http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8100432.stm Well I'm sad enough to have watched the whole thing on parliament and I personally agree with Brown on the inquiry but considering the response form MPs I wondered what you'll think? I agree with the PM that if the enquiry was fully public, even if sensitive areas were done in private, there probably would be a problem with people not speaking frankly through fear of reprimand. the problems people have with the timings are admittedly a bit concidental but I can't see what the alternative was since we only officially stopped operations a couple months back and, like he said, a report looking into everything over 8 years is going to take a while. Only things I'm concerned over is when this reports published all the evidence i assume except Secrets service Act stuff'll have to be shown to but are the public going to be able to see it? And also how the states will be with this. We were a joint invasion force and it was their idea so it need to include things from their sid but i can see thme being very protective. SO what do you think about this inquiry?
The whole thing is being done behind closed doors. The inquiry findings are not allowed to place blame (I guess the thousands of dead Iraqi civilians and well over 100 dead UK troops was no ones fault then!?!) And the "grandees" choose to do the inquiry are a handpick group that include a man Knighted by Tony Blair and another man who was Blair's semi-official autobiographer!!! This inquiry is going to find nothing and is an institutional cover-up. I really feel bad for all the families of the dead solders who have been calling for an inquiry for years and have been fobbed off with this!
Fair enough but considering the stuff should be made public afterwards it'll probqably be possible to apportion blame yourself. Can't comment on the actual commitee since i dont know anyting about it but my only real gripe with them from what I know is that there isn't a high ranking military officer, from what i remember anyway, and I would have thought their opinion would be pretty invaluable
I guess you have to decide between holding it in public and not getting the truth or holding it in private and trusting that it is being carried out properly.
Its lose lose either way but I think this is a better option. Plus if you did do a public one but did private sessions over the OSA stuff then people get a half baked view on things. I don't doubt a lot of stuff going into this enquiry will go way over my head as it is
Some of the committee: Sir Lawrence Freedman. Some claim that he himself was part of the causes of the Iraq war. He's a good buddy of Tony Blair and pretty much hand wrote Blair's speech that he gave prior to the invasion, justifying the planned attacks of humanitarian grounds. Sir Martin Gilbert Historian and official biographer of Winston Churchill. He is a great admirer of Blairs and has publicly said that he believes that in the future Blair and Bush will be regarded as hero's, akin to Churchill and Roosevelt in the 2nd World War!!! Behind closed doors and under specific orders not to place blame (although I am sure they have no intention to anyway) what are these people going to tell us!?!? They will not find anything that in anyway makes Blair or any of his former cabinet look at all at fault. My guess is they will come out and claim a combination of secret service mishaps and bad communication. As I said before its an institutional cover up and a slap in the face for the families of all the dead soldiers.
But suppose the enquiry ends up being a cop out and the public feel they didint investigate something properly (prior US planning for instance) or labour lose the election can they have another enquiry?
If the "inquiry" states that boys and civilians died because of bad politics and greed, there shall be no need for further enquiry. Don't hold your breath!!!
In theory yes. I mean you can have as many inquiries as you want. We actually already had an in inquiry in to Iraq if you remember. Specifically it was an inquiry in to the dossier that made the claim that Sadam had WMD's that he could launch on England in 45 minutes, this was the main reason we went to war. It found that the secret services didn't check there sources well enough (forgive me for being cynical but I think MI5 and MI6 are more then capable of checking where they get their information from and it was quitely clearly a faked dossier put together to try to justify the war to parliament). But just because there could be another one doesn't mean there will be. Whatever of the findings it will be hard to justify having another inquiry to both parliament and the public. Inquiries like this are long and very expenses and it is inevitable that many people will be happy with the findings even if a lot of other people see it as a sham. I think it is important to note the time frame for this inquiry, 12 months. Many critiques argue that this inquiry could easily be done in 6 months. However by making it 12 months it means that labour can ensure there is no way of the findings coming out before a general election. I honestly think that with this one only history will tell the real story. I look forward to reading history books on this subject in 25 years to find out the truth.
nah I'm with you MI5 wouldn't have messed up with something like that. I like the emphasis Brown put on protecting national security though makes me think countries don't always play by the book
I don't see the point is handing out blame in this inquiry, so it's better that they are not. We all know mistakes were made. It seems to me the point is simply to find out the truth... what decisions were made, by whom, for what reason and what their intent was. I can also understand the point of it being private. If it is completely open to the public then people may be less forthright. While I don't doubt that the government will try to spin the results into a more favourable light, I'm not a conspiracy theorist and so do not think they will use the private nature of the inquiry to fix the result. While I think government should be open as mush as possible, I think for the sake of getting the real information we sometimes need to close the door. Of course the conspiracy theorists will jump on this as a total scam. And I agree with Southpaw that if only part of it is public, with the classified stuff being private then the public will only end up with a one sided understanding of what happened. I think some of the best reasoning, or at least what will make the decision more understandable, will likely be classified and under the OSA. As for the timing, well I think this was obviously calculated by Brown so not to totally destroy his chances at the next election. I suspect this may have been his plan all along.
I was really looking forward to this being turned into some huge conspiracy by the government to hide some secret agenda about the invasion, other than oil i mean, adn all i get is one sentence? Well thats depressing
