Semi-Daily Journal

"I may be wrong", but since I rarely am, I guess this is one of the days Semi-Daily Journal isn't "fair and balanced". This FT article buries the real news at the end. Which is that the report in question:

" ...exonerates the Blair government's central claim that intelligence was not distorted for political ends in its controversial September, 2002 dossier.

" 'We are content that the JIC has not been subjected to political pressures, and that its independence and impartiality has not been compromised in any way,' the report said.

" 'The dossier was not "sexed up" by Alastair Campbell or anyone else,' it said, referring to Mr Blair's communications director, who resigned earlier this month."

nice try patrick r sullivan:
tne repert in question was a report by a top secret parlimentary committee that met in secret and took secret testimony controlled by the government (i.e. number 10) with a 2/3 labor majority. it is anything but a full public inquiry. the hutton inquiry is something of a diversionary tactic, but it has been revealing nonetheless. last week, the head of the chemical and biological weapons section of the mod intelligence service, brian jones, i think his name was, testified that the sept. 2002 dossier in question had, indeed, in his opinion and that of his colleagues, been, "overegged", which now replaces "sexed up" in british journalistic jargon. in fact, at operative levels, there has been very little difference between the views of u.k. and u.s intelligence. on both sides of the pond, it was the top echelon and the political leadership that manipulated the scant data to make a ficticious case. the only real question left is to what extent they believed their own lies. it is now a modal question of intention and not a factual question of truth. in the light of this, prof. delong's mock-nostalgia for the first king george rather that the current one is perplexing. on both sides of the pond it has been and is a case of government without checks and balances and separation of powers.

over egged is a cooking reference

just in case anyone would miss that last point about checks and balances and separation of powers, from the stand point of classical republicanism there point is not simply to balances out mutually competing self-interested positions (the economists standpoint), but to
ensure and enforce full public deliberation on matters of crucial public import, (none more so than war!). and similarly the highest function and capacity of political leadership is phronesis, the practice of prudence, the formation of deliberative judgments guiding collective action that are at once normatively justified and practically efficacious. just what was tony blair thinking? (since i don't think any thinking person ever wonders what or if george bush thinks.) for it was tony blair's acquiescence
that provided the spoon full of sugar for many "liberals". it is not really tony blair's lies that offend: they are too mincing compared to the usual political m.o. (his self-righteousness is far more offensive.) rather, while arrogating the exclusive perogative of judgment to himself, he failed to ask and answer the right questions, but rather spun them to his own satisfaction. it is his large failure of prudential judgment that, imho, disqualifies him from credibility in any future political leadership.

"TONY BLAIR was facing fresh questions over the Iraq war last night after it was revealed that intelligence chiefs had told him that military action would increase the risk of terrorist attacks.

"Mr Blair took Britain to war in spite of a warning that the collapse of the Iraqi regime would make it easier for terrorist groups to obtain chemical and biological weapons, and that the threat from al-Qaeda would be heightened by action to depose Saddam.

"The advice from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which Mr Blair did not disclose before the war, was given in an assessment on February 10, five weeks before the action started." - from The [London] Times at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-813327,00.html

US intelligence was not corrupted by the Administration. It may get ignored from time to time, but it does not get corrupted.

Assessments by Britain's intelligence services have historically been entirely opaque to all except a few senior ministers beyond the professionals themselves so issues of political corruption did not arise. If assessments were corrupted, the few senior ministers with access were only misleading themselves.

Present questions of corruption have arisen partly because a little of the veil has been lifted in recent years but mainly because the rationale presented to Parliament and the public for Britain's engagement in the Iraq war was largely based on intelligence assessments of Iraq's possession of WMD together with a claim such weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes of a command being given. To convince the public of the strength of the rationale for war this dossier was published on 24 September last year: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Politics/documents/2002/09/24/dossier.pdf

Most of the present political controversy and the Hutton Inquiry, concerning the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, relate to whether the case made in this dossier had been "sexed up" or otherwise embellished in order to make a stronger rationale for war than intelligence assessments could justify and, if so, at whose insistence.

