01:00 AM EST on Saturday, January 31, 2004

The political life of British Prime Minister Tony Blair hung by a thread this week. He was facing a crucial vote on a proposal to raise tuition fees at Britain's universities, and awaiting the findings of a commission inquiry on the intelligence dossier about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Blair won the tuition vote, by a razor-thin margin. And, to nearly everyone's surprise, the Hutton Commission not only exonerated the Blair government, but it also severely castigated the British Broadcasting Corporation, which had aired a sensational story about the intelligence dossier.

The BBC story was that weapons experts at the Ministry of Defense had been pressured by the Blair government to exaggerate their findings to justify invading Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The government stoutly denied the story, and the BBC stuck to its guns. Then, in the midst of the standoff, a Ministry of Defense consultant named David Kelly committed suicide after he had been identified as the source of the story.

The presumption, last year, was that the Blair government had, indeed, "sexed up" (the BBC's term) intelligence for political purposes; and that, when the BBC left it open to criticism, maliciously exposed David Kelly, endangering his livelihood. After Mr. Kelly killed himself, a commission headed by Lord Hutton, a respected judge, was established to get at the truth.

We may never know the exact truth of events, but here is what the Hutton Commission concluded: Intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction may have been faulty (as David Kay has testified about American findings) but there is no evidence that the system of intelligence gathering was distorted by politics, or that the Blair government exerted influence to get the sort of intelligence it wanted. And while Lord Hutton did not rule on the quality of that intelligence, he pointed out that the government was entitled to interpret findings as it saw fit, so long as reports to Parliament reflected the consensus of the British intelligence "community." This was done.

On the emotional question of Mr. Kelly, Lord Hutton said that the unfortunate scientist had violated civil-service regulations by talking to a reporter, and was not a victim of government malice or foul play.

It is Lord Hutton's condemnation of the BBC, however, which has drawn the most interest. Lord Hutton complained that the Iraqi intelligence story was never properly vetted within the organization, and that once the government objected, the taxpayer-funded BBC bureaucracy merely circled the wagons instead of reviewing the evidence. This is being seen in Britain as an unprecedented rebuke of the BBC, whose chairman, director general and reporter have since resigned.

In our view, there are two sides to the Hutton Commission's conclusions. While Lord Hutton has concluded that the Blair government did nothing wrong, it is fair to say that it was disingenuous about certain questions -- notably the public identification of David Kelly -- and that Tony Blair's highly centralized mode of governance led to needless confusion within the intelligence agencies and Parliament.

As far as the BBC is concerned, Lord Hutton's report was full of recommendations about reforming its editorial processes to avoid a recurrence of that one faulty story. Our conclusion is that news organizations, even government-subsidized ones like the BBC, are well equipped to improve practices on their own, and that the last thing a free press needs is government "guidance" such as Lord Hutton suggests.