On Morning Ireland on Wednesday, the presenter - and I missed who it was - twice told us that US forces had "assassinated" Uday and Qusay Hussein. "Assassinate", according to the OED, means "1. Kill (esp. a public figure such a political or religious leader) by treacherous violence; commit a planned murder of (freq. by a person hired or instructed to commit the act)." Kevin Myers takes issue.
The Hussein brothers were killed in a four-hour gun-battle in Mosul. This was not an assassination, and to put their deaths on a moral par with the murders of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King or Mahatma Ghandi is grotesque. It is, however, proof of the extraordinary and unmediated access to the public enjoyed by broadcast journalists, and with all their baggage.
Any item you read in The Irish Times will have been written by one journalist, sub-edited by another, and approved by at least one senior editor. If there are any doubts about the item, in terms of taste, it goes to the deputy editor, or the editor herself.
These are necessary precautions. Truth is a precious commodity, and is easily lost in a sloppy phrase or imprecise sentence. Yet news broadcasters apparently feel immune to the need for the sort of prudent measures which the rest of us live by. This newspaper would not have used a loaded word such as "assassinate" to describe a killing so soon after it had occurred, and with so little evidence to justify it, never mind one which involved a four-hour gun-battle.
But they live by different rules in the electronic media, as we all now know. The casual on-air chat between journalists, which started out as a background briefing to explain the headlines, has now been transformed by the BBC into a means of breaking a fresh story. This was how Andrew Gilligan made the allegation of the changes in the British dossiers on weapons of mass destruction, using the "sexier" term to describe the changes.
What is going on that a major news story breaks in the course of what is presumably an unscripted conversation? Even though the programme editor is - apparently - aware of the intended content of the conversation, this can't prevent it straying into the sort of colloquialisms - such as "sexier" - that a straightforward written script would never contain, and a source wouldn't have used.
The medium becomes the message, and headline news of enormous gravity is thus presented as background material. Worse, and quite inexcusably, the reporter concerned even partially exposed the identity of his source for the allegation as being "a single officer involved in drawing up" the earlier dossier.
This sounded remarkably as if Andrew Gilligan was raising two fingers at the British government, sneering: We've bested you. Na na na naah naah. So it became just another round in the secret war between Blair and Campbell on the one side, and the BBC on the other. And even in metaphorical wars, there are casualties: careers suffer; and in this case, the imminent end of a career, in whatever other circumstances we know nothing about, also meant the end of a life.
One life. The war meant the end of many lives, as war does. And that's why the spinning skills of news management, of using the medium to massage the message, are so very grievously wrong in time of war. This was why that wretched creature, Jo Moore, who wanted to bury bad news on September 11th, 2001, was so universally reviled. Words may not be manipulated to justify taking life: nor can the loss of life be manipulated for selfish ends. To play with words to precipitate war is to employ the morality of the Ems telegram, one of the most sordid episodes in European history.
By using different dossiers as a pretext for going to war, Blair is in a trap of his own making: and a wholly unnecessary trap, with an unnecessary pretext. The justification for going to war lay in the nature and the history of Saddam's government: it was a barbarous, criminal, genocidal regime, which had attacked all of its neighbours, and which years of UN sanctions had failed either to tame or remove. After September 11th, the US could not tolerate the continued existence of such an outlaw state, one which retained nuclear ambitions and which had vast and still unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons-making materials.
The grounds that visibly existed were grounds enough. (For if it was known that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, what were the UN weapons inspectors doing there?) But it was morally and politically inexcusable to use the dark arts of the spin doctor to compile more compelling evidence to justify war.
The electorate who pay for the war, and the soldiers who might die in it, deserve the sober truth, untouched by the velvet glove of the political magician. If the sober truth is not good enough to win the argument - and on this occasion, I emphatically believe it was - then it is not acceptable to argue (as Tony Blair has been doing) that somehow or other history will forgive them their errors.
They were not errors. They were concocted falsehoods, which entered the media and remained there, the way that falsehoods invariably do in the ceaseless spin and mixed metaphors of Blairite politics. You cannot take your country to war on weasel words and varnished truths and emerge smelling of roses, for sooner or later your chickens will come home to roost. And that's them in the offing, right now.