John Scarlett who presided over the misleading of the country over Saddam’s

John Scarlett, who presided over the misleading of the country over Saddam’s weapons, has been promoted to head of MI6. But both the Daily Mirror and the BBC enforced the principle of accountability for mistakes.The contrast with the behaviour of the two governments that led the illegal and unjustified invasion of Iraq is stark. Two of them, Piers Morgan and Greg Dyke, were sacked; they did not voluntarily accept responsibility. On that occasion, too, the media organisation bore some responsibility for the distraction from the substance, namely the intelligence failure over Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes.What is striking, however, is that the editor of the Daily Mirror and the chairman and director-general of the BBC all lost their jobs. The question of whether or not the Daily Mirror’s photographs were fakes distracted attention from documented cases of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. The short-lived defence of Piers Morgan, the newspaper’s editor, that “the pictures accurately illustrated the reality”, was deplorable.

Not simply because readers are entitled to know that pictures are what they purport to be, but because it allowed the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment and the Government to evade responsibility for real torture.
The regiment and the British armed forces as a whole have trumpeted their “vindication” and will no doubt use the Daily Mirror’s embarrassment to deflect criticism of acknowledged misconduct. But Mr Morgan has ensured that the impression that will be left with much of the British public is of soldiers traduced.It is all too reminiscent of the way the debate over the reasons why Britain went to war in Iraq was diverted into a huge row with the BBC over the wording of a correspondent’s reports on the BBC’s Today programme. This is a war of images, in which Downing Street hopes to obtain some succour from its victory over the Daily Mirror, while the White House pronounces that what happened to Nick Berg is far worse than anything in Abu Ghraib. If more evidence emerges of transgressions by British or American servicemen or women, will we need to see the pictures before we believe it?. Several soldiers will be charged in the next few days with crimes, including those related to the death in custody of Baha Mousa, the Iraqi hotel receptionist, first reported in our pages in January. Now Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who broke the scandal open, is reporting in the forthcoming issue of The New Yorker that it is rooted in a decision approved last year by Mr Rumsfeld to expand a secret operation against al-Qa’ida to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.

Another week of distractions and resignations. The result was that secret operatives, some with aliases, worked side by side with the military police now in the limelight, and imbued them with their uncompromising methods.Even Mr Hersh’s original revelations might not have achieved such an impact if The New Yorker had not obtained photographs of Ms England and her friends and put them on its website. A torrent of detail has emerged about torture and “stress techniques” used on suspects during interrogation at secret CIA facilities around the world. These practices were endorsed while Major General Geoffrey Miller was running the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay; he is now in charge of prisons in Iraq.