by Chris Bertram on August 20, 2003
I missed the beginning of the Hutton Inquiry and I’m only just beginning to catch up. The details of yesterday’s evidence have been pushed down the headlines by the bigger news from Iraq and Israel, but it seems to me at least that yesterday’s evidence marks a major shift in favour of the government and against the BBC. Campbell performed well, but the really important revelation was Andrew Gilligan’s email to an aide of Liberal Democrat MP David Chidgey (Original email here). Gilligan – himself an “unsatisfactory witness” to the same select committee – is revealed both to have planted (if that’s not too strong a word) some of the questions that put David Kelly under so much pressure, and (despite having huffed and puffed about the need for journalists to protect sources) effectively “outed” Kelly as the source for his colleague Susan Watts. No wonder the BBC’s support for Gilligan seems to be fading, with their reaction limited to an anodyne “We are looking at this e-mail and will deal with it in the context of the Hutton inquiry.”
We shouldn’t forget, of course, that the government deliberately focused on the narrow issue of Campbell’s role in their row with the BBC in order to deflect attention from the big issue of whether the WMD case for war was deliberately exaggerated. But as far as the immediate political battle goes, the BBC looks to be on the ropes.
by Maria on August 14, 2003
Le Monde ran a story yesterday about the ‘Russians’ in Guantanamo who are begging NOT to be extradited. The Russian government is trying to have 8 prisoners – including Chechens and Tartars – sent to Russia to face trial on terrorism charges. Meanwhile, the mothers of two of them are begging the US not to send their sons to Russian prisons where they could face torture and death.
America has certainly fallen well below its own standards of justice and fair treatment in Guantanamo. But to a prisoner who’s already known jails in Chechnya, Russia and Afghanistan, the prison camp evidently measures up to the best of Russian sanatoriums.
Radio Free Europe ran a piece on this last week. The story was then picked up and a further corroborating interview added by a Russian tv station, and that seems to be where Le Monde’s reporter saw it.
by Chris Bertram on August 4, 2003
A puff for one of my other collaborative projects: Imprints. The latest issue is now out and contains much of interest. The online content this time is an interview with Michael Walzer which ranges over many issues: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the morality of humanitarian intervention, Israel and Palestine, anti-Semitism, memories of Rawls and Nozick, the permissibility of torture, blocked exchanges and commodification, the narcissism of Ralph Nader, and much more. Read the whole thing – it is both enlightening and provocative.
by Henry Farrell on July 29, 2003
There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about a DARPA project which aims to predict terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups, through creating a futures market, in which traders can speculate on the possibility of attacks; the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?hp picks up on it too. Most of the commentary is negative, but “Josh Chafetz”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2003_07_27_oxblog_archive.html#105943317047655345 likes the idea, and invokes Hayek.
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by Chris Bertram on July 20, 2003
The whole business of whether the “dodgy dossier” was “sexed up” by the British government and whether Andrew Gilligan’s report about it also went beyond what he was entitled to claim looks likely to damage all concerned in the wake of Dr David Kelly’s suicide. I’m trying to keep an open mind about the various possibilities, though things look much less good for the BBC today, in the light of their admission that Kelly was the source for Gilligan’s story. The BBC have also shown poor judgement in getting former Guardian editor Peter Preston to pontificate in their defence. Writing about journalists’ duty to protect their sources Preston observes:
if your source talked to you under conditions of anonymity, would you do everything in your power to protect him – including maintaining silence even after he’d identified himself to his bosses and talked, not entirely frankly, to the foreign affairs select committee?
Of course. No question of that either. Sources come in many shapes, forms and conditions of confidentiality. Once they place their faith in you, your faith and your room for manoeuvre belongs to them; and after their death, their family.
Can this be the same Peter Preston who, in the early 1980s, complied with a court order to reveal that civil servant Sarah Tisdall was the source of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian? Tisdall was subsequently sentenced to six months in prison.
by Henry Farrell on July 18, 2003
“The Economist”:http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1923421 gives us a rather longwinded editorial today, explaining why it was right to support the war, even if it turns out that George and Tony indeed were telling porkies. The piece makes some (apparently) good arguments. First, Saddam had repeatedly failed to comply with UN sanctions, and had lied about what he was up to. The UN needed to carry through if its threats were to be considered credible. Second, any delay in following through on the threat would possibly have led to divisions among the allies. Third, America and its allies are doing their best to make the country and the region more peaceful and less threatening.
So why is the _Economist_ wrong? Let’s take each of their arguments in turn.
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by Henry Farrell on July 17, 2003
Two strikingly similar mischaracterizations of opposition to the war today, from different sources. The “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/17/international/worldspecial/17BLAI.html?hp quotes an unnamed British official as saying of Iraq and Afghanistan:
bq. There is this myth that these countries don’t want freedom, and that Saddam or the Taliban are popular, but then it becomes apparent that they were not at all popular after they fall.
And “Instapundit”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/010537.php quotes at length from a New York Post “article”:http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/774.htm that says:
bq. This chorus [a mixture of Arab and Western newspapers, and _Time_ magazine] wants us to believe that most Iraqis regret the ancien regime, and are ready to kill and die to expel their liberators. Sorry, guys, this is not the case. … ONE fact is that a visitor to Iraq these days never finds anyone who wants Saddam back.
Now I don’t know whether this is a flash in the pan, or a new talking-point in the making, but either way it’s bogus. It implies that opponents of the war believed that Iraqis were happy with Saddam, and that Afghans liked the Taliban – thus, their criticisms of what’s happening now can safely be ignored. The fact that no-one outside the lunatic fringe (and perhaps a couple of Arab newspapers) actually makes this claim is irrelevant. When your opponents have arguments that you can’t answer, you don’t try to answer them – instead you construct a straw man and start clobbering the bejesus out of that, in the hope of confusing innocent bystanders.
Critics aren’t arguing that the Iraqi people are begging Saddam to return, at least not the ones that I’m reading. They’re dissecting the deceptive claims that were made by Bush et al. in the run-up to the war. They’re looking closely at the lurching disaster that is post-war Iraq – a far cry from the smooth and easy transition to democracy that the administration seemed to be promising. They’re asking about the lasting damage that the US has done to its relationship with its allies. And I’m not hearing much in the way of a convincing response from the pro-war crowd.