By the waters of Babylon I sat down and wept....

[johnny9fingers]

Strange, isn't it, that the only person to be rigorously cross-questioned by the Chilcot inquiry is Clare Short, who resigned over being misled about the Iraq invasion.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8492526.stm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/feb/02/clare-short-iraq-war-inquiry

I wonder why Clare is the only witness to the inquiry that has been cross-questioned in such a style? Is it because it's just bad manners to question a former PM in such a fashion? Sir Roderic Lyne's questioning seems particularly....what's the phrase....biased and confrontational. Odd from a chap who, after Eton and Leeds University (because his grades were so bad he couldn't get in anywhere else), went into the Foriegn Office. Mind you, Roderic is very 'stablishment: as I suppose are all the members of the inquiry.

Now I have to declare an interest here. Clare is a distant cousin on my mother's side. (The nationalist Irish yeoman farmer side.) Weirdly, she married a chap, Alex Lyons, who was at the Inner Temple  with one of my godfathers. So there are a number of degrees of connection. Mind you Clare has something like 40 first cousins, so distant cousins must number in the hundreds, if not thousands.

I do hope Clare's testimony actually starts some sort of ball rolling. If the war was illegal, then those responsible for it must stand trial for the deaths of thousands....no, hundreds of thousands. I would love to see Tony Bliar come under the same sort of rigorous cross-questioning that Clare has.

But perhaps with his freedom at stake.

He might then implicate the other folk involved in the decision to go to war illegally: not that they will ever stand trial, being US politicians, and having given themselves retrospective immunity.

In the course of the Chilcot Inquiry, Bliar put up a good show given that he had almost no difficult questions to answer at all. Having heard the nature of Short's evidence, and the fashion in which it has been extracted, I would now be pleased for Bliar to be recalled and questioned at least as thoroughly as Clare has been.

Unlike Bliar, Clare at least left the inquiry with a standing ovation. Bliar left to boos, jeers and catcalls. Perhaps the time has come for him to move to the US to avoid any subsequent actions.

After the first trial of Oscar Wilde, Oscar was advised to run. I'd give the same advice to Bliar right now.

Comments

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Credit where it's due, the pun was originally Victor Lewis Smith's. I tended to use Bleuch or Blur or Blurgh, but I thought given the circumstances....

As for the immunity thang, I'll have to trawl through so much stuff to find it....but I recall a politicartoons page dedicated to it some year or two ago. Wasn't just GWB that was immunised in the bill, I seem to remember Cheney et al were included too.