The issue of whether the government cooked intelligence about Iraq's WMD is also getting a lot of attention in the UK this week. Lord Hutton, a British judge, has been leading an inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly, a prominent scientist who worked for the Ministry of Defense as an expert on biological weapons. After a BBC reporter ran a story quoting an anonymous security expert as having said that the government had "sexed up" intelligence about Iraq's weapons program, Tony Blair's press officer gave Dr. Kelly's identity to the press apparently in retribution for his stance. This action was similar to the (still undisclosed) senior member of Bush's cabinet who outted Valerie Plame to punish her husband for exposing the administration's flagrant lies about Nigerian uranium. However, it is not quite as serious since Dr. Kelly was not an undercover operative, so exposing him didn't put him in any immediate danger. His death was due to suicide after the government ruined his reputation, and he was dragged before the press and a parliamentary hearing to defend his statement.
The Hutton inquiry was to determine whether the government acted inappropriately in revealing the identity of Dr. Kelly, but may have a wider scope by lending credibility to Dr. Kelly's claim that Blair cooked evidence to motivate the war. Lord Hutton's report will be issued on Wednesday. The Guardian speculates about the potential fall-out if the report is critical of Blair:
The Prime Minister, who has said that if Hutton finds that he lied over either the naming strategy or WMD he would resign, suffered a fresh blow yesterday after David Kay, the head of the Iraqi Survey Group, quit on Friday night, saying there were no large WMD stockpiles in Iraq. ... Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary, challenged Blair to admit the war had been a mistake. Cook, who resigned before the war began, said Blair had been driven by 'evangelical certainty'. ... 'It is becoming undignified for the Prime Minister to continue to insist that he was right all along when everybody can now see he was wrong,' he said.
It seems unlikely that the Hutton report will damn Blair enough to force his resignation, but hopefully this will lead to a wider knowledge that the UK and the US mislead us about the need to go to war with Iraq.
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