- LONDON (AFP) -- The judge
who probed the suicide of arms expert David Kelly was accused of a "whitewash"
by much of Britain's daily press for clearing Prime Minister Tony Blair's
government of wrongdoing while rebuking the BBC.
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- The rightwing Daily Mail said that judge Brian Hutton's
long-awaited verdict, delivered Wednesday, had attracted "widespread
incredulity."
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- "Justice?" the paper asked in a front page
headline. It said Hutton's report "does a great disservice to the
British people. It fails to set its story in the context of the BBC's huge
virtues and the government's sore vices."
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- The British Broadcasting Corporation was plunged into
turmoil, with its chairman Gavyn Davies resigning, after Hutton severely
criticised the world's biggest public broadcaster.
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- The judge said that a BBC radio report claiming that
the government deliberately exaggerated the threat of Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction before the US-led invasion on March 20 last year was "unfounded".
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- "We're faced with the wretched spectacle of the
BBC chairman resigning while Alastair Campbell crows from the summit of
his dungill. Does this verdict, my lord, serve the real interest of truth?"
asked the Daily Mail.
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- Campbell is Blair's former communications director and
one of the principal figures in a bitter row between the government and
the BBC during which Kelly took his own life last July.
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- In a comment piece for the leftwing Daily Mirror tabloid,
journalist Paul Routledge accused Hutton of an "establishment whitewash"
which "stinks to high heaven".
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- Hutton's judgement "makes me feel physically sick,
like a victim of a crime who knows that justice will never be done",
said Routledge.
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- The Mirror said that the BBC had been left "shamed",
but the narrowness of Hutton's remit during his inquiry "meant that
the real issue -- the existence of weapons of mass destruction -- wasn't
even touched on".
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- "Hutton's whitewash leaves questions unanswered"
said the rightwing Daily Express, referring to issues such as whether the
government was right to enter the war given that "there are no weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq, let alone anything to suggest Saddam Hussein
could have launched a deadly attack in just 45 minutes, or even 45 days."
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- In a controversial report last May, BBC reporter Andrew
Gilligan claimed the government had "sexed up" a September 2002
dossier on Iraq by claiming that Baghdad could deploy chemical weapons
within 45 minutes.
-
- In a striking front-page article, with a white space
left where normally a photograph would appear, the Indepenedent asked Thursday
if the Hutton report was an "establishment whitewash".
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- The paper called Hutton's conclusions "curiously
unbalanced", and said they had strengthened the case for an "independent
inquiry into the intelligence failures that took this country to an unjustifiable
war."
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- The leftwing Guardian said that Gilligan "got more
right than he got wrong" in his reporting, adding that the BBC should
now ensure "there is no collective failure of nerve in the corporation".
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- "BBC jouralists must go on probing, must go on asking
awkward questions -- and must go on causing trouble," the Guardian
urged.
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- It added that Hutton's report had a "certain naivety
of tone and approach".
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- The government may have been cleared over Kelly's death,
"but that does not mean it was honest about Iraq. It was entitled
to Hutton's narrow vindication, but it still has a lot to prove."
-
- Like much of the press, the Financial Times said the
BBC had been plunged into the most serious crisis of its 80-year history
by a report from Hutton that took the political world by surprise in its
sweeping vindication of the government.
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- The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Sun, all rightwing
papers, called for BBC director general Greg Dyke to follow in the footsteps
of chairman Gavyn Davies and resign.
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- Many dailies agreed that Hutton had exposed serious failings
within the BBC, with the Sun saying he had put the spotlight on the broadcaster's
"culture of sloppiness, incompetence and arrogance".
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- Copyright © 2004 Agence France Presse. All rights
reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority
of Agence France Presse.
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- http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/afp/20040129/
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