Richard Norton-Taylor, MI6’s Iraq guardian

[Paul Rigby]

The Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor, the paper’s veteran expert on matters spook, has long enjoyed a reputation as one of MI6’s most fervent admirers. In Saturday’s edition of the paper, he again demonstrated why the reputation is so richly deserved. “The calamity of disregard,” 4 August 2007, p.32, represents a significant attempt to rewrite the historical record of that bloated bureaucracy’s catastrophic contribution to the Iraq charnel-house: All mention of John Scarlett is banished, and we are instead treated to a portrait of the organisation’s Richard Dearlove, the service’s nominal head (the real masters, of course, are in Washington) as a dissident seer fearlessly resisting the drift to illegal invasion.

Read Norton-Taylor’s Stalinoid drivel here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/st...2141409,00.html

For a pithy, accurate, and pointed rebuttal, see today’s letters page contribution in the same paper from Dr. Brian Jones, a senior defense intelligence analyst who really did offer meaningful resistance to the lies concocted by, among others, MI6’s Scarlett, lies utilised so eagerly and efficiently by the wretched Dearlove:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2142964,00.html

[John Simkin]

The Guardian’s Richard Norton-Taylor, the paper’s veteran expert on matters spook, has long enjoyed a reputation as one of MI6’s most fervent admirers. In Saturday’s edition of the paper, he again demonstrated why the reputation is so richly deserved. “The calamity of disregard,” 4 August 2007, p.32, represents a significant attempt to rewrite the historical record of that bloated bureaucracy’s catastrophic contribution to the Iraq charnel-house: All mention of John Scarlett is banished, and we are instead treated to a portrait of the organisation’s Richard Dearlove, the service’s nominal head (the real masters, of course, are in Washington) as a dissident seer fearlessly resisting the drift to illegal invasion.

Read Norton-Taylor’s Stalinoid drivel here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/st...2141409,00.html

For a pithy, accurate, and pointed rebuttal, see today’s letters page contribution in the same paper from Dr. Brian Jones, a senior defense intelligence analyst who really did offer meaningful resistance to the lies concocted by, among others, MI6’s Scarlett, lies utilised so eagerly and efficiently by the wretched Dearlove:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2142964,00.html

Thank you for posting this. I intended doing this after reading Dr. Brian Jones' letter in yesterday's Guardian.

[Guest David Guyatt]

I well remember Norton Taylor and his coverage of Britain's Iraqgate and the resultant dry cracker, the Scott Inquiry.

Expectations that a government minister or two would be sent to the Tower rode higher than Ronald Reagan sitting in

the saddle of a 1950's western.

What a bloody useless (but oh cor blimey so typical) exercise in Establishment blamestorming and whitewash that turned out to be.

But that's what the media are more or less paid to do. Hard to find an honest journalist who can work in tandem with an honest editor,

who both work for an honest publisher. Advertising is the name of the game and all else is circus hoopla and molding us citizens into an

acceptable shape for the betterment of society... naturally.

David

[Paul Rigby]

I well remember Norton Taylor and his coverage of Britain's Iraqgate ...

I once enquired of retired Customs & Excise nabob who within the British establishment had green-lighted the expose of HMG's love-affair with Iraq. Came the answer: "The F.O." Cynics have long pondered the precise point at which the Foreign Office ends and MI6 begins.

No wonder Norton-Taylor was so well-informed - and foregrounded - during that black farce.

Paul