Who is Hutton: Ireland, Pinochet, M15...*
- From: alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Alan)
- Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2006 23:36 +0000 (GMT Standard Time)
http://irelandsown.net/hutton.html
A history of Hutton?s life, from Bloody Sunday cover up to Pinochet affair to
Iraq war lies.
Upon his resignation as BBC chairman Gavyn Davies commented on the
irreconcilable contradictions between Hutton?s "bald conclusions" and the
balance of evidence presented to the actual Inquiry.
Even BBC political editor Andrew Marr comments on Hutton's underlying
assumptions and background, making him more likely to believe and trust certain
social groups: "again and again, he comes down on the side of politicians and
officials."
So who is Hutton, and what is in his background to come to these extraordinary
conclusions? What has lead to the reports extraordinary absolution of Blair?s
war lies and attack on journalistic freedom?
The 72 year old Baron Hutton of Bresagh, County of Down, North Ireland, is a
classic representative of the British ruling establishment. A member of the
Anglo-Irish elite, he was educated at Shewsbury all boys boarding school, and
then Balliol, Oxford, before entering the exclusive club of the British
Judiciary. Whilst British Judges are overwhelmingly conservative, upper class,
white, male and biased, Hutton?s background is even more compromised.
His name will be familiar to residents of the Six counties of Ulster. During the
bloody thirty years war Hutton was an instrument of British state repression,
starting in the late 1960?s as junior counsel to the Northern Ireland attorney
general, and by 1988 rising to the top job of Lord Chief Justice of Northern
Ireland.
Hutton spent his career as Judge and Jury in the notorious northern Ireland
kangaroo ?Diplock Courts?. These were special non-Jury courts, condemned by
human rights advocates for their miscarriages of justice. He was hated for this
role by the families of the many innocent Catholics wrongly convicted here.
Hutton distinguished himself after the Bloody Sunday massacre of civil rights
protesters in 1972. He played a key role in the ensuing judicial cover-up called
the Widgery Inquiry which absolved British troops of Murder. This miscarriage of
justice is only now being investigated by the current Saville inquiry.
Then in 1978 he represented the British Government before the European Court of
Human Rights, defending it against a ruling that it abused and maltreated
detainees from the conflict.
However, he will be remembered in the rest of the UK for his role in the 1999
Pinochet affair. Another senior Judge, Lord Hoffman had contributed to the
decision to arrest and extradite the notorious former dicator of Chile and mass
murderer General Pinochet during his visit to Britain.
As a law lord, Hutton led the rightwing attack on Lord Hoffman, on the excuse
that Hoffman?s links to the human rights group amnesty international invalidated
Pinochet's arrest! Lord Hutton said "public confidence in the integrity of the
administration of justice would be shaken" if Lord Hoffman?s ruling was not
overturned.
More recently, Hutton was also involved in the ruling that David Shayler, the
former MI5 agent, could not argue he was acting in the public interest by
revealing secrets.
This history of intimate links with, and knowledge of Britains secret military
intelligence operations meant he could be a trusted pair of hands when it came
to the Kelly affair.
*from http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/01/284545.html
3 February 2004
Hutton Inquiry: A black day for democracy in Britain
?Statement of the Socialist Equality Party
Lord Hutton?s inquiry into the death of whistleblower Dr. David Kelly has
revealed the advanced stage of decay of British democracy. It is a watershed in
the attack on democratic rights that has been waged for more than two decades by
successive governments and which has dramatically accelerated under the Labour
government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The fundamental question underlying the inquiry was: Do the British people have
the right to hold their government accountable on matters pertaining to life and
death?
Hutton?s verdict was a resounding ?No.? He has come down squarely in favour of a
quasi-dictatorial form of government, in which those who hold power are not
answerable for their actions to the people. He has, moreover, set in motion a
witch-hunt against any section of the media that maintains the slightest
independence from the government and subjects its claims to critical review. His
findings clear the way for an unprecedented attack on freedom of the press and
free speech.
To understand the import of Hutton?s findings, it is necessary to review the
circumstances under which the inquiry was convened.
Months before hostilities against Iraq began, Blair decided to line his
government up behind the drive of the Bush administration for war. He launched a
propaganda offensive aimed at terrorizing the population and stampeding it
behind the war drive, making blood-curdling claims about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction and an imminent threat to the safety of the British people that have
since been proven to be utterly false.
