« Electricity market | Main | says it well »
August 02, 2003
a note on Blair, Kelly & the BBC
In Australia the fallout in Britain over the Blair Government's justification for the Iraqi war is usually seen as a battle royal between the government and the BBC, with David Kelly cast in the role of the lonely whistle-blower, being seen as the fall guy. The murky waters of the Blair Government's management of the issue is overlooked:
The UK fallout is seen through the prism of what is happening in Australia between the Howard Government and the ABC. The conservative's charge that the objective values of journalistic integrity have been undermined by "reporters" (ie., commentators) furthering an ideological or a lefty political agenda. The problem is the lefty bias of the ABC. And Andrew Wilkie who spoke out.
Here is a different view from Airstrip One to make things more complex. Emmanual Goldstein says that:
"This is not really a battle between the BBC and the government, but a battle between some elements (how large we don't know) and the government.
The intelligence services were looking stupid because the dossiers that were supposedly based on their information was tosh, and they wanted the world to know who the real authors of these dossiers were. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell were pretty high on the list."
It sure looks so judging from this report.
In Australia the intelligence agencies took the rap by saying that they slipped up in providing shonky information. They have been politicized along with the rest of the public service. The real concern in Australia is the unaccountable power of the ministerial advisors.
Emmanual's observations apply to Australia:
"The dossiers were a pile of tosh, and the fact that they were tosh was not because our intelligence services were hopeless but because our government lied to us, and our government lied to us not out of habit but out of a conscious desire to have an excuse to follow on the slipstream of a superpower."
Being good and loyal friends leads to dirty hands.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 2, 2003 11:24 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.sauer-thompson.com/mt2/mt-tb.cgi/463