this mostly effects those in the UK but I would be pleased if any over there could let me know what is going on. From here this is the article I just found from last Saturday. Please update me on it if you can!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story...028114,00.html

It's official - Saddam was not an imminent threat

Hutton's remit was narrow - yet he has exposed the truth about the Iraq war

Clare Short
Saturday August 23, 2003
The Guardian

After eight days of the Hutton inquiry and enormous quantities of media coverage, it is worth pausing to try to take stock. Many of us have said that, deliberately or otherwise, Alastair Campbell's decision to go to war with the BBC had the potential to distract attention from the most important questions arising from the Iraq crisis - whether the nation was deceived on the road to war, and where responsibility lies for the continuing chaos and loss of life in Iraq.
Lord Hutton has been charged with inquiring into the narrower question of the circumstances that led to the death of Dr David Kelly and will report on this very important question. But his inquiry is revealing important information that casts light on the bigger question of how we got to war.

There is an unfortunate tendency among some commentators to seek to narrow the issue to a blame game between the BBC and 10 Downing Street. This has led to comment to the effect that Dr Kelly was the unfortunate victim of a battle between two mighty institutions, accompanied by a campaign of vilification against Andrew Gilligan and the Today programme. It is important to remain constantly aware of the vested interests at play: the Murdoch empire and other rightwing media operations would like to weaken and break the BBC so that British broadcasting might be reduced to the sort of commercially dominated, biased news reporting that controls the US airwaves. It is extremely unfortunate that a Labour government has been willing to drive forward this campaign against the BBC.

We must not allow the barrage of biased comment to mislead us into a fudged conclusion that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. And we must focus both on the pressures that were placed on Dr Kelly and the wider question of how we got to war in Iraq.

The inquiry has already established beyond doubt that, despite government briefing that Dr Kelly was a medium-level official of little significance, he was in fact one of the world's leading experts on WMD in Iraq. It is also clear that Dr Kelly chose to brief three BBC journalists - and presumably others - to the effect that the 45-minute warning of the possible use of WMD was an exaggeration. He said to the Newsnight reporter Susan Watts, as well as to Gilligan that Campbell and the Downing Street press operation were responsible for exerting pressure to hype up the danger. The inquiry is exploring the reality of that claim. But it is already clear that Dr Kelly made it, to Gilligan and Watts.

The BBC would have been grossly irresponsible if it had failed to bring such a report - from such an eminent source - to public attention. It is a delicious irony that Alastair Campbell castigates the BBC for relying on one very eminent source for this report ... and yet the 45-minute claim itself came from only one source.

As a result of the Hutton inquiry, we now know that two defence intelligence officials wrote to their boss to put on record their disquiet at the exaggeration in the dossier. Moreover, one official asked his boss for advice as to whether he should approach the foreign affairs select committee after the foreign secretary had said that he was not aware of any unhappiness among intelligence officials about the claims made in the dossier.

We know through emails revealed by Hutton that Tony Blair's chief of staff made clear that the dossier was likely to convince those who were prepared to be convinced, but that the document "does nothing to demonstrate he [Saddam Hussein] has the motive to attack his neighbours, let alone the west. We will need to be clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat. The case we are making is that he has continued to develop WMD since 1998, and is in breach of UN resolutions. The international community has to enforce those resolutions if the UN is to be taken seriously."

I agree completely with Jonathan Powell's conclusion. But it follows from this that there was no need to truncate Dr Blix's inspection process and to divide the security council in order to get to war by a preordained date.

If there was no imminent threat, then Dr Blix could have been given the time he required. He may well have succeeded in ending all Iraq's WMD programmes - just as he succeeded in dismantling 60-plus ballistic missiles. Then sanctions could have been lifted and a concentrated effort made to help the people of Iraq end the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein - just as we did with Milosevic in Serbia.

Or if Blix had failed, we would have been in the position President Chirac described on March 10, when the issue would have come back to the security council. And in Chirac's view, this would have meant UN authorisation of military action.

The tragedy of all this is that if we had followed Jonathan Powell's conclusion, and the UK had used its friendship with the US to keep the world united on a UN route, then, even if it had come to war, a united international community under a UN mandate would almost certainly have made a better job of supporting Iraq's reconstruction. In this scenario the armed forces would have concentrated on keeping order; the UN humanitarian system would have fixed the water and electricity systems; Sergio Vieira de Mello, as Kofi Annan's special representative, would have helped the Iraqis to install an interim government and begin a process of constitutional change, as the UN has done in Afghanistan; and the World Bank and IMF would have advised the Iraqi interim authority on transparent economic reform, rather than a process of handover to US companies.

Following the terrible bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, there is a danger that those who favour chaos in Iraq will make further gains, at great cost to the people of Iraq and coalition forces. The answer remains a stronger UN mandate and internationalisation of the reconstruction effort. The worry is that the US will not have the humility to ask for help, and the chaos and suffering will continue.