Blair pursued his war policy in the face of the indisputable opposition of the
majority of people in Britain, not to mention the popular will of broad masses
of people in the rest of Europe, the US, and around the world. Some two million
people marched in London on February 15, 2003 to oppose the coming war, in the
largest political demonstration in British history. This and similar expressions
of popular opposition and anger showed that a large majority of the population
had made its own evaluation of Blair?s WMD assertions, and concluded they were
not credible.
Blair?s response was to declare that the essence of democracy was the conduct of
state policy in defiance of the popular will.
His drive to war provoked significant differences within the state apparatus.
This included factions within the intelligence services that objected to the
manipulation and misuse of intelligence for the purpose of justifying a
predetermined policy of military intervention. The eventual response of the
Blair government was to silence all such opposition by ?outing? one of its chief
critics from within the intelligence establishment ? Dr. Kelly ? and making an
example of him.
The dossiers of September 2002 and February 2003 making the case for war aroused
serious criticism as soon as they were published. September?s dossier contained
the by now infamous claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction
within 45 minutes, and the charge that Iraq had sought to purchase nuclear
materials from Africa. The claim that Niger had supplied yellow cake uranium to
Saddam Hussein was exposed as a fraud by the International Atomic Energy Agency
only weeks after it was made a centrepiece of US and British propaganda. Within
a matter of hours, the February 2003 dossier was found to have been largely
plagiarised from a US student thesis that was based on intelligence more than
ten years old.
Blair hoped that victory in Iraq would allow him to suppress such uncomfortable
facts and to cow his political critics. Instead, the declaration of an end to
hostilities was followed by mounting popular resistance within Iraq to the joint
US/British occupation, prompting fears that it would prove to be a new Vietnam.
Under these circumstances, sections of the security apparatus sought to
exonerate themselves and pin the blame for the Iraqi debacle firmly on Blair.
Hence the decision of Kelly, Britain?s top weapons inspector and a man
intimately involved in the preparation of the September, 2002 dossier, to give
an unscheduled interview to the BBC?s Today reporter, Andrew Gilligan.
When Gilligan reported at the end of March, 2003 that his anonymous source
(Kelly) had spoken of significant discontent within the security apparatus as to
the bona fides of the September dossier and had blamed Blair?s Director of
Communications Alastair Campbell for having made it more ?sexy,? the government
decided to mount a campaign to silence the BBC and demand a retraction.
The government made it known that Kelly was the source of the Gilligan report
and forced him to testify before two parliamentary inquiries. On July 18, Kelly
was found dead in the woods near his home.
This event led to demands for an investigation not only of the circumstances
leading to Kelly?s death, but also of the way in which the war had been prepared
and whether false intelligence claims had been employed by the government.
Blair could not countenance any such investigation, and determined that any
official inquiry would focus exclusively on Kelly?s death and his government?s
dispute with the BBC. To this end Blair appointed Lord Hutton to preside over an
inquiry that was designed to conceal rather than reveal the truth.
Hutton, a former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, had made his reputation
defending British soldiers in Northern Ireland during the inquiry into Bloody
Sunday 1972, and prosecuting alleged terrorists in the no-jury Diplock courts.
Considered a ?safe pair of hands?, he was given a narrow remit that did not
extend beyond examining the immediate circumstances leading up to Kelly?s death.
Though he went on to take oral and written evidence from leading figures within
the civil service and the government, right up to Blair himself, that dealt
extensively with the preparation of the September 2002 intelligence dossier,
Hutton?s verdict is entirely consistent with this initial proscription.
Many commentators who followed the inquiry?s proceedings expressed incredulity
over Hutton?s final ruling. From the standpoint of the facts placed before him ?
the mass of evidence showing that the government must have known its
intelligence was dubious, at best, and that it had sought to ?sex up? the
dossier, as Kelly had claimed ? Hutton?s findings make no sense. But
politically, Hutton has performed the job with which he was charged.
In order to arrive at his absurd conclusion ? clearing Blair and the rest of his
government of any wrongdoing and instead attacking both the BBC and Kelley ?
Hutton declared that the objective fact that no WMDs were found in Iraq and the
government?s claims were proven to be false was irrelevant! All that mattered
was whether Blair knowingly used false intelligence claims, and since there was
no proof as to the prime minister?s mental processes as the time, he had to be
given the benefit of the doubt and politically vindicated.
