Tom Sawyer's picket fence was no whiter

On Wednesday, I said "The Hutton inquiry was a shameful, disgraceful, disgusting whitewash." Well, I've now had time to think it over, digest more of the coverage, reconsider my words. And I do feel obliged to amend them. So, ahem,

The Hutton inquiry was a shameful, disgraceful, disgusting, and transparently false whitewash.

There, I feel better now.

I know some of you who read my blog aren't regular followers of lots of news, so let me give you a quick backgrounder.

In September 2002, as part of its efforts to bang the drums of war against Iraq, the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair issued what was claimed to be a sober, solidly-founded indictment of Saddam Hussein as possessing massive stocks of banned weapons.

Prominently played in this report was the dramatic statement that Saddam's chemical weapons were so advanced and so well-distributed to front-line units that they could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order to do so. (Actually, the report failed to make clear a distinction between battlefield and strategic weapons, leading to headlines screeching that the UK was "45 minutes from doom." But battlefield weapons are what it was referring to.) This, by the way, was in the second version of this report; the first contained no such claim.

Last May, in the wake of the failure to find the expected cache of deadly biochem weapons, Andrew Gilligan and Susan Watts of the BBC reported on the matter. Citing one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier as a source, they said that the 45-minute claim was inserted at the insistence of Blair's director of communications, Alistair Campbell, as part of a plan to "sex up" the document to make Saddam seem more threatening. Gilligan later stated that the government "probably knew" the claim was untrue.

This caused a major row, with the Blair team stomping about Whitehall, looking for the leaker. After a while, Dr. David Kelly admitted to superiors that he had met with the reporters twice and was the source of the information, while maintaining he didn't say anything about "sexing up" the charges against Iraq. Now, Dr. Kelly was no ordinary source: He was Britain's top weapons inspector. I'm going to let journalist Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, take it for a few paragraphs. (This is from an email column, so no direct link.)

To save itself after the reports by Gilligan and Watts, the government, including the Prime Minister himself, went on an internal crusade to out the name of its own intelligence operative so it could then discredit the news items.

Publishing the name of an intelligence advisor is serious stuff. In the USA, a special criminal prosecutor is now scouring the White House to find the person who publicly named a CIA agent. If found, the Bushite leaker faces jail time.

Blair's government was not so crude as to give out Dr. Kelly's name. Rather, they hit on a subterfuge of dropping clues then allowing reporters to play "20 questions" - if Kelly's name were guessed, they'd confirm it. Only the thickest reporters (I name none here) failed after more than a couple tries.

Dr. Kelly, who had been proposed for knighthood was named, harangued and his career destroyed by the outing.

He was publicly assailed, his stability was questioned (the usual tactic against a whistleblower), and he was raked over the coals by a Parliamentary committee.

Unable to deal with the publicity, the pressure, the destruction of his career, and the humiliation, David Kelly committed suicide.

Which caused an even bigger row.

Blair was forced by the pressure to name someone to investigate the circumstances surrounding Dr. Kelly's death. For this, he chose Lord Hutton, a former law lord (equivalent to a member of the Supreme Court). Hutton read documents, took testimony, and did all the other things all good inquiries do. On Wednesday, he released his report.

His conclusion? The whole thing was all the BBC's fault. Nope, the government had nothing to do with it. They are all honorable men with only the best of intentions. As various BBC reports for January 28 have it, Hutton said the allegation that the government had "sexed up" the dossier with a claim it probably knew to be untrue, was "unfounded" because the 45-minute claim was based on an intelligence report the Intelligence Service believed to be reliable. What's more, he wrote, bristling with upper-class establishment indignation, it was a grave allegation that attacked the integrity of the government and the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).

He also criticized "defective" BBC editorial processes over Gilligan's report on BBC Radio 4's "Today" program, which is where he made the "probably knew" comment.