In the meantime, Lord Hutton will draw his conclusions about the tragic death of Dr Kelly. My own tentative conclusion is that Downing Street thought they could use him in their battle with the BBC, and that the power of the state was misused in a battle to protect the political interests of the government.

· Clare Short resigned as international development secretary in May

If there was no imminent threat, then Dr Blix could have been given the time he required. He may well have succeeded in ending all Iraq's WMD programmes - just as he succeeded in dismantling 60-plus ballistic missiles. Then sanctions could have been lifted and a concentrated effort made to help the people of Iraq end the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein - just as we did with Milosevic in Serbia.


Following the terrible bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, there is a danger that those who favour chaos in Iraq will make further gains, at great cost to the people of Iraq and coalition forces. The answer remains a stronger UN mandate and internationalisation of the reconstruction effort. The worry is that the US will not have the humility to ask for help, and the chaos and suffering will continue.



Those two paragraphs embody the pertinent reality of that war.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_354221,0000.htm
Blair wards off attacks at Hutton inquiry
Vijay Dutt
London, August 28

A noisy protest from about 100 demonstrators greeted Tony Blair as he arrived to give evidence before the Hutton inquiry, the second British Prime Minister to go before a judicial hearing.

But, Blair critics suffered a setback and are sorely disappointed that he could mount a robust defence of his role in the preparation of the controversial September dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He told the Hutton inquiry, that he "would have been forced to resign if the claims about the government "sexing up" its Iraq dossier had been true".

He said the dossier was in response to the tremendous demand for information and for evidence that Saddam Hussein was actively involved in developing weapons of mass destruction. A large number of information was coming to him in this regard and he had a discussion with President Bush also about it all.

Giving evidence for 160 minutes at the inquiry into the death of government scientist Dr David Kelly, who was the source for the BBC report about intelligence in the dossier being "sexed up", Blair said that the report threatened his credibility as prime minister and, if true, "would have merited my resignation". But he took responsibility for the media strategy that led to Dr Kelly being outed as the suspected source of the BBC.

He added that his foreword to the controversial document made clear the dossier was responding to calls to show intelligence on Iraq and was not used "as the immediate reason for going to conflict". He denied any knowledge that intelligence officers were unhappy with the dossier. He said that when he had heard BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan's report, he had asked John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, to heck the claims made in it.

Blair stressed that he had held no doubt that Number 10 press chief Alstair Campbell would help with the presentation of the document. His critics had been pointing out that Campbell had briefed Blair on how to make his presentation of the case on Iraq in the House of Commons. Blair said that when the "raging storm" erupted following the BBC story and then Campbell's name was added, it did not remain a " small item".

He then wanted Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee rather than the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, to investigate the row. He was asked if the appearance of Campbell on Channel 4 had escalated the row between Downing Street and BBC, Blair said, the dispute was already there but, "for us the dispute was in a sense not what was important. What was important was to correct the story."

He admitted that he was in a "quandary" about what to tell the MP's committee when Dr Kelly admitted to his bosses in the Ministry of Defence that he had met Gilligan. "We handled this by the book, in the sense of with the advice of senior civil servants. Not as I say in order to pass the responsibility to them but in order to make sure that this was not as it were the politicians driving the system, but us taking a consensus view about what was the right way to proceed."

It was decided to tell the MPs' Committee the suspected source had come forward - as it would have been improper to keep it from them, before making the news public without naming Dr Kelly. The feeling was, "look, we are best simply to be open about this. We know this information."

He also pointed out that any statement that was made was to be put to Dr Kelly first. Referred to leak fears, Blair said he had not seen the "question and answer" sheet which told Ministry of Defence press officers they could confirm Dr Kelly's name if it was put to them by journalists.

"I think the basic view would have been not to offer the name but on the other hand not to mislead people". The trouble was it was fairly obvious the name was going to come out. The most that you were doing with the public statement was getting a short breathing space."

Blair said that nothing in the discussions had suggested Dr Kelly was "anything other than someone with a certain robustness who was used to dealing with the interchange between politics and the media."

He also said that it was "absolutely wrong" for BBC witnesses to have suggested the reason he had not mentioned the 45 claim again was because the government had developed doubts about it.

The evidence of the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon on Wednesday in which he put the onus on Downing Street had made Blair's critics demand that he must come clean about his role. Blair succeeded in silencing them but without giving out much. This is why he is still prime minister, murmured a protester.

interesting thank you! anymore information would be appreciated!

There`s a short history of Alastair Campbell`s career here as well as links to a interview with him explaining why he`s chosen to quit his job so suddenly.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2977978.stm

Cambell was a public liability for far to long...he was sacrificed on the alter of political expediency.

Neon