The Panic Button

The rigorous, independent Chilcot inquiry took on an extra specially glowing aura of Britishness today when the eponymous front-man censored the video feed to remove "sensitive information" which was then dismissed as insignificant by onlookers who proceeded to leak it to the press. Chilcot was having a bit of a chat with Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was ambassador in charge of circumventing the United Nations before the invasion and special envoy in charge of cowering in Baghdad's Green Zone afterwards, and does not appear to have derived much satisfaction from either role. The censored information allegedly related to British intelligence reports being less fatuously optimistic than those of the Vice-Chimp in Charge, Paul Bremer, and hence more useful to Colin Powell, then US secretary of state, in compiling his post-invasion PowerPoint presentations. Chilcot decided, if that is the word I want, to cut this horrendous piece of anti-Americanism under protocols agreed with (or, in Standard English, imposed by) Whitehall, whereby information in official documents can only be referred to with the prior agreement of the institution whose conduct is supposedly under investigation. Greenstock also observed that, despite the Vicar of Downing Street's sincere faith in the weapons of mass nonexistence, certain defeatists maintained "Saddam's regime would collapse so fast that we would be left holding a baby without the materials for looking after it." Bizarrely, he went on: "And that indeed is what happened", as though the Iraqi oil ministry had never been pacified or had a dummy inserted into it.