Posted on 04/17/2005 11:12:00 AM PDT by quidnunc
After Kamel Bourgass was convicted last week of plotting to make poisons and sentenced to 17 years in prison, ministers sprang to the microphones to claim that the jury's verdict in the ricin trial proved that they had told the truth about the terrorist threat to Britain. But this was far wide of the mark. On the contrary, it was a disaster for those who believe that such a threat exists.
The acquittal of eight of the nine defendants allowed the opponents of the Government's behaviour in Iraq to claim that Bourgass was merely a lone and ineffectual nutcase, that there was no al-Qa'eda conspiracy, and that the threat of a ricin plot was simply cooked up by Tony Blair to justify the Iraq war by mendaciously fuelling a climate of fear, as he had done over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The prosecuting authorities effectively stand accused of suborning justice to shore up support for an unjustifiable war. Duncan Campbell, the maverick intelligence analyst, has pooh-poohed the claim that Bourgass's ricin recipe came from al-Qa'eda, and insisted instead that he downloaded it from American internet sites.
Some lawyers involved in the case suggested that the evidence by Bourgass's alleged co-conspirator was obtained under torture. And, in The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins wrote that there was no ricin, no al-Qa'eda plot and that anyone who was alarmed about such a thing was insane. Reality's boot, however, may be on the other foot. For it is surely the Government's opponents who filter everything through the distorting prism of their obsession that Britain was taken to war on a lie.
Evidence suggests that the trial itself was politicised, with the wholly unconnected war in Iraq being dragged in at every opportunity. The jury never actually heard some of the most crucial evidence. It all raises urgent questions about whether the adversarial knockabout and courtroom gamesmanship that characterise the criminal court system can cope with trials of this nature, where public safety is said to be so gravely at risk.
-snip-
As I have said before, de Nile isn't just a river in Egypt, it also flows freely a mile wide and twenty fathoms deep from John o"Groats to Land's End.
I see you couldn't retort anything I said, but went for a cheap gag.
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