British judge: government not involved in suicide of weapons expert

LONDON -- A judge cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair's administration Wednesday of any direct involvement in the suicide of a government expert on Iraqi weapons but criticized the BBC for its reporting in the scandal that shook the British leadership.

The government did not act in a "dishonorable, underhanded or duplicitous" way in revealing the identity of weapons expert David Kelly, said senior appeals judge Lord Hutton, who was appointed by Blair to investigate the death.

Hutton said he was satisfied that nobody involved in the matter could have foreseen that Kelly would take his own life. He killed himself after being identified as the anonymous source of the British Broadcasting Corp. report accusing the government of exaggerating claims about Iraqi weapons to bolster support for war.

Hutton also said the BBC report that Blair's government had manipulated its intelligence in an official dossier about Iraq's weapons was unfounded. He specifically rebutted the BBC report that the government had "sexed up" the dossier.

"I am satisfied that none of the persons whose decisions and actions I later describe ever contemplated that Dr. Kelly might take his own life. I'm further satisfied that none of those persons was at fault in not contemplating that Dr. Kelly might take his own life," Hutton said on national TV as he read from his 328-page decision.

"Whatever pressures and strains Dr. Kelly was subjected to by the decisions and actions taken in the weeks before his death, I am satisfied that no one realized or should have realized that those pressures and strains might lead him to take his own life," Hutton said.

In his report, BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan had quoted his source as saying that Blair's government had "sexed up" the intelligence dossier on Iraq's arms to bolster its argument for the war in Iraq, including a claim that they could be deployed in 45 minutes.

The subsequent feud between the government and the BBC over the report raised widespread concerns about Blair's integrity and led to the biggest crisis of his seven years in office.

"Whether or not at some time in the future the report on which the 45-minute claim was based was shown to be unreliable, the allegations reported by Mr. Gilligan on 29 May 2003 that the government probably knew that the 45-minutes claim was wrong before the government decided to put it in the dossier was an allegation that was unfounded," Hutton said.

The judge also said that Kelly had acted improperly by privately meeting with Gilligan and had breached rules regarding government employees contacts with the media because he hadn't been given permission from his superiors for such a meeting.

Hutton sharply criticized the publicly funded BBC's "defective" handling of Gilligan's story, saying the network's editors had failed to properly check the reporter's allegations and did not properly investigate the government's complaints about his report.

The judge criticized the BBC's Board of Governors for failing to fully investigate the criticism of Gilligan's report and would have probably discovered it to be unfounded if they had.

Hutton pored over documents, e-mails, official minutes and extracts from the personal diary of Alastair Campbell, Blair's former communications director, which provided insights into the interplay of politics and policies at the highest level.

The scandal has damaged the credibility of Blair, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon, senior government officials and the BBC.

Hutton's hearings, lasting most of August and September, transfixed the country, which remains deeply divided about Blair's decision to back the U.S. attack on Iraq.

The retired chief U.S. weapons inspector, David Kay, said last week that he concluded that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, which were the basis of Blair's case for war.

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