensive.

I disagree about the Daily Mail and the Sun, though. I think they would print something with those desperately hateful and totally-uninformed sentiments in a heartbeat, minus a few things the lawyers made them take out.

Finally I have to think that this guy is an almost psychotically unhappy person inside.

"check"

"Rivers of blood as high as a horse's shoulder?"

"check!"

"Fox News staff in da house?"

"check!!!!"

"Call in the angels"

the Book of Revelations can't come true soon enough for assbaskets like this. I hope you sit on your fucking lapel pin, bitchnose

xpost yeah that was bad.

stevem you have just persuaded me to go to bed.

"On each element of the case before him, Lord Hutton gave the government the benefit of the doubt, opting for the interpretation that most favoured it, never countenancing the gloss that might benefit the BBC. Perhaps the clearest example was Lord Hutton's very judge-like deconstruction of the "slang expression" sexed up. One meaning could be inserting items that are untrue, he said; another could simply be strengthening language. Under the latter definition, Hutton conceded, Gilligan's story would be true. So his lordship decided the other meaning must apply."

I share your worries about the whitewash, but don't you see that Gilligan's sloppiness gave Hutton the licence to interpret the meaning of "sexed up" the way he did? The listeners were being told at the same time that the document was sexed up and that the government "probably" had known that the 45-minute deployment information was not true. The implication was clearly that the sexing up consisted at least in part of lying. It was later found out that the detail in question had been added late because the information had come in late, and not because a fictional element was needed to bolster the dossier. So even though the term "sexing up" usually means only to streghtn existing facts, in this case it obviously implied extended embellishment with untruths.

The sad thing about this is that it means that the government is excused the blatant sexing-up concocted between Campbell, on behalf of the government, and John Scarlett. And black becomes white. It was the sexing up which took us to war. It wasn't the 45-minute capability in itself, but the removal of the word "may" from the dossier and its replacement with such terms as "capable of", and the replacement of "WMD programmes" with "WMD", that clinched the deal in the public's eyes and made 55% of them poll in favour on the eve of the war.

Perhaps I should attack a train *tonight*?

No shit it's an easy choice! Au revoir, freedom fries - hello, pomme frites!

new labour are some sick fucks.

Is it me, or are they managing to keep this fairly quiet? Page 6 of The Independent.