The Hutton "whitewash"

Billmon quotes Max Hastings:

Lord Hutton seems unable to grasp a simple truth: all journalism is conducted against a background of official obfuscation and deceit, which does much to explain our blunders and omissions. It seems remarkable not how much journalists get wrong -- a great deal -- but that we are able to retrieve from the Whitehall swamp fragments of truth, and to present the waterlogged and bedraggled exhibits to readers and listeners.

There's more to this than meets the eye. As always. But, while I haven't been posting on the Hutton inquiry (into the death of David Kelley and the connection to Blair's involvement in the WMD fiasco), I have been catching bits and pieces about it since its instigation. All along, the reports coming out of Great Britain were that the Hutton report was going to knock Tony Blair on his ass. The excitement was nearly palpable the closer it came to the report's release. And, Whammo! It was exactly the opposite. Hutton gave Tony a flying pass and nailed the BBC. And journalism will be a long time recovering, I imagine. (Read Greg Palast's post.)

How could the reporters have been so wrong?

There'll be more to this story.

Billmon:
The MO is the same here in the states. Having manipulated and bullied the intelligence community into progressively hyping its own assessment of the Iraq threat -- and then creating its own pet intelligence assessment office within the Pentagon to say what the CIA would not -- the Bush administration and it defenders have now fallen back on the narrowest possible definition of wrongdoing: Did they, in fact, tell "lies" -- statements they knew to be completely false when they uttered them?

This leaves the press -- or that part of it that actually seeks to get at the truth -- in a classic Catch-22. It is difficult, and usually impossible, for journalists to prove definitively that a public official is lying, in the specific sense that the White House or 10 Downing Street now want to frame the debate. The obstacles are particularly formidable when the government is completely controlled by one party -- which is all the time in Britain and presently the case in America. The government, quite simply, has the field tilted almost entirely in its favor...

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