On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 09:42:15 +0000 (GMT), Dave Plowman
wrote:

In article ,
IMM wrote:
It's interesting to note, that we have people with views from across
the political spectrum, and those who feel that Baroness Thatcher was
equally misbehaved in her day, yet the only person who seems to be
supporting Teflon Tony is yourself. Doesn't that strike you as a
little odd?

No. It proves the power of the tabloids to influence minds.

Well, I don't read any papers and get all my news from the BBC. And am a
socialist. But am perfectly aware that on the broader issue of WOMD Blair
either lied, was very badly advised, or both. The facts of the 'war' only
go to prove this.

H(mostly)RYK ... the whole "45 minutes" issue, followed by the
assignment of blame to the BBC, has diverted attention away from the
key issues: why was the intelligence regarding Iraq's WMDs so wrong,
and/or why was that intelligence incorrectly analyzed, and/or was that
intelligence and its analysis selectively passed on to the government,
and/or did the government chose to emphasize some of the intelligence
available to it and ignore the rest?

It seems to have been conveniently forgotten that Saddam Hussein was,
among all his other attributes, a clever man with clever advisors. He
will have undoubtedly recognized that the likelihood of an attack by a
US-led coalition, with or without explicit UN backing, would be
reduced by claiming to or presenting evidence of a lack of WMD and the
destruction of WMDs. OTOH, the Iraqi regime will have equally
recognized that the likelihood of a mass uprising by Kurdish fighters
and/or renewed hostilities w/ Iran would be reduced by maintaining and
encouraging information that WMDs were still available ... and
available for immediate use. This is pure surmise, but it may be a
reasonable assumption that the human intelligence available to the US
and the UK came either from people within (or previously within) the
Iraqi regime -- who will probably have been telling what appears to
have been the truth, i.e., that WMDs had been destroyed and were not
being re-manufactured -- or from sources in Iran or Kurdistan which
will have given the completely opposite story. This would have given
the situation in which different sources were producing completely
opposite intelligence; if this was the case, who made the decision to
give prominence to the intelligence that was subsequently used to
justify military action, and why?

Notwithstanding these issues and how they impact on the government,
the BBC *has* come out of this very badly. I for one hope that with
the departure of Greg Dyke and Andrew Gilligan (and hopefully also
those of the people w/ editorial responsibility for the continued
emphasis on the dossier/45 minutes start) will reinstate within the
BBC's news organizations a culture that the truth is more important
than "the story", and that the BBC's role as a news organization is to
report the news, not to create it. If Mr Dyke's appalling
lowest-common-denominator populism could be swept away all the better
.... I for one have no problem with the concept of a publicly funded,
public service broadcaster; I do have a problem, though, with that
broadcaster producing crap (soap operas, game shows, "reality" shows,
etc.) using licence fee revenue.

Julian

--
Julian Fowler
julian (at) bellevue-barn (dot) org (dot) uk