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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (26981)	1/29/2004 6:16:12 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793955

washingtonpost.com Blair's Vindication Provokes Media Backlash By Jefferson Morley washingtonpost.com Staff Writer Thursday, January 29, 2004; 10:11 AM On the brink of political death, British prime minister Tony Blair won a smashing victory yesterday, according to the British online media. But it provoked both admiration for his resiliency and a media backlash against the independent judge who exonerated Blair's handling of an erroneous British Broadcasting Corporation report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "Tony Blair, the Houdini of contemporary British politics, lives to fight another day," declared the editors of conservativeThe Scotsman in Edinburgh. In London, the leftist The Guardian echoed the thought: "Mr. Phoenix [Blair] lives to fight another day." Just 48 hours ago, Blair appeared close to losing his grip on power. On Tuesday, he faced down a rebellion in his own Labour party to win parliamentary approval for a plan to charge tuition fees for university students. And he still faces criticism for the failure of U.S. and British forces to find the weapons of mass destruction that Blair claimed Saddam Hussein possessed. But yesterday, The Hutton Inquiry, a six-month long probe led by an independent judge, exonerated Blair of wrongdoing in the events leading up to the suicide of David Kelly, a British intelligence expert on Iraq. Instead, Hutton strongly criticized the BBC for sloppy reporting on a story that alleged Blair and his aides deliberately "sexed up" a pre-war intelligence report on Iraq's ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction. In the wake of the report, BBC chairman Gavyn Davies and general manager Greg Dyke resigned. Alastair Campbell, Blair's media chief who was accused of exaggerating the Iraqi threat, resigned before the Hutton investigation was complete. The Hutton report repudiated journalist Andrew Gilligan, who was responsible for the BBC story. While Blair is demanding an apology from a mortified BBC, the British press across the political spectrum says Hutton failed to address, much less resolve, the larger issue of how the Iraqi threat was so badly overstated by the British government. In the Financial Times (subscription required), senior correspondent Philip Stephens noted that Hutton paid only glancing attention to some of the central questions of the Iraq conflict. "Did Tony Blair make the right strategic and moral decisions in backing George W. Bush's push for war? "Did the prime minister set out to distort the evidence in the pursuit of his goal? " And: "Whether or not it was exaggerated by Downing Street, why was the intelligence analysis of Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes so badly flawed? The Independent (subscription required) called Hutton's 740 page report "curiously unbalanced." The liberal London daily also published a column by Charles Kennedy , leader of the opposition Liberal Democratic party, declaring Hutton's report "should be the opening curtain and not the last word." Even the editors of the conservative Daily Telegraph , who supported Blair and the war in Iraq, declared: "there are very serious issues that Lord Hutton decided not to explore." "Even if Downing Street is cleared of deliberately tampering with intelligence for political ends, concerns remain about our intelligence services and their interaction with Downing Street." (Downing Street is the British equivalent of the White House.) The Times , owned by conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, reported that Sir Christopher Bland, the former chairman of the BBC, questioned the even-handedness of the report. "Sir Christopher told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that he accepted Lord Hutton's central criticism that there were errors in the original story by Andrew Gilligan, the BBC Today reporter, and the BBC's subsequent investigation. "It is legitimate to question whether Hutton was even-handed in the way he treated on the one hand politicians, civil servants and the security services, and on the other hand the standards of conduct he applied to journalists and broadcasters." "There is a curious imbalance ... in that he whitewashed the Government, and maybe he was right to do that, but he tarred and feathered the BBC and there just seems to be a real imbalance in his treatment." Only the tabloid The Sun, Britain's largest circulation daily also owned by Murdoch, downplayed the story. "The public never really cared much about the Hutton inquiry because they all rightly deduced that it was only going to tell them what they knew already," the editors declared. "That the Prime Minister did not act dishonestly, as his accusers claimed." "That the BBC system was deeply flawed." "And that Dr David Kelly largely brought his problems on himself by giving unauthorised interviews." "There have been many casualties which could have been avoided if people at the BBC had just done their job properly." The Sun's chief rival, the Mirror, countered with a plaintive page one headline: "Blair Cleared by Hutton But Where are the WMD?" © 2004 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive