The report also condemned the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which had aired the charges against Blair’s administration. The chairman and director-general of the BBC, and the journalist who first reported the allegations, have been forced to resign. In a groveling statement, the new acting chairman of the BBC, Richard Ryder, apologized “unreservedly” for “our errors.”

The official clearing of Blair in the Hutton Report came the same week as former weapons “inspector” David Kay defended the administration of U.S. president George Bush from charges that it had falsified intelligence to justify launching the March 2003 assault on Iraq. (See article on page 3.)

The September 2002 dossier was prepared by British spy agencies as part of the UK rulers’ political preparations for assuming second-in-command of the subsequent U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Among other claims, the dossier contended that the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad would be able to deploy “weapons of mass destruction” within 45 minutes of a decision to do so.

Last July, Kelly, a scientist who had been employed as a weapons inspector in Iraq, committed suicide. A week earlier he had been named as the source of a BBC report by journalist Andrew Gilligan, who claimed that Blair’s office had ordered the spy agencies to re-edit the dossier to beef up the case for war. In one early morning broadcast in May of last year, Gilligan made a claim, which he later retracted, that the government had inserted the 45-minute statement about Iraqi weapons knowing it to be false. This allegation became the center of a political fight between the Blair government and the BBC tops. After Kelly’s death, Hutton was appointed to conduct an inquiry into the matter, which began last August.

Hutton, a member of the House of Lords and author of the report that cleared Blair of wrongdoing, said Gilligan’s allegation was “unfounded.” He castigated the editors and managers at the BBC “for failing to investigate properly the Government’s complaints that the report… was false.” Hutton also exonerated the government from the charges that it caused Kelly’s suicide by naming him as the source for the journalist’s account. Blair had authorized the fingering of the scientist a week before his suicide.

Hutton’s background shows he was well suited for the task of defending an imperialist government on the course toward war. Born in Belfast, in British-occupied Northern Ireland, he served there as a high court judge and as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland until 1997, when he moved to England to become a “Law Lord.” Prior to this, from 1969—during an upsurge of the nationalist struggle against anti-Catholic discrimination and the partition of Northern Ireland—Hutton served as a junior counsel to the attorney general of Northern Ireland.

Hutton then represented the Ministry of Defence at the Widgery inquiry into the killing of unarmed civilians by British troops in Derry on Bloody Sunday in 1972. The Widgery report cleared the British army of blame for the killings. In 1978 Hutton represented the British government at the European Court of Human Rights against allegations of torture of Irish political prisoners.

The conclusions of the Hutton Report have been greeted with criticism, with voices on the right and left of bourgeois politics calling it a “whitewash.” Austin Mitchell, a Labour MP (member of parliament) and chair of the National Union of Journalists group in parliament, said the report “shows all the characteristics of judicial deference to the establishment.”

The right-wing Daily Mail reacted in fury to the exoneration of the Blair government, with columnist Max Hastings calling the report “a great disservice to the British people.” The editors of the Mail condemned Blair for failing to express “contrition for leading Britain to war on a false prospectus.”

In a statement after his resignation, Gilligan said, “I repeatedly said that I did not accuse the government of fabrication, but of exaggeration. I stand by that charge, and it will not go away.”

None of these critics of the Hutton Report, however, have called for the immediate withdrawal of the British troops occupying Iraq.

The editors of the London Times, who supported the Anglo/American invasion of Iraq, said the day after the report’s publication that “Lord Hutton has executed his unenviable task commendably.”

On February 3 Blair announced an inquiry into the so-called faulty intelligence that had led to his claim of Baghdad’s stockpiles of “weapons of mass destruction” as a justification for the invasion.

The “independent” body will be chaired by a former cabinet secretary and will include Labour and Conservative MPs and a retired head of the armed forces.  
 
 
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