Chilcot Iraq Enquiry.

[brogdale]

11am.


It'll do as expected: go into the minutiae of Whitehall processes. It has no remit to declare anyone a war criminal, and won't.

On Newsnight they said that the journos 'purdah' will end at the point that Chilcot himself stops speaking at the pressa...so actually more like 11.30am...apparently.

 

[danny la rouge]

On Newsnight they said that the journos 'purdah' will end at the point that Chilcot himself stops speaking at the pressa...so actually more like 11.30am...apparently.

I plan to have formed my view by 11.01am, so he'll be talking to himself for 29mins.

I understand he's not taking questions.

 

[brogdale]

I plan to have formed my view by 11.01am, so he'll be talking to himself for 29mins.

I understand he's not taking questions.

Like that's not already firmly set!

 

[danny la rouge]

Like that's not already firmly set!

I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong*.


(*About a small set of largely irrelevant technicalities).

 

[weltweit]

Wonder if the conclusions will even mention the dodgy dossier?

 

[danny la rouge]

Wonder if the conclusions will even mention the dodgy dossier?

He forgot to include it and is planning to insert a mention while in the taxi, which is ordered for 10.15. He doesn't expect it to take longer than 45 minutes to finish.

 

[brogdale]

Wonder if the conclusions will even mention the dodgy dossier?

When consulted in the Maxwellisation process, the dossier expressed its preference not to feature in the report. So that's it.

 

[weltweit]

Wonder how long after the inevitable immediate crash, the website will be able to be browsed by ordinary folk like us?

And don't anyone say 45 minutes

 

[brogdale]

Bet there'll be quite a lot of Cmd +F of "Dr David Kelly".

 

[danny la rouge]

And don't anyone say 45 minutes

I said it once, but I think I got away with it.

 

[danny la rouge]

 

[Artaxerxes]

"The main expectation that I have is that it will not be possible in future to engage in a military or indeed a diplomatic endeavour on such a scale and of such gravity without really careful challenge analysis and assessment and collective political judgement being applied to it.

WE WENT TO WAR! HOW WAS THIS NOT THE FUCKING CASE!

9 days my arse, your looking at least a couple of weeks if not a month because I'm not doing nothing but read it for 12 hours a day.

 

[weltweit]

Bet there'll be quite a lot of Cmd +F of "Dr David Kelly".

Yes that poor sod seems to have been forgotten in the last years.

 

[brogdale]

Serious media outfits will also have to have a team of people going through the stuff surrounding Peter Goldsmith's 'Damascene' conversion from a pronouncement of illegality to full-throttle tally-ho in the space of a couple of weeks.

 

[likesfish]

There's villages and tourists just outside Alkrotiri, did the people there also have to carry protection?

While in the event of a massive nbc attack we would have to fight through the mutated hordes to seize limassol airport somebody worked given a scuds range and accuracy saddam would need to fire approx 12000 scuds to be sure to knock out the RAF base rather more than were ever built .
An air raid would have to get through most of the wests air forces and several US carrier fleets .
Though the iraqi special forces threat to RAF mount olympous ( radar base on top of a snow covered mountain) was quite amusing
The leaders arnt called dick and clint by any chance?.
RAF intelligence dont like if you laugh in their face


Well for gulf war one no they didnt have to on the grounds there wasnt any to be had the only in date stuff was still sealed next door to the chemical casuality clearing station along with the body bags.

A collection of tents contaminated casualtiys go in one end through various showers and come out the other end and get whisked off to hospital also got to learn how to decomtaminate a C130 hey why operate a jetspray in an NBC Suit when theres infantry about they'd only be asleep

 

[YouSir]

Odds on it saying no one did anything wrong but they won't do it again so let's all move on, lessons learned, fresh starts, can't live in the past, different now?

 

[kebabking]

i'm particularly looking forward to the excoriation of Geoff Hoon (who is known variously as 'Buff', an insult so imperceptable it took him several months to see it, or for brevity, TCH - That Cunt Hoon).

actually i think he's the one far more likely to see the inside of a cell than any of the others - distortion and embellishment aren't really crimes, but negligence is. don't be that surprised if the saintly Clare Short gets it with both barrels either - she might even get malfeasance rather than just negligence...

