A little more than a year ago, Tony Blair was cleared of any involvement in the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly. Kelly's identity had been revealed as the source for a BBC story that said the reliability of intelligence supporting the Iraq war had been deliberately exaggerated.
Read about it here.
The chairman of the board of governors of the BBC resigned.
Today, the Downing Street memo shows that:
- Kelly was absolutely right
- The deception was deliberate
- Blair knew Kelly was right
- The BBC's story was accurate
The Hutton Report, commissioned by Blair to clear the air after Kelly's suicide, said that the BBC story was inaccurate:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3437471.stm
Key allegations about the government's Iraq dossier reported by the BBC's Andrew Gilligan were "unfounded", Lord Hutton has said.
The judge said it was impossible to know exactly what government scientist Dr David Kelly had said to the journalist at their meeting last May.
But he said the allegation reported by Mr Gilligan that the government had "sexed up" the dossier with a claim about Iraq's weapons capability it knew to be untrue, was "unfounded".
Really?
So, the meat of the Hutton report is absolutely false. What about the rest?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3437315.stm
# Dr Kelly took his own life and no third party was involved
# No-one involved could have contemplated that Dr Kelly would take his own life as a result of the pressures he felt
# Dr Kelly was not an easy man to help or to whom to give advice
# Can not be certain of factors that drove Dr Kelly to suicide
# Dr Kelly probably killed himself because of extreme loss of self-esteem and would have seen himself as being publicly disgraced
# Dr Kelly would have felt his job was at risk and that his life's work could be undermined
The last point is obvious. Yes, Dr. Kelly would have felt his job was at risk. He had been outed as the source for information that his nation had joined the United States in an illegal invasion, based on phony intelligence that had already caused thousands of unjustified deaths.
The Hutton report patched up the leak and David Kelly was left twisting in the wind.
But Kelly was right. Blair was lying. Hutton was lying. The chairman of the BBC board of governors only lost his job. David Kelly lost his life.
Isn't it time to reopen the inquiry into Blair's complicity? We know the part of the report that said Blair didn't know the intelligence was faulty was wrong.
Isn't it worth asking whether Blair had some hand in what happened to Kelly?