Beeb: We wish George would get what Tony’s got.

The theme of Tom Carver’s advocacy piece seems to be his wish that Americans would be as distrustful of George as Brits are of Tony. Here’s how the teaser on the front page reads (at the time of writing)–

“Case for war: Why has Bush escaped anger facing Blair over intelligence on Iraq?”

And here’s the caption (at the time of writing) under President Bush giving the State of the Union speech to Congress–

Some of Bush’s claims have been disputed, but there is no US inquiry

Is the BBCi caption writer hoping for an American version of the Hutton proceedings? Sadly, for the BBC at least, there is no such inquiry in the USA.

Carver raises the usual arguments against the overthrow of Saddam (no WMD found, unwarranted claims of uranium purchases from Africa, etc.). Conveniently, there is no mention of the barbarity of the Baathist ‘thugocracy’ and its use of chemical weapons on its own people along with some thirty years of a human rights nightmare. It would be educational for Mr Carver to simply read Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview on NBC’s Meet the Press which aired yesterday. What does Cheney say about these ‘uranium in Africa’ charges? Here’s his answer to the interviewer, Tim Russert.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I guess the intriguing thing, Tim, on the whole thing, this question of whether or not the Iraqis were trying to acquire uranium in Africa. In the British report, this week, the Committee of the British Parliament, which just spent 90 days investigating all of this, revalidated their British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa.

And later-

MR. RUSSERT: If they [intelligence assessments about Iraq WMD’s] were wrong, Mr. Vice President, shouldn’t we have a wholesale investigation into the intelligence failure that they predicted…

VICE PRES. CHENEY: What failure?

MR. RUSSERT: That Saddam had biological, chemical and is developing a nuclear program.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: My guess is in the end, they’ll be proven right, Tim. On the intelligence business, first of all, it’s intelligence. There are judgments involved in all of this. But we’ve got, I think, some very able people in the intelligence business that review the material here. This was a crucial subject. It was extensively covered for years. We’re very good at it. As I say, the British just revalidated their claim. So I’m not sure what the argument is about here. I think in the final analysis, we will find that the Iraqis did have a robust program. How do you explain why Saddam Hussein, if he had no program, wouldn’t come clean and say, “I haven’t got a program. Come look”? Then he would have sanctions lifted. He’d earned $100 billion more in oil revenue over the last several years. He’d still be in power. The reason he didn’t was because obviously he couldn’t comply and wouldn’t comply with the U.N. resolutions demanding that he give up his WMD. The Security Council by a 15-to-nothing vote a year ago found him still in violation of those U.N. Security Council resolutions. A lot of the reporting isn’t U.S. reporting. It’s U.N. reporting on the supplies and stocks of VX and nerve agent and anthrax and so forth that he’s never accounted for. So I say I’m not willing at all at this point to buy the proposition that somehow Saddam Hussein was innocent and he had no WMD and some guy out at the CIA, because I called him, cooked up a report saying he did. That’s crazy. That makes no sense. It bears no resemblance to reality whatsoever.

Carver’s article (on BBCi at this writing) uses the subheading “Hoax” when discussing the issue of uranium in Africa and the aluminium tubes cited by Colin Powell, quite a serious and unsubstantiated charge. To quote Carver–

That was mentioned by the president in his State of the Union speech in January, which the White House now admits was based on a hoax.

It would have been good of Carver to point us to the relevant admission by the White House. Just as Gilligan seems to have done with Dr. Kelly’s off-the-record chats, such an admission would be difficult to pull out of thin air. The Hutton inquiry has Dyke in the dock about just this kind of thing. So I ask– Can the BBC change its spinning, spiteful ways?