(by D.D. Guttenplan, The Nation)
Meteorologists may disagree, but the political weather in Britain
almost always comes from the United States. So it could hardly have
been more fitting that just as the first flakes of winter were
starting to fall here, the British government's conduct in going to
war in Iraq was also buried under a thick blanket of white. When Lord
Hutton opened public hearings into the death of Dr. David Kelly, the
British expert on Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, back in
August, the former Chief Justice of Northern Ireland said his inquiry
was "not a trial conducted between interested parties who have
conflicting cases to advance." But his report, issued on January 28,
went well beyond acquitting Prime Minister Tony Blair and his former
spokesman, Alastair Campbell, of knowingly taking Britain into war on
false premises. Hutton's finding that the government had not "sexed
up" its dossier on Iraqi weapons, and that the BBC had been wrong to
suggest otherwise, gave a huge boost to a government that only a day
earlier had come within five votes of losing on a major parliamentary
showdown despite a 161-seat majority. By the end of the week both the
director general of the BBC and the chairman of its board of
governors had resigned.
How could Hutton disregard so much of the evidence his inquiry
uncovered? Not only were there memos from Campbell and Jonathan
Powell, Blair's chief of staff, urging changes in the language of the
dossier (many of which were adopted), there was also Campbell's
diary, with its admission that the government wanted to publicly
identify Kelly as BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan's source in the hope
that Kelly's outing would "fuck Gilligan." That there were errors in
Gilligan's initial story is beyond question. Nor did BBC management
help by refusing to issue a speedy correction. But to focus on such
matters while ignoring the fact that Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction--the Blair government's sole justification for going to
war in defiance of the United Nations--have been shown to be
nonexistent takes a special talent.
Perhaps the most surprising--and revealing--aspect of the Hutton
report is that it was a surprise at all. In the long, shameful
history of British cover-ups, few men have come as well prepared to
wield the whitewasher's brush. As plain Brian Hutton he represented
British paratroopers who killed thirteen unarmed civil rights
marchers in Derry on Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972. When the Irish
government took Britain to the International Court of Human Rights
for torturing political detainees, Hutton acted for the defense. As a
judge in Northern Ireland he often presided over so-called Diplock
courts, where major crimes are tried by judges alone and where the
prosecution is given wide latitude in the use of paid informants.
More recently it was Lord Hutton who, during the Pinochet extradition
hearings, criticized one of his fellow judges for not disclosing his
ties to Amnesty International. When it comes to vigilance in defense
of the British establishment, Hutton, as the handicappers like to
say, has form.
But if Hutton's conclusions were foregone, the response has been more
interesting. The Independent left most of its front page white the
day after Hutton came out--a gesture of outrage expressed less
graphically both by the left-leaning Guardian and the right-thinking
Daily Mail. Parliamentary opposition to Blair, which reached its
high-water mark on the showdown over allowing elite universities to
charge higher tuition fees, remained feeble. But the media (with the
sole, significant, exception of the Murdoch press, whose owner is the
BBC's main competitor) were remarkably quick to consign Hutton to
history's dustbin. If the backlash against Hutton signals a split
between the government and the political class, the public is firmly
on the side of the latter. Over half the voters in one poll thought
Hutton wrongly cleared the government of sexing up the dossier. In
another, the Hutton-battered BBC emerged as three times as
trustworthy as the government.
The habit of deference is hard to shake off, as is the habit of
regarding Britain's record in Northern Ireland as a historical
curiosity. And in secular Britain, supposedly impartial judges have
long assumed the sacramental duties of a priestly class, wafting
incense and mystification over the brutal exigencies of power. By
bringing the whole sordid ceremonial into disrepute, Hutton may
inadvertently have done his country, if not his masters, a favor. On
February 3, Blair was forced to announce that Britain, too, would
hold hearings on its intelligence failures in the run-up to war on
Iraq. But any revelations from that process are likely to come out of
Washington, where David Kay's candor and Bush's own concession cut
the ground from under Blair's previous reluctance.
In the meantime, the best test of Blair's newfound enthusiasm will be
how his government treats Katharine Gun, the former British
intelligence officer who told the truth about Washington's efforts to
rig last year's Security Council vote on Iraq. For blowing the
whistle on British collusion in a US campaign to spy on delegates
from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan--the
crucial "swing votes" on the Security Council--Gun was charged in
November under the Official Secrets Act. Her American supporters
include Sean Penn, Jesse Jackson and Daniel Ellsberg, but here in
Britain Gun's ability to defend herself has already been hampered by
a government move to prevent her from telling her lawyers anything
about her work. Gun, who is pleading a "necessity defense" arguing
that her actions were justified to prevent an imminent threat to life
and limb, would make an ideal witness for Blair's new inquiry.
