Press cries 'whitewash' as Hutton slams BBC
AFP, London
The judge who probed the suicide of arms expert David Kelly was accused of a "whitewash" by much of Britain's daily press yesterday for clearing Prime Minister Tony Blair's government of wrongdoing while rebuking the BBC. The rightwing Daily Mail said that judge Brian Hutton's long-awaited verdict, delivered Wednesday, had attracted "widespread incredulity." "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." The British Broadcasting Corporation was plunged into turmoil, with its chairman Gavyn Davies resigning, after Hutton severely criticised the world's biggest public broadcaster. 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". "We're faced with the wretched spectacle of the BBC chairman resigning while Alastair Campbell crows from the summit of his dunghill. Does this verdict, my lord, serve the real interest of truth?" asked columnist Max Hastings in the Daily Mail, which splashed his words across its front page. 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. In a comment piece for the leftwing Daily Mirror tabloid, journalist Paul Routledge accused Hutton of an "establishment whitewash" which "stinks to high heaven". Hutton's judgement "makes me feel physically sick, like a victim of a crime who knows that justice will never be done", said Routledge. 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". "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." 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.
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