Introduction

This blog is the best of what's left of the Pear Shaped Iraq Inquiry Inquiry ... A while ago I took down the old pages because they were difficult to maintain.  Also since Youtube lost the animations (It took the Intervention of the UK Data Commissioner to recover them) rebuilding the pages would take some effort.  And... well... it seemed like ancient history.  Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell are all pushing up the daisies these days ...so what's the point?  And then the Queen knighted Tony Blair so I thought I'd bring it back again - if only to give the Youtube animations the context they have lost since the original pages have gone...

So here we go again...

The Chilcot Inquiry started in 2009 and The Pear Shaped Iraq Inquiry Inquiry started as something to do in about 2010 ...a one off article to comment on it.  As I didn't have the rights to TV footage I used some software and scripting skills to animate the inquiry transcripts in a new voice to speech service called Xtranormal which subsequently went bust...  

Originally the animations were placed actually in the transcripts to show where they had been taken from in an attempt to counter claims that they were decontextualized.  This is no longer an issue since the report of the Inquiry in 2016 so I here present a paired down version ... if you want to trail through all the original and sometimes heavily redacted transcripts they're all on the government website...

For historical reference this is not a review of the actual inquiry - it was a review of the Inquiry transcripts in the period between the launch of the Inquiry in 2009 and the publication in 2016.  The main problem in coming to any understanding from the Inquiry is the sheer volume of material.  The transcripts are long and, taken in their original form, extremely dull.... often running to hundreds and hundreds of pages.  

Even an extremely extremely abridged transcript would be enormous to behold.  

Added to this its terms of reference of the Inquiry were extremely wide meaning that information on pre-war build-up and post-war operations are confused and overlapping and testimony is not always chronological meaning the casual reader has a hