Dear Sir,
I’ll keep this short. I was so disappointed with your report of yesterday that I nearly cried. I was with 2 million people on February 15 2003 who marched in London because we all knew that the government was lying. Events have shown they were lying. Governments do lie. They are assisted by your profession’s obsequious axiom that the Government is always above contempt no matter what.
Last November, on President Bush’s visit to London, Richard Perle, one of the main architects of the invasion of Iraq, admitted that “international law stood in the way” of the invasion. In May, the deputy secretary of defence in America, Paul Wolfowitz, admitted that the WMD story was a used as a justification for "bureaucratic reasons”. You must know this. The government intelligence on Iraq was materially unfounded, whatever way it is examined. Somewhere in the chain of information it was falsified. This is a serious matter which has used to cover utterly criminal acts such as bombing of civilians. You know this. You have not demanded that the chain of government information be investigated and sorted out before it gets used to conduct further acts of killing.
You may have honoured your loyalty to your Prime Minister in the way you chose to interpret your terms of reference as narrowly as possible. What good is that? The terms of reference were chosen by the men who are guilty. You had an opportunity, and you seriously let down the people of this country who being humiliated by this aggressive international violence done in our name.
We need an official inquiry into the cases of this invasion -- which are highly contentious. Maybe you did not feel authorized to address any part of it, but you did not even call for further investigation. Only the guilty party, the government, can call for an investigation of itself, and they won’t do it. This is not right. You have dashed our hopes.
So you conclude in your report that if the BBC plays fast and loose with their reporting, and makes an accusation that’s believed by a huge number of the informed population to be true, and events show it to be true, and it leads to the unexpected suicide of one guy, that’s a terrible crime. But if the government plays fast and loose with its secret intelligence, and that intelligence was wholly untrue, and it starts an illegal war killing thousands and humiliating a foreign nation, that’s clear and fine. Is that how it is? The BBC will now become more of a tool of the government than it already is. This is what you want?
The newspapers and satellite channels in this country are totally owned by and serve American corporate interests -- who also fully own the American government -- and they make this plain in their editorial policies. Misinformation on this scale is causing our democracy to fail. Thanks for pushing it further over the edge.
We, the electorate, have been totally disenfranchised on this policy of foreign adventures since both main political parties favour American led violent international criminality and the bombing of people in distant lands who are of no threat to us whatsoever. With a ballot box choice like this, you and the government you serve cannot claim a fair democratic mandate.
This has been a dark day for justice and truth. You have paid your greatest respects to criminal murderers. This is how you conclude your career, whitewashing a British government’s injustices on a scale more serious than anything perpetrated in Northern Ireland. I hope you are proud of your work. We will be fortunate if your retirement saves us from your judgements in future.
Yours,
Julian Todd.
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