29 January 2004

"Your e-mails will be passed on to those who can make decisions." That is what the host said on the BBC World Update. I was up early because the morning show was all about spooks and journalists and policymakers. Once a junkie, always a junkie.

There is an uneasy balance amongst these tribes on both sides of the Atlantic. The politicians got where there are, after all, because they followed a dream. The ones in the States tend to be true believers in something. It certainly is true of the people at the top of the current Administration, and I always had that feeling about Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Well, maybe more about the former than the latter. But I think you know what I mean.

It is only human to lean towards analysis that makes it easier to do what you wanted to do anyway. Like discovering that wine or chocolate really is good for you, or the whole Atkins Diet thing. "Fat is good for you," or maybe "The Government can be a powerful force for good."

As best I can determine, Lord Hutton had no axe to grind in this matter. He retired two weeks ago as Lord of Appeal after a distinguished career. He was called to the Bar in 1954, when I was three years old. I wouldn't be called until much later, and it was a different bar. He took six weeks have the hearings that are the basis for the document by which he will be remembered, though he took on cases involving heads-of-state and sworn terrorists. He was a jurist of some personal courage. He was Lord Chief Justice for Northern Ireland for a decade at the height of The Troubles. Several others who sat on that bench were killed, and the IRA marked him for death, too.

The Hutton Report seems to have saved the Blair Government. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on where you sit. But that is politics everywhere. What amazes me is how rapidly it was all resolved.

The BBC is the loser in this narrowly defined struggle. Gavyn Davies resigned as Chairman after Hutton states that stories about government misconduct were unfounded. There is a crisis meeting scheduled at Bush House with the remaining governors today.

The controversy in Britain centers on the death of former UN weapons inspector David Kelly. He apparently killed himself near his home last summer in lovely Oxfordshire. He had been fingered as a source for a BBC report by Andrew Gilligan that claimed a malevolent plot by Her Majesty's government to enhance the facts in a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability.

Gilligan apparently had the opportunity to go directly on the air with his claim that the Government was lying, and did so, serene in the knowledge that he didn't trust them and thus there must be something wrong.

In a press conference held after the release of the report, Lord Hutton said he had contemplated whether the Government had deliberately released the name of Dr Kelly in order to destroy his credibility. Hutton dismissed this theory after hearing from serving members of Mr. Blair's cabinet.

The villain of the piece was not at 10 Downing Street. Hutton also came down on the BBC like a ton of bricks. He said the editorial system at Bush House was 'defective' in it's failure to carefully consider the gravity of the allegations contained in Gillgan's report. Interestingly, though, Hutton was the very soul of judicial probity. He refused to address the issue about how policy concerns might have influenced the interpretation of available intelligence. He said it was not his lane in the road and outside his authority. Such a "question of wide import" did not fall within his terms of reference, he said.

I can tell you from experience that everything you hear on the news is wrong in some regard. That has been true in the print media for generations and they have columns and columns to get it straight. It of course is also a matter of perception, and it is nearly impossible to be completely objective all the time. When you have to condense an entire world into thirty seconds, nuance is the first casualty.

But that seems to be the thing that disappointed Lord Hutton the most: the failure of a great cultural institution to understand nuance. The War in Iraq may have been based on incorrect information, but it was at least an honest misinterpretation. He seems to think that the BBC stands alone in the world as an institution that is supposed to understand cultural context and ambiguity. The network should have stood as last best remnant of a universal system unparalleled since Rome.

The Hutton lasted a total of six weeks. It's openness about the workings of the highest level of government were quite refreshing. By way of contrast, the American investigation into President Clinton's conduct in the Oval Office went on for years. In fact, this week has been a study in the remarkable differences of these two great democracies separated as Churchill noted, "By a common tongue."

Interestingly, Presidential advisor Karl Rove has been accused of the same tactic of which Hutton cleared the Prime Minister.  Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson publicly disputed the President's claim in the State of the Union Address last year that Iraq had sought to buy weapons grade uranium from Niger, a report that had rttled around the Atlantic Alliance for months. The President was later forced to admit that he shouldn't have mentioned the alleged Africa connection as part of the brief against Saddam.

But the Administration was clutching for justification. Forces were flowing to the region, and the case had to be made.

The other funny aspect of this is that it only became a crime to reveal the names of intelligence officers after rogue operative Phil Agee fled the Agency. The President's father, former Director of the CIA, considered Agee a traitor after 1975, when he published "Inside the Company: a CIA Diary." He went on publishing lists of names until they made it illegal. They say he was disgruntled about Vietnam, or something, and of late he has been working or the Cuban Service. The legislation making his leaks a crime was an effort to ensure he could be arrested as an agent of the communists.

The story goes that Rove condoned the disclosure of the Ambassador's wife with the Directorate for Operations of the CIA as a way to get even with him. I have no idea if it is true, and only observe it as a witness of the passing parade. The matter is under investigation, and the Attorney General has recused himself.

I expect we will take a little more than six weeks to wrap this one up. But I think Lord Hutton is available, if we need him.

I got ready to work and took a last look at the headlines. There was a story about bio terror weapons that had been developed by al Qaida in Malaysia. It claimed the project was being developed in Kandahar and run by Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain and U.S.-trained biochemist. He was, in turn, responsible to a fellow named Riduan Isamuddin, an Indonesian accused of heading al-Qaida's operations in the region.

I got my briefcase and put the matter of bio terror aside for a moment. It appeared the war in Afghanistan cut short that particular weapons program. But the sad thing in this press account was that there was no crime on which to convict Sufaat. The Maylasians were going to have to let him go, and all that knowledge would go with him.

I wonder if I could get him to call Andrew Gilligan? I think they both have some time on their hands.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra