The Poodle's in the dock

Donut · 08-28-2003, 06:10 AM

Only the second British Prime Minister to appear before a judicial review

08-28-2003, 11:17 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Donut:
Only the second British Prime Minister to appear before a judicial review

Why do you always refer to him as Poodle? Just curious

I suppose "in the Dock" is like an Impeachment hearing for our President?

Donut · 08-28-2003, 11:47 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by MagiK:

quote:
Originally posted by Donut:
Only the second British Prime Minister to appear before a judicial review

Why do you always refer to him as Poodle? Just curious

I suppose "in the Dock" is like an Impeachment hearing for our President?
[/QUOTE]You know how a poodle yaps when his master tells him to, or plays dead, well that's what Blair does for Bush.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LONDON -- One of the saddest results of our war in Iraq is that it may finish off Tony Blair before Saddam Hussein.

Everywhere I go in Britain, people dismiss Mr. Blair as President Bush's poodle. Mr. Blair's Labor Party has fallen behind the Conservatives in the latest poll, for only the second time in 11 years. "The Iraq critics think that the prime minister has betrayed his country to a Texas gunslinger," William Rees-Mogg noted in The Times of London.

Source

A judicial review isn't the same as impeachment, but he does sit in fron of a Judge and answer questions put by lawyers.

Timber Loftis · 08-28-2003, 01:56 PM

Today's NY Times:
_____________________________
August 28, 2003

Blair Says He Would Have Quit if BBC Claims Were True
By WARREN HOGE

LONDON, Aug. 28 — Prime Minister Tony Blair said today that he would have had to resign had there been truth to a BBC report that his government had "sexed up" an intelligence dossier on Iraq with dubious information.

Giving evidence to the judicial inquiry into the death of the weapons expert identified as the BBC's source, Mr. Blair said he had viewed the report as "an absolutely fundamental charge" that went beyond the area of permissible dissent to attack his integrity.

"It is one thing to say we disagree with the government, we should not have gone to war, people can have a disagreement about that," Mr. Blair said. "But if the allegation had been true, it would have merited my resignation."

He asserted: "This was an attack that went not just to the heart of the office of the prime minister but also the way your intelligence services operated. It went, in a sense, to the whole credibility, I felt, of the country."

The BBC report said that Mr. Blair's aides had had inserted into the dossier on Iraqi arms the claim that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order being given. The BBC report further said that the aides knew the claim to be false and forced it into the document over the objections of intelligence chiefs.

The BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, followed up with a column in a Sunday tabloid identifying Mr. Blair's closest aide, the powerful director of communications and security, Alastair Campbell, as the person who had ordered up the 45-minute claim.

The report, broadcast on May 29, put a sharp focus on a debate already under way in Britain over the failure to find any unconventional weapons in Iraq and the possibility that the government exaggerated the threat of Mr. Hussein's arsenal to justify going to war.

The issue has sent Mr. Blair's popularity plummeting to the lowest point since he came to power six years ago and has produced a sequence of poll results showing that the public no longer trusts him to tell the truth.

The argument came to a dramatic head last month when Dr. David Kelly, a former United Nations weapons inspector and adviser to Britain's Ministry of Defense, was identified as the probable source of the BBC report. He was found dead on a path near his Oxfordshire home three days after he had testified before a parliamentary committee.

Within hours of the July 18 discovery of Dr. Kelly's apparent suicide, Mr. Blair set up an independent inquiry, headed by a senior British judge, Lord Hutton, and said he would appear as a witness if called. Mr. Blair today became the second prime minister in British history to testify at such a hearing.

The hearings, now completing their third week, have ranged beyond the formal question of what role the government played in the circumstances leading to Dr. Kelly's death. They now embrace the entire charged question of whether the government was misleading in its effort to overcome public opposition to military action.

Mr. Blair said the government repeatedly sought to obtain a retraction of the report by the BBC but that the broadcaster refused to admit error. The damning account was becoming accepted as truth, Mr. Blair said, and the only way to correct that impression would have been "a clear and unequivocal statement that the original story was wrong."

On Tuesday, John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee and author of the dossier, said the BBC report was "completely untrue," and the House of Commons foreign affairs committee last month absolved Mr. Campbell of the report's central charges after taking testimony from him and from Mr. Gilligan.

"The problem was," Mr. Blair said, "we literally from May 29 to this day, have been in a position with this allegation hanging over us, with an entire campaign built around it, dealing with that fundamental issue to do with trust, and we have still not had the story retracted."

Stung by the personal charge, Mr. Campbell exploited the disputed BBC report to mount a full-scale assault on the corporation's overall coverage of the war and its reputation for impartiality. Fights between British governments and the country's public service broadcaster are traditional, but this struggle struck BBC chiefs as something more.

"I felt this was an extraordinary moment, almost unprecedented, an unprecedented attack on the BBC to be mounted by the head of communications at Downing Street," said Gavyn Davies, the BBC's chairman, who followed Mr. Blair to the witness box. "I took this as an attack on the integrity of the BBC and the impartiality of the BBC."

The compiling of the dossier has been the subject of many of the 11 days of public testimony, and several witnesses have talked of the intense activity at Downing Street in the weeks before the Sept. 24 publication.

Mr. Blair said today that his government felt it had an obligation to make public as much of its worries over Iraq's weapons as it could in answer to what he called "an enormous clamor" for information from the public and the press.

He said he discussed the matter with President Bush in August, and the two decided that action had to be taken. The Bush administration at the time was relying on the British to play a major role in making the argument for a tough approach to Iraq. On Sept. 3, Mr. Blair said at a news conference that the government would be producing a dossier of evidence.

"I recall throughout the August break last year literally every day there were stories appearing saying we were going to invade Iraq, that military action had been decided upon," he told Lord Hutton. "We really had to disclose what we knew," he said. "People were not unnaturally saying `produce that intelligence, then.' "

Mr. Blair said that his office's involvement in the preparation of the 50-page dossier was only presentational and that he had directed that the content had to be fully based on intelligence and approved by Mr. Scarlett.

He disputed the view that publishing the intelligence was aimed at justifying war.

"The purpose of the dossier was to respond to the call to disclose the intelligence that we knew," he said. "But at that stage the strategy was not to use the dossier as the immediate reason to go to conflict, but as the reason why we had to return to the issue of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction."

He said this had been "a perfectly right way" of producing the dossier, and he denied that there had been any exaggeration. "I think we described the intelligence in a way that was perfectly justified," he said.

Mr. Blair was also asked about his role in making public the name of Dr. Kelly once the weapons scientist had told his Defense Ministry handlers that he had had a conversation with Mr. Gilligan, the BBC reporter, a week before the damning report was broadcast.

Dr. Kelly had advised them he believed Mr. Gilligan had embellished the information, and the government saw in him a way of discrediting the report.

The ministry disclosed his name to reporters and sent him before the Commons foreign affairs committee to answer questions in a televised grilling during which he appeared uncomfortable and overwhelmed.

Mr. Blair said he had urged his people to handle the case "by the book" so that no one could later question whether the government was trying to dissemble or cover up.

He said that with hindsight it was easier to appreciate that Dr. Kelly might have been treated with more understanding but that conversations he had had with his aides at the time did not reveal that.

"All I can say was that there was nothing in the conversations we had that would have alerted us to him being anything other than someone, you know, of a certain robustness who was used to dealing with the interchange between politics and the media," Mr. Blair said.

"Having said that, it is never a pleasant thing, indeed it is a deeply unpleasant thing, for someone to come suddenly into the media spotlight."

08-28-2003, 02:37 PM

Thanks for the enlightenment...I was thinking it must have something to do with his hair or something [img]smile.gif[/img] which didn't look all that poodle like to me [img]smile.gif[/img]

johnny · 08-28-2003, 03:08 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by MagiK:

Thanks for the enlightenment...I was thinking it must have something to do with his hair or something [img]smile.gif[/img] which didn't look all that poodle like to me [img]smile.gif[/img]

Looking at his hair, you could put him in the category "bastards", but i don't think he deserves that title.

08-28-2003, 03:11 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by johnny:
Looking at his hair, you could put him in the category "bastards", but i don't think he deserves that title.

Ya lost me Johnny...why would hair have anything to do with bastards?

johnny · 08-28-2003, 03:27 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by MagiK:

quote:
Originally posted by johnny:
Looking at his hair, you could put him in the category "bastards", but i don't think he deserves that title.

Ya lost me Johnny...why would hair have anything to do with bastards?
[/QUOTE]Not sure if it has the same meaning in English, but here in the Netherlands a "bastard dog" is something like a crossbreed, not really a race, know what i mean ?

08-28-2003, 03:53 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by johnny:
Not sure if it has the same meaning in English, but here in the Netherlands a "bastard dog" is something like a crossbreed, not really a race, know what i mean ?

Ahhh I was trying to puzzel out what his hair had to do with his parentage [img]smile.gif[/img]

Timber Loftis · 08-28-2003, 03:55 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by johnny:

quote:
Originally posted by MagiK:

quote:
Originally posted by johnny:
Looking at his hair, you could put him in the category "bastards", but i don't think he deserves that title.

Ya lost me Johnny...why would hair have anything to do with bastards?
[/QUOTE]Not sure if it has the same meaning in English, but here in the Netherlands a "bastard dog" is something like a crossbreed, not really a race, know what i mean ? [/QUOTE]Yeah. We call it a Mutt. Mutts are great dogs.

08-28-2003, 06:10 AM	#1
Donut Jack Burton Join Date: March 1, 2001 Location: Airstrip One Age: 41 Posts: 5,571	Only the second British Prime Minister to appear before a judicial review __________________ [img]\"http://www.wheatsheaf.freeserve.co.uk/roastspurs.gif\" alt=\" - \" /> <br />Proud member of the Axis of Upheaval<br />Official Titterer of the Laughing Hyenas<br />Josiah Bartlet - the best President the US never had.<br />The 1st D in the D & D Show

08-28-2003, 01:56 PM	#4
Timber Loftis 40th Level Warrior Join Date: July 11, 2002 Location: Chicago, IL Posts: 11,916	Today's NY Times: _____________________________ August 28, 2003 Blair Says He Would Have Quit if BBC Claims Were True By WARREN HOGE LONDON, Aug. 28 — Prime Minister Tony Blair said today that he would have had to resign had there been truth to a BBC report that his government had "sexed up" an intelligence dossier on Iraq with dubious information. Giving evidence to the judicial inquiry into the death of the weapons expert identified as the BBC's source, Mr. Blair said he had viewed the report as "an absolutely fundamental charge" that went beyond the area of permissible dissent to attack his integrity. "It is one thing to say we disagree with the government, we should not have gone to war, people can have a disagreement about that," Mr. Blair said. "But if the allegation had been true, it would have merited my resignation." He asserted: "This was an attack that went not just to the heart of the office of the prime minister but also the way your intelligence services operated. It went, in a sense, to the whole credibility, I felt, of the country." The BBC report said that Mr. Blair's aides had had inserted into the dossier on Iraqi arms the claim that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order being given. The BBC report further said that the aides knew the claim to be false and forced it into the document over the objections of intelligence chiefs. The BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, followed up with a column in a Sunday tabloid identifying Mr. Blair's closest aide, the powerful director of communications and security, Alastair Campbell, as the person who had ordered up the 45-minute claim. The report, broadcast on May 29, put a sharp focus on a debate already under way in Britain over the failure to find any unconventional weapons in Iraq and the possibility that the government exaggerated the threat of Mr. Hussein's arsenal to justify going to war. The issue has sent Mr. Blair's popularity plummeting to the lowest point since he came to power six years ago and has produced a sequence of poll results showing that the public no longer trusts him to tell the truth. The argument came to a dramatic head last month when Dr. David Kelly, a former United Nations weapons inspector and adviser to Britain's Ministry of Defense, was identified as the probable source of the BBC report. He was found dead on a path near his Oxfordshire home three days after he had testified before a parliamentary committee. Within hours of the July 18 discovery of Dr. Kelly's apparent suicide, Mr. Blair set up an independent inquiry, headed by a senior British judge, Lord Hutton, and said he would appear as a witness if called. Mr. Blair today became the second prime minister in British history to testify at such a hearing. The hearings, now completing their third week, have ranged beyond the formal question of what role the government played in the circumstances leading to Dr. Kelly's death. They now embrace the entire charged question of whether the government was misleading in its effort to overcome public opposition to military action. Mr. Blair said the government repeatedly sought to obtain a retraction of the report by the BBC but that the broadcaster refused to admit error. The damning account was becoming accepted as truth, Mr. Blair said, and the only way to correct that impression would have been "a clear and unequivocal statement that the original story was wrong." On Tuesday, John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee and author of the dossier, said the BBC report was "completely untrue," and the House of Commons foreign affairs committee last month absolved Mr. Campbell of the report's central charges after taking testimony from him and from Mr. Gilligan. "The problem was," Mr. Blair said, "we literally from May 29 to this day, have been in a position with this allegation hanging over us, with an entire campaign built around it, dealing with that fundamental issue to do with trust, and we have still not had the story retracted." Stung by the personal charge, Mr. Campbell exploited the disputed BBC report to mount a full-scale assault on the corporation's overall coverage of the war and its reputation for impartiality. Fights between British governments and the country's public service broadcaster are traditional, but this struggle struck BBC chiefs as something more. "I felt this was an extraordinary moment, almost unprecedented, an unprecedented attack on the BBC to be mounted by the head of communications at Downing Street," said Gavyn Davies, the BBC's chairman, who followed Mr. Blair to the witness box. "I took this as an attack on the integrity of the BBC and the impartiality of the BBC." The compiling of the dossier has been the subject of many of the 11 days of public testimony, and several witnesses have talked of the intense activity at Downing Street in the weeks before the Sept. 24 publication. Mr. Blair said today that his government felt it had an obligation to make public as much of its worries over Iraq's weapons as it could in answer to what he called "an enormous clamor" for information from the public and the press. He said he discussed the matter with President Bush in August, and the two decided that action had to be taken. The Bush administration at the time was relying on the British to play a major role in making the argument for a tough approach to Iraq. On Sept. 3, Mr. Blair said at a news conference that the government would be producing a dossier of evidence. "I recall throughout the August break last year literally every day there were stories appearing saying we were going to invade Iraq, that military action had been decided upon," he told Lord Hutton. "We really had to disclose what we knew," he said. "People were not unnaturally saying `produce that intelligence, then.' " Mr. Blair said that his office's involvement in the preparation of the 50-page dossier was only presentational and that he had directed that the content had to be fully based on intelligence and approved by Mr. Scarlett. He disputed the view that publishing the intelligence was aimed at justifying war. "The purpose of the dossier was to respond to the call to disclose the intelligence that we knew," he said. "But at that stage the strategy was not to use the dossier as the immediate reason to go to conflict, but as the reason why we had to return to the issue of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction." He said this had been "a perfectly right way" of producing the dossier, and he denied that there had been any exaggeration. "I think we described the intelligence in a way that was perfectly justified," he said. Mr. Blair was also asked about his role in making public the name of Dr. Kelly once the weapons scientist had told his Defense Ministry handlers that he had had a conversation with Mr. Gilligan, the BBC reporter, a week before the damning report was broadcast. Dr. Kelly had advised them he believed Mr. Gilligan had embellished the information, and the government saw in him a way of discrediting the report. The ministry disclosed his name to reporters and sent him before the Commons foreign affairs committee to answer questions in a televised grilling during which he appeared uncomfortable and overwhelmed. Mr. Blair said he had urged his people to handle the case "by the book" so that no one could later question whether the government was trying to dissemble or cover up. He said that with hindsight it was easier to appreciate that Dr. Kelly might have been treated with more understanding but that conversations he had had with his aides at the time did not reveal that. "All I can say was that there was nothing in the conversations we had that would have alerted us to him being anything other than someone, you know, of a certain robustness who was used to dealing with the interchange between politics and the media," Mr. Blair said. "Having said that, it is never a pleasant thing, indeed it is a deeply unpleasant thing, for someone to come suddenly into the media spotlight." __________________

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08-28-2003, 02:37 PM	#5
MagiK Guest Posts: n/a	Thanks for the enlightenment...I was thinking it must have something to do with his hair or something [img]smile.gif[/img] which didn't look all that poodle like to me [img]smile.gif[/img]

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