Hutton?s pose of agnosticism toward Blair?s intelligence claims did not prevent
him from declaring ? without any substantiation ? that the government and the
security services had acted in good faith in proclaiming that Iraq represented a
real and immediate danger. Nor did it prevent him from denouncing as
impermissible any questioning of their ?integrity?.
Even with regard to Kelly?s death, the government was found to be blameless, and
its representatives of having acted impeccably. Hutton ignored all testimony
showing that the government outed the scientist as part of a campaign to silence
its critics, including the diary entry of Campbell explaining that naming Kelly
would ?f?k Gilligan?.
Sole blame was placed on the shoulders of Gilligan and the BBC.
Gilligan was found to have committed the cardinal sin of impugning the integrity
of the government and the security services, especially by his remark that the
government ?probably? knew its claim that Iraq could launch WMD within
45-minutes was wrong. The BBC?s board of governors was found to have ?defective?
editorial structures because it had allowed his story to stand and was condemned
for having defended their reporter from Campbell?s witch-hunt.
Hutton also concluded that Kelly was ?partially responsible? for his own
misfortune, underscoring the ruthlessness of the British state, even against one
of its own.
Thus, reality has been turned on its head.
Gilligan and the BBC are held to an exacting account for a never repeated remark
made during a one minute, early morning radio broadcast. In contrast, the
government and its spy chiefs are not required to answer for using untrue
statements to drag the country into a war that has killed thousands of innocent
people, as well as nearly sixty British soldiers, and reduced a country to
ruins.
The verdict against the BBC has major implications for the future of the
corporation and more broadly for press freedoms in Britain. The entire future of
the BBC as a public broadcaster may be thrown into question when its charter is
due for renewal in 2006. The commercial stations may be allowed a greater share
of the market, with one of the major beneficiaries being the government?s most
fervent supporter ? Rupert Murdoch.
Hutton?s report marks a black day for democratic rights in Britain. In
overriding the right to publish a story so clearly based upon the public
interest, Hutton has confirmed the contempt felt by the political elite towards
the popular will. His findings prove that all avenues through which working
people were once able to exert some form of control over the government and the
state have been closed down.
His conclusions must be set in the context of the offensive against civil
liberties that has accompanied the government?s so-called ?war on terror? ? from
the detaining of people indefinitely without charge to plans to implement
legislation enabling parliament to be bypassed in the event of a state of
emergency being declared.
Not even during the Second World War, when Britain did face a real threat of
invasion, have so many basic democratic freedoms been jettisoned.
This cannot be attributed to the personal failings of Blair or his cabinet. The
government has faced virtually no opposition to its warmongering and attacks on
democratic rights, whether from the judiciary, the opposition parties, the media
or any other section of the establishment. And it has been able to build on a
legacy left to it by previous Conservative governments.
The establishment of a legal framework for a de facto dictatorship must express
profound social and economic processes. It manifests an international phenomenon
that finds its most finished expression in the United States.
Political and economic power has become concentrated in the hands of a
super-rich financial oligarchy, which rules over a society riven by historically
unprecedented levels of social inequality. In Britain, the richest 1,000
individuals have a combined personal wealth of more than £155 billion, largely
accumulated as a result of government policies aimed at slashing corporate
taxation and cutting public spending. The aim of these policies is to transform
the country into a cheap labour platform for global investors.
So pronounced are class antagonisms, so great is the contradiction between the
interests of the rulers and the ruled, that the democratic process has become
atrophied and sclerotic. The broad mass of the population must be excluded from
the political process in order that there can be no check on the activities of
an elite whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the working
class.
This common pro-big business agenda ensures that none of the old parties enjoy
mass support. This is especially true of the Labour Party, whose traditional
working class consistency is the target for its right-wing policies. Whatever
their tactical differences, all sections of the ruling class are in full
agreement with the programme of imperialist aggression and the destruction of
workers? living standards that is being spearheaded by Blair?s government.
Only this can explain why Hutton and Blair believe they can get away with such a
crude whitewash.
The necessary conclusions must be drawn. Working people cannot look to any
section of the establishment or to dissenting elements within the state to
oppose war and defend their essential social interests and democratic rights.
Popular hostility to the government must find independent political expression
through the construction of a new workers? party based on a socialist programme.
As part of this fight, the demand must be raised for the immediate withdrawal of
all occupying forces from Iraq, and for Blair and Bush to be held to account for
their war crimes.
http://irelandsown.net/hutton.html
Alan
"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."
Nemesis Peace Centre
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