 

[YouSir]

i'm particularly looking forward to the excoriation of Geoff Hoon (who is known variously as 'Buff', an insult so imperceptable it took him several months to see it, or for brevity, TCH - That Cunt Hoon).

actually i think he's the one far more likely to see the inside of a cell than any of the others - distortion and embellishment aren't really crimes, but negligence is. don't be that surprised if the saintly Clare Short gets it with both barrels either - she might even get malfeasance rather than just negligence...

More optimistic than me, get the feeling real blame or responsibility will be thin on the ground. Hopefully wrong though.

 

[kebabking]

More optimistic than me, get the feeling real blame or responsibility will be thin on the ground. Hopefully wrong though.

i think one of the genuine problems that Chilcott will have in saying who did what is that the nature of government under Blair makes it almost impossible.

not only would there not be a written record, but the participants themselves won't really know anything other than what they took from the meeting.

this is, sadly, not as uncommon as you might wish to hope - a more recent example is the current Carrier programme, 2 ships each weighing more than 60,000 tons: they were originally designed to be changable in operation, but that a decision would have to be made about which avenue to go down some way into the build. 10 years on, none of those involved - the navy, the shipbuilders, the politicians - can agree on not just when that decision was made, but whether it was made at all...

 

[Kaka Tim]

The intelligence services will be blamed for providing faulty info - so the politicians were misled.
As opposed to the obvious and well documented reality - which was that the spooks were ordered to find evidence to back up the case for war - no matter how shonky.

The central scandal of the whole debacle is that Blair wanted to join in with the US invasion of Iraq and employed the entire forces of the state - including the intelligence services - to comprehensively mislead the public and parliament that this was a war of absolute necessity and not of choice.

Chilcot wont go anywhere near that. As Danny pointed out - it will be a fog of detailed analysis of whitehall process and procedure that will be used to close the issue for good.

Basically we already know the truth - digging deep into the report might provide more details that back that up but thats about it.

For me the real unknown about the Iraq was is why blair was so keen - ego maniacal zeal? a winston churchill complex? a belief that this would be beneficial for the uk? For shit and giggles? Delusion? Does he even really know himself?

 

[likesfish]

Tch should be done regardless of morality he's guilty as fuck of not allowing the military to plan for the war till the last moment.

 

[likesfish]

Serria leone and kosovo were his gateway wars nice in and out tea and medals a fairly clear cut victory for liberal intervention.
So he thought iraq would be more of the same

 

[kebabking]

The intelligence services will be blamed for providing faulty info - so the politicians were misled...

i won't fall off my chair if you're right...

one rumour doing the rounds is that the executive arms - the military, the Int services, DFID - will get the blame, with the politicians being hidden under an impenetrable fog of obfiscation.

its actually going to be easier to do this because the executive arms will do boring things like keep records of who decided what, whereas the politicians just had chats in the corridors.

 

[Artaxerxes]

To help Mr Blair, President BUsh agreed to seek a further UN resolution, the second resolution determining that Iraq had failed ot take its final opportunity to comply with its obligations...without evidence of major new Iraqi violations or reports from the inspectors that Iraq was failing to co-operate and they could not carry out their task, most members of the Security Coucnil could not be convinced that peaceful options had been exhausted...Mr Blair and Mr Straw blamed France for the impasse and claimed the UK was acting on behalf of the international community..we consider the UK was in fact undermining the Security Council's authority.

 

[kebabking]

JIC is getting the blame...

 

[kebabking]

Army is getting the blame...

 

[Pickman's model]

Bet there'll be quite a lot of Cmd +F of "Dr David Kelly".

Ctrl f on a pc

 

[Artaxerxes]

Mr Blair told the inquiry that the difficulties encountered in Iraq after the invasion could not have been known in advance. We do not agree that hindsight is required - the risk of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, internal instability and al-Qaeda activity were each specifically identified before the invasion."

 

[killer b]

Crikey. This is all rather more damning than I expected.

 

[Pickman's model]

Crikey. This is all rather more damning than I expected.

Yeh. Easy to blame yesterday's men tho