After the furore, some analysis of the Hutton report
If it looks like a whitewash, walks like a whitewash, and quacks like a whitewash…
A few choice selections from the Guardian’s analysis of the Hutton report:
[…]Lord Hutton leaves himself open to accusations of having cherrypicked the evidence that supports the government case and sidelined that which supports the BBC. Awkward bits of evidence that do not fit his final conclusion are left lying around unanswered.
[…]
The bulk of Lord Hutton’s report consists of reprinting oral evidence to the inquiry, with little analysis.
He repeatedly emphasises the “grave allegations” made by Andrew Gilligan and repeatedly dismisses accusations that the government’s behaviour was “dishonourable, underhand, and duplicitous”.
Where the evidence appears to be conflicting, he invariably gives ministers and government officials the benefit of the doubt rather than the BBC.
Beyond his tendency to narrow his remit to avoid asking the important questions, and a tendency to instinctively favour the Government, is a wilful tendency to ignore or distort evidence:
Evidence emerged during the inquiry from John Scarlett, the head of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), who drew up the dossier, that the 45 minutes related not to long-range weapons as had been widely assumed at the time but to battlefield weapons.
This is significant, because it supports the BBC case that the threat from Saddam was not as grave as the government dossier suggested.
But Lord Hutton said in his report that the distinction between battlefield weapons and long-range ones deployable within 45 minutes “does not fall within my terms of reference”.
Look. If the Government issues an intelligence report talking about Weapons of Mass Destruction, beefs up the language on many occasions and uses the totemic 45 minutes figure as a scare quote in its own partisan introduction, and it takes the death of an expert in the field, hounded to suicide by a personally devastating leak, for a full inquiry to be launched, taking months and months to collect evidence from everyone involved - then we should at least expect said report to realise that there’s a difference between ballistic nuclear weapons and grenades filled with chemicals.