From evidence at the Hutton inquiry we know the early title of the dossier was amended to delete "programme for" before "WMD", that the dossier went through many drafting changes before publication, that the 45-minute claim was based only on a single source and added late in the course of the drafting changes, and that two intelligence officials besides Dr Kelly were sufficiently uncomfortable with the published outcome to put their reservations in writing. The 45-minute claim was made no less than four times in the dossier, on the first occasion in the forward signed by Tony Blair. There appears to be some emerging consensus that this prominence was unwarranted, particularly since this claim was based only on a single source. The failure of Coalition Forces in Iraq to discover any WMD has further damaged the cedibility of the claim and it also emerged at the Hutton Inquiry that the claim related only to battlefield weapons, which did not pose a real and present threat to Britain.

In the last few days it has come to light that Tony Blair was evidently advised in February of this year that war with Iraq could increase the threat to Britain of terrorism. For reasons best known to himself he chose not to make that public in his speech to Parliament in March seeking approval for war when British troops were already stationed on Iraq's borders, poised for invasion before the summer heat in Iraq began.

It seems to be that one unintended early consequence of the Hutton Inquiry is that it is not now considered politically feasible to hold a referendum during this Parliament on whether Britain should join the Euro.

Hmmm,
Didn't we break our oath of allegiance with George III a few years before he went mad ? lucky stroke, that.

Note that while the current matriach of the former house of hanover is still the nominal head of Great Britain, she doesn't have much say over the day-to-day operations of its government.

Considering how uneducated she is, that's another lucky stroke.

As I recall, it was all a concatenation of errors starting with an unfortunate misunderstanding over taxes on tea. I'm sure the present incumbent of the monarchy would announce a general amnesty for descendents of all rebels who affirmed their allegiance. By reports, an amazing number of American celebrities seem to be moving their location of residence to London of late and it can't quite be because of the reputed attractions of the climate.

Whatever her lack of mainstream, formal education, the Queen has an unrivalled length of continuing experience of government and has been known to fire an occasional public shot of rhetoric across the path of administrations when their political stance could be considered damaging to social cohesion or our constitutional settlement. That happened with Mrs Thatcher and there was a wry comment, attributed to the Palace, shortly after the opening session of Parliament in May 1997, at the start of Tony Blair's administration, to the effect that it was the state opening of Parliament, not the state opening of a Labour government.

The prevailing conventional wisdom on the role of a constitutional monarchy in Britain comes as a legacy from Walter Bagehot, then editor of The Economist, in his book: The English Constitution (1867):

"The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn."

Much of the current little local difficulty can be construed as a perception that Britain's civil service is apt to believe that it has inherited those entitlements and because Tony Blair and New Labour wish to correct any such misapprehensions.

The enduring puzzle for political scientists and those of similar ilk is as to why the constitutional settlements of the politically stable nation states at the western edge of Europe are, besdies Britain, also mainly monarchies: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. Even the republics in western Europe have mainly parliamentary, not presidential systems of government, and where the elected presidencies have constitutional functions broadly corresponding to those of a constitutional monarch. France with a hybrid structure is an exception. The generality indicates the important distinction made in western Europe is not between republics and monarchies but between presidential and parliamentary systems of government and that Europeans incline to parliamentary systems.

So can we now all agree that Bush/Blair IGNORED intel that was contrary to their agenda anc cherry picked intel that jived wit their agenda?

Do I have a penchant for the obvious?

I believe this would all be MI6 (also known as SIS, or Secret Intelligence Service) I believe.

MI5 is tasked with domestic intelligence, MI6 with foreign intelligence. (there has been a merger of the two post 1990, but I believe they still operate as independent entities, albeit both from the same headquarters in Vauxhall).

British intelligence was the great postwar joke in the 1950s, because of the penetration by the Cambridge graduates Burgess/ Philby/ Blunt/ Maclean and the 'Fifth Man': all of whom gave virtually every secret of significance to Moscow. Decades of limited funding since then have blunted its effectiveness
(matching the decline of the UK in world affairs in general) however MI6 is believed to be fairly well integrated with the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and to derive good leverage from that.

And MI6 agents are licensed to break the law outside the UK without legal sanction: ie they are, indeed, 'licensed to kill'.

MI6 recovered its legendary reputation in the 1980s when it spirited Gordievsky, a colonel in the KGB, out of Moscow when he was under survelliance by the KGB and then Mitrokhin, the KGB archivist, in the early 1990s. A google search on the names will retrieve further details.