This is the title of an article posted by John Simpson on the BBC web site yesterday. The article covers yet again how Intelligence was used by Tony Blair to justify the UK participation in the invasion of Iraq!
The article discusses how (as we now understand) the use of the intelligence was oversold to convince the doubters that something had to be done! It goes on to talk about the Butler report and how when the main press conference was given, none of the main stream journalists present asked any ‘killer questions’!
According to John Simpson’s article…
A member of the Butler committee, the Conservative MP Sir Michael Mates, said he was surprised that no one asked what he called “the killing questions” at the press conference when the committee’s report was published. “The media didn’t home in on that. Once we hadn’t provided them with a scalp, they more or less lost interest.”
What I find interesting about this article is that it really shows up how shallow the main stream media journalists have become in their investigative work.
Many of them now seem to have recast themselves as Presenters, more concerned about how they are perceived by the public than in hunting down a serious story. Had they paid a bit more attention to the situation at the time, perhaps ‘we’ could have called the governemt to account and we might not have the situation we have today.
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