The first days of testimony in this are amazing. I confess I am not big on televised hearings, but it would have been worth it, if only for the political education. At the end of it, I hope someone publishes the testimony -- or is it on the Web somewhere. Talk about a political education (the darkest of Yes, Ministers.

What I find most interesting is the familiar strategy of ignoring the larger scale issues and focussing on what seems to me to be probably a single misstatement (Gilligan's remarks on his interview with Kelly today reinforce this) about who was directly responsible for "sexing up" the dossier. As if anyone needed to have a direct spoken order to please their masters. Virtually the entire intelligence community up in arms about the misuse of intelligence, and a complete skein of half-truths woven about the push towards war, none of this seems to matter.

You get a grim sense of how bureaucracies work, and the toxic nature of the relationships among the civil servants, the political level, and the press.

One wonders how far Lord Hutton will take his "brief".

yours,

Peter T.