Ale uton had report to ther fter weeks of detailed evidence,
death of Dr David Kelly has become almost irrelevant - at least as far as the court of public opinion is concerned.
Despite the elaborate choreography of government evidence, the basic facts are now incontrovertible. And they are completely damning of the decision to go to war with Iraq, and very damaging for the credibility of Blair and his government.
The government wanted to limit the scope of the inquiry, but inevitably it has burst the bounds of the immediate circumstances of Kelly's death. The central issues can be summed up like this:
a) Did government ministers and their aides, alone or in co-operation with intelligence services, manufacture or distort evidence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)? ....
b) Did the government, and Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell and Geoff Hoon in particular have a strategy for 'outing David Kelly as the source for Andrew Gilligan's story about the 'sexed up' dossier?
And c) did BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, or the BBC more generally, make false claims about what Kelly had said and lie about government distortion of the facts about WMDs? The outing of Kelly
That there was a strategy to out" ted by Povernment officials. Thanks to the unlikely device of putting Alistair Campbell's dairy into the public domain; we now know that Campbell was desperate to expose Kelly as the source.
There were two inter-twined motives -first to puhish Kelly, and second to get him. to deny the story that the government and/or Campbell had 'sexed up' the socalled dodgy dossier, inserting the false claim that Iraq could launch WMDs within 45 minutes.
It is now absolutely clear that the Ministry of Defence and Downing Street told journalists that they would 'confirm or deny names put to them as the potential source, and indeed the Independent got it in one question.
It has also become clear, through his own testimony and others, that Tony Blair was at least complicit in this strategy. The government hung Kelly out to dry, and they regarded it as apt punishment for his 'disloyalty'. That contributed massively to his death. Splits in the state apparatus
Second, it is now obvious to all but ernment's claims about Iraqi WMDs was false through and through. In one sense, the '45-minute' claim was just the tip of a massive iceberg of lies, but of course it did add spice to suggest that civilians in the West were under some kind of imminent threat of biological or worse
The government's defence on this has essentially been that they relied on advice from the intelligence agencies, primarily Ml6, and they were just conveying what they considered to be good intelligence. John Scarlett, head of the Defence Intelligence Committee, has backed up his masters' story on this - and doubtless a knighthood waits in the wings. But the whole story is ridiculous, for several reasons.
First Scarlett's disavowal of disquiet among the intelligence services about the contents of some of the dossiers does not ring true.
It seems clear that there has been alarm among sections of the security services and the top military brass at Blair's headlong rush to support Bush all down the line.
This disquiet has reflected concern about the discrediting of their intelligence, but probably also fears that participating in war against Iraq would increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks in Britain, not lessen it.
More generally, those in the upper echelons of the state's security apparatus must have been concerned about the adventurist drift of Bush's military policies, and the pos sibility of landing Britain in more and unpredictable military operations.
Second and more importantly, the government's claim that they were just echoing the advice of intelligence experts is a plain absurdity. One hapless Labour backbencher was put up on Newsnight to claim that this was a question for 'specialists' and not a "political' question!
Since when, anyone with the least knowledge of history will ask, has war and peace been a technical and not a political question? Obviously the apparatus of dossiers and reports was part of a giant political campaign to whip the House of Commons and the British people into support for war.
In fact, on the last two days of the Inquiry, the government's lawyers reversed their line on this, saying of course Ministers had an input into the dossiers, because, well they had overall political responsibility!
Public opinion is in any case much less concerned about the detailed arguments about who wrote what, and more convinced by the fact that absolutely no weapons of mass destruction have been found, after six months of searching - not to mention Hans Blix's assertion that Iraq's WMDs were probably destroyed a decade ago. Role of the BBC T role of the BC. This has been of he final piece of the jigsaw is the
course a huge diversion engineered by Alistair Campbell to take the heat off the government - the Guardian's comment and opinion editor Seamus
, "displacement