Word Hutton's final report into the death of Dr David Kely to be pubalished later this month, may focus blame on a few scapegoats from the BBC or even Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon: but it is widely expected that Tony Blair himself, the architect of the war drive and the most eager to make the false claim that Iraq's so-called "weapons of mass destruction" posed a "clear and present danger" will escape with only his public credibility damaged.
After nine months of fruitless searching throughout occupied Iraq, the capture of Saddam and other prominent figures from his regime, it has become even more apparent that there were no weapons, or even ongoing "weapons programmes" at the time .. Blair and Bush launched their invasion.
Indeed Blair's most recent attempt at the end of December to claim that hidden "weapons laboratories" had been discovered in Iraq were instantly ridiculed from Baghdad by Paul Bremer, Bush's head of the Coalition provisional Authority.
Whether or not the Hutton Report does justice to them, 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 Inquiry itself was set up in response to the apparent suicide of Dr Kelly, who had been a relatively low profile advisor until unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight of media attention. That there was a strategy to 'out David Kelly has been all but admitted by government officials. The government hung Kelly out to dry, and that contributed massively to his death.
It is now also obvious to all but total Blairite loyalists that the government's claims about Iraqi WMDs were false through and through.
The '45-minute' claim was just the tip of a massive iceberg of lies, but it did add spice to suggest that civilians in the West were under some kind of imminent threat of biological or worse attack.
As Diane Abbott has pointed out, Labour MPs who believed the assurances they were given, sometimes personally by Blair himself in the run up to the key Commons vote on support for the war now "feel like pillocks".
Michael Meacher has pointed to the key role in the selection and distortion of evidence played by "Operation Rockingham", a unit set up within the intelligence service Gilligan under pressure: can he hold on to his job? specifically to further the notion that Iraq had WMDs, and belittle evidence to the contrary.
Yet it is also clear that Blair and his office chose to highlight the most dramatic, and least substantiated allegations emerging from these sources, further spiced up in the "dodgy dossier" by the inclusion of plagiarised material from an old PhD thesis.
This is because the driving force behind the dossier was always political, and the defective information suited Blair's political purpose: a campaign to whip the House of Commons and the British people into support for war
However while the genuine culprits seem likely to escape any retribution, one or more sacrificial offerings seem likely to be singled out from the news team of the BBC.
Andrew Gilligan, the first to use David Kelly's information and draw attention to the government's "sexing up" of the dossier may have enough dirt on the whole affair to protect his own job: but editors and managers may well take the blame for exposing the