Abu Ghraib: the BBC's idee fixee.

Watching Newsnight on the Tuesday night presented me with an interesting comment from Dr James Schlesinger, Abu Graib enquiry chairman. In response to a leading question from a whining Kirsty Wark suggesting that senior figures should lose their jobs over the prison scandal, he said

'I think that is probably an expectation of the BBC, it is not our expectation.'

Could there be a better indictment of the BBC than to say they are utterly predictable? At any rate it would seem the BBC were proud of that exchange, because the transcript of that particular interview was readily available at the Newsnight Site.

From analysis of that I could confirm my feeling that out of eight questions asked, six directly attempted to elicit a response calling into question the future of senior officials, one insinuated that Schlesinger was being diplomatic in not doing so, and the other could be described as functional, if pushy. The interview was useless except to satisfy the BBC appetite for accusing the Bush administration.

To me as a viewer, the only interesting things were those that Schlesinger took care to emphasise of his own accord- such as to make a radical distinction between the day and the night shifts at Abu Ghraib. I have heard so much stemming from the BBC's obsession with responsibility lying at senior levels that it is superfluous to add to it- which they continue to do in this article at BBConline.

Admittedly the further reporting relates to the release of another report, by General Fay, but the idee fixee is unmistakably pursued, with the BBC enlisting Democratic support: ' '"Harry Truman had that sign on the desk and it said, 'The buck stops here,'" Mr Kerry said. ' (fatuously, groping and failing to find his gravit- ass once more).

The American Thinker provides a neat summary from which a clear inference is possible that the BBC in its coverage of this (as it is on many world issues) has become an echo chamber for Democratic rhetoric.