Listening to Hoon this morning on the Today programme had me shouting at the radio again. The sheer cheek of the man to claim that he did not know the headline of the highest circulation news paper in the country, was unbelievable. He must have a media department in his ministry and the Sun is a reckoner for the mood of the nation, for better or worse.
"The first time I saw that (Sun newspaper 45-minute) headline was very recently watching a Panorama programme": Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon talks to John at 0810. Also, Reeta Chakrabarti at 0856 on what Mr Hoon told the Hutton Inquiry."
He claimed that the 45 minute claim and the delivery mechanism was essentially immaterial "not a matter of great public contravercy" to the case for war and tried unsuccessfully to connect the conventional ballistic missiles that were found to the case for war, they were a contravention of 1441, but are not WMD. Then tried to claim that a battlefield mortar was a WMD.
Just as the programme was closing, his words in reference to a question about the banner headlines on the day of publication of the dossier from the Hutton Inquiry were played on air, "I can recall, yes".
hoon - implausable deniability
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... and Blair seemed quite angry when he was being questioned in committee on the announcement of a review into the way the intelligence was gathered ... something along the lines "I have admitted that no WMD have been found but critics have also to acknowledge that we have found programmes for their development, attempts to procure the raw materials and proof of an intention to develop WMD."
Excuse me, but wouldn't Blix and the other weapons inspectors have found this out without going to war? And wasn't that the whole point of the largest ever peacetime demonstration in Hyde Park last year ... to say that we should at least wait until the weapons inspectors had finished their work?
I too find myself getting increasingly infuriated with pro-war politicians feeling hard done by when they are asked to account for their decisions. (And I also think it's a bit rich for the gung ho Tories to be complaining that they were misled when they were literally champing at the bit to go to war.)
Unfortunately, for those of us who marched, it's pretty cold comfort to be able to say "We told you so!"
I agree wholeheartedly Nick. I, for one, am sick of being repeatedly told that no one cared about 45 minutes at the time. As if that means that it does not matter if they lied or misled people!
It's funny looking back on the marching and wondering whether it all made any difference. Maybe not in the short term, but we can only hope that it will make them think twice before doing it all over again. Maybe.