Meanwhile, as the Independent reported on Thursday, Gilligan had also suggested that the reason the claim was in the second version of the dossier and not the first was because intelligence analysts doubted it and were reluctant to include it because it came from a single source. Hutton concluded that was also "unfounded" and actually only appeared in the second version because the raw intelligence on it had only recently arrived.

It sounds like a major smackdown. However, it's a fraud. A sometimes slippery fraud, one approached like a prosecutor trying to convict Gilligan and the BBC rather than like an investigator trying to ferret out the truth, a fraud that has now succeeded in forcing out both the director of the BBC and Andrew Gilligan, but still a fraud whose conclusions are contradicted by the testimony on which they're supposedly based.

While Gilligan's assertion that the government "probably knew" that the 45-minute claim was false does reach beyond hard evidence, a charge that they should have known, should have regarded it as at best questionable, doesn't. In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for January 29, deputy editorial page editor Jay Bookman reminds us that much of the "intelligence" about Iraqi capabilities came from

Iraqi defectors, a group with a long history of telling us whoppers about highly advanced nuclear programs, smallpox research - anything that might goad us into invading. The CIA knew all too well that such sources were often tainted.

So, most certainly, did the UK's intelligence services.

And the charge was in fact completely false; Palast notes that even "the exile group which supplied this raw claim now calls the 45 minute story, 'a crock of shit.'" But what's important here is that doubts about it were expressed at the time. Boris Johnson, a conservative MP, says in the January 29 Daily Telegraph that

this claim was included despite the misgivings of Brian Jones, the most senior and experienced MoD [Ministry of Defense] official working on WMD. One of his team had protested that the 45-minute business was "rather strong, since it was based on a single source,"

the very assertion Gilligan made. But, he goes on to say,

[b]y this stage, alas, it no longer mattered what the experts thought. The intelligence chiefs - principally John Scarlett - were in constant textual negotiation with Downing Street, and the protests of their juniors were ignored. On September 20, an unnamed MoD official felt obliged to write a further letter of complaint. "The draft still includes a number of statements which are not supported by the evidence available to me ... what I wish to record is that it has NOT been established beyond doubt that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons."

Gilligan actually made two charges. That the Blair government 1)deliberately made the dossier as inflammatory as possible by, among other things, 2)including a claim it "probably knew" was false. What Hutton has done here is to attack the questionable second charge as a means of denying the solid first charge. He ignored the doubts expressed, ignored the known unreliability of the single source, ignored the admission by the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, that the 45-minute claim was given "undue prominence" in the dossier, ignored all of it in order to focus on the most literal meaning of "probably knew" and swallow whole the government claim that it believed the report was reliable in order to exonerate the Blair crowd.

But that the dossier was indeed "sexed up" can't be denied. Writing in the Guardian, Seumas Milne notes that

[f]ortunately, 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".

In the Asia Times on January 28, David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council, adds two more examples. The first draft of the dossier says: "Intelligence confirms that Iraq has covert chemical and biological weapons programs, in breach of UN Security Council Resolution 687." The final version adds the phrase "and has continued to produce chemical and biological agents" at the end. On the same page, the allegation "Iraq has chemical and biological agents and weapons available, either from pre-Gulf War stocks or more recent production" sees "either" changed to "both" between the first and second drafts.

Hutton's cover for this patently politically-driven interference in an intelligence report is beyond ludicrous. "The Prime Minister's desire to have as compelling a dossier as possible," he tells us, "may have subconsciously influenced the JIC to make the language of the dossier stronger than they would otherwise have done." Subconsciously? Apparently, we're supposed to accept that when Scarlett ignored his own experts, removed caveats, added claims, changed "may be" to "are," and all the rest of it, he was unaware he was doing it.

The whole thing stinks from top to bottom. I'll give MP Johnson the last word.

Blair, [Defense Secretary Geoff] Hoon, Scarlett, the whole lot of them, have been sprayed with more whitewash than a Costa Brava timeshare.

Indeed.

Footnote: Thanks to Information Clearinghouse for the Bookman and Isenberg links.