[lbo-talk] The other Ian Williams

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Sat Dec 30 10:56:31 PST 2006


The other Ian Williams writes:

"It was a different Ian Williams who was at the concentration camp -- but he was right and totally vindicated when the libel case went to court."

If by vindicated one means that the British judicary rewarded a journalist for the largest UK broadcast news for supporting military intervention by forcing his left-wing critics out of business as vindicated, then of course he is right. If the other Ian Williams means that the ITN Ian Williams' attempt to portray the camp at Trnopolje as a death camp was vidicated, then he is wrong, since the other Ian Williams' lawyers conceded that they had never meant to say any such thing before the libel case was heard.

If one can believe it, the case was lost because the British judges thought it was unfair to say that the ITN journalists had *lied* when we could not know that they were *deliberately* saying something that was not, as they made it clear before the case, true, i.e. that Trnopolje was an extermination camp. (Incidentally, this is Tony Blair's last shred of defence for taking us to war in Iraq, that he believed that there were weapons of mass destruction there, even if it turned out not to be true, and therefore he was not lying.)



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list