"Tuesday
night on the BBC Ten O'Clock News, Andrew Marr the BBC's political
editor made quite a slip live on television. His words? `Dr Kelly
was killed'.
Need
I say more? Here's is my previous editorial: This
Government has played a game for the last six years of spin
and plausible deniability. They will explain away all of their
actions
with whatever seems plausible. Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications
chief, is today explaining to the Hutton Inquiry how the earlier
drafts of the `dodgy
dossier' apparent didn't exist, even though the Downing Street press office
had been talking about it prior to its release.
The
dossier was originally called "Iraq's Programme for Weapons of Mass Destruction",
but on release they pulled the words "Programme for" from
the title. Surely those words would suggest that the writers
of the
dossier had as a basic assumption that there was a weapons PROGRAMME
rather than the weapons themselves in Iraq.
The inquiry
will steadfastly avoid these difficult questions:
1. Why did Dr
Kelly lie to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee when he told
them that he was not the BBC's source?
2. Is it possible
that Dr Kelly was murdered and it made to look like a suicide?
3. Who would
benefit from Kelly's death?
4. Why did the
Downing Street press office have ANYTHING AT ALL to do with what
should have been an intelligence document? (This alone demonstrates
that the dossier was an exercise in spin rather than a balanced
briefing document)
To
those who have engaged their grey cells and have followed the
arguments
from the UK and US governments as well as other information,
one thing is clear: Tony Blair and George W Bush approached
the whole exercise with an agenda of making a case for war in
Iraq, not for evaluating whether Iraq was a genuine threat. There
is a clear difference between the two. "
- Editor
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