Blair found guilty! (Channel 4)

Member Name: phoebe1

Product:	Channel 4
Date:	23/06/03 (290 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Not many!

Disadvantages: Too many soundbites, Intellectually feeble, Still no capitals............

Generally, if Channel 4 are showing a current affairs programme and it is hosted by Jon Snow, then it's a given that it will be loaded with integrity and worth a look in. Add to this the tantalizing prospect that, with recording delayed until the eve of transmission, there is the possibility of some previously unbroadcast revelation to be aired, and I knew I had to watch "Tony Blair on Trial" last Saturday.

THE FORMAT
***********
Jon Snow presided in a modern courtroom setting, with the PM accused of sending troops to Iraq under false pretences. It goes without saying that Tony was unavailable to stand in the dock, but nevertheless witnesses testified with arguments for and against. At the end of the show the studio audience, carefully vetted to represent a broad cross section of opinion, acted as a jury on whether the PM deliberately deceived the public about the threat posed by Saddam.

THE PLAYERS
************
Against Blair
Oonagh Blackman, deputy political editor of The Mirror, which ran a high profile campaign against the war.
Peter Oborne, a journalist with The Spectator.

For Blair
William Shawcross, an historian and journalist on international affairs
Eric Joyce, a former army officer and a Labour MP.

The above cross-examined invited experts.

THE ARGUMENTS
***************
Andrew Wilkie, senior intelligence advisor to the Australian PM, who resigned this March in protest at Australia's support for the war, had access to much of the intelligence on WMD and confirmed that the notion they could be launched within 45 minutes was preposterous. He also asserted that there was no hard intelligence to prove any active cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The defense rubbished his claims by saying he was not in the loop, having no access to the truly relevant documents. Not the most elegant of arguments - when all else fails try character assassination.

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Phil Shiner, a human rights lawyer who is taking the government to court over the war, did concede that Iraq had an appalling human rights record. But he also reminded us that cluster bombs were used in urban areas, contrary to our government's assurances.

The Ph. D. Iraqi-American student, whose now infamous twelve year old thesis was plagiarized by the government, revealed that they had changed key words. In their dossier, 'Iraq's intelligence agencies aided opposition groups in hostile regimes' was altered to 'Iraq's intelligence agencies were supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes'. He also concluded that Saddam's WMD were a threat to only Iraq, and not the rest of the world.

Andrew Garfield, as a former British intelligence officer and an adviser on terrorism to the US department of defense, had access to a significant amount of intelligence. He said that Downing Street had used poor judgement on the Ph. D. thesis and handled it very badly, citing that their apology to the Secret Intelligence Service was an admission of this.

Gwyn Prins, a UN adviser 1996-1999, agreed that Blair had been ill served by Alastair Campbell and the spinners who had embellished the dossier. However, he pointed to the long trail of evidence on Saddam provided by three sets of UN inspectors. A revelation to me was that when the Israeli air force bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981, they found a laser isotope separating factory underneath. All of which pointed to Saddam having form. So why are we to believe he had changed?

Peter Kilfoyle, Labour MP for Liverpool Walton, agreed it was nonsense to believe that Iraq's WMD were an imminent threat to us. An American war long in the planning was his analysis, and he was backed up by the father of one of the British helicopter pilots killed in Iraq who said his son had told him it was a done deal in December, even whilst the option of t
he UN second
resolution still existed.

THE VERDICT
************
After a 45 second summing up from both sides, the audience voted on:

'The Prime Minister deliberately misled the public about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. As a result, the government fought an unjustified war with Iraq.'

67% found Tony Blair guilty 33% found him not guilty


MY VERDICT
***********
Many people may have felt no need to watch this programme, since their verdict of guilty had long been arrived at. I continue to have nagging doubts about the intelligence that existed on weapons of mass destruction. As time goes on and none has been discovered, it is looking more likely that the Americans were using falsified intelligence to serve their own means. Even now, Donald Rumsfeld has more or less implied that there may not be WMD.

But how did Blair get dragged in to this web of deceit? I can believe that Bush's administration would go to any lengths to justify a war. You only have to look at the disgraceful way Gorgeous George Galloway has been fitted up with fake documents by the US newspaper The Christian Science Monitor to understand the crude methods of the American Way. Call me naïve, but I somehow thought that Blair would not allow himself to be duped by such crass tactics.

I do think that he was let down by his advisers, and in particular Alastair Campbell. He should have sacked him as soon as it was discovered that the dossier had been 'sexed up'.

An argument used by the defense in this programme was that since there could be no doubt of the cruelty and mass murder that Saddam had committed, that reason alone was surely good enough to justify a war. I would have felt more comfortable with this, since it could at least have given us a precedent to invade Zimbabwe where Mugabe continues with his corruption and cruelty. The point is, if you have a compelling case to commit
troops to
c
ombat then you should present a truthful, open account and not dress it up as poorly
presented intelligence.

I was surprised by the size of the guilty verdict. It would have been helpful if a vote was taken before the debate, making it possible to see if anyone had actually been swayed by the content. My guess is that 67% of them thought Blair was guilty before they even entered the studio!

We weren't told how many were in the audience, but it could have been no more than 150 people, which is too small a sample size to be statistically significant, in case anyone is tempted to extrapolate this result.

Overall, I felt let down by this programme. Being only an hour long meant that there was not enough time to develop the arguments. The little we did hear were intellectually feeble. Soundbites were all that we were getting from the main speakers, often interrupted by mass partisan applause reminiscent of the BBC's dreadful 'Question Time', which only served to detract from the gravitas of the proceedings. This was a missed opportunity to have an intelligent debate on how democratic governments justify the need to go to war.

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