LONDON -- The Jan. 28 report of Lord Justice Brian Hutton's inquiry into the death last July of British government defense scientist David Kelly was highly critical of the behavior of the British Broadcasting Corp. and a BBC reporter who had accused the government of "sexing up" intelligence for the September 2002 report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The reporter had alleged that the government knew all along that it was not true that Iraq had WMD that could be deployed within 45 minutes.
The government was pleased with the Hutton report, which exonerated it and Prime Minister Tony Blair while only mildly criticizing the Ministry of Defense for not having done enough to help Kelly. As for the BBC, the chairman of the governors has resigned and a lot of soul-searching is going on about what went wrong inside the corporation.
Hutton decided it was not within the scope of his investigation to comment on the accuracy of the government's intelligence or on whether the intelligence justified the government's decision to send British troops to Iraq. Many observers think that these issues should be the subject of a separate independent inquiry, not least because of the failure so far to find WMD in Iraq and of the resignation of the U.S. chief weapons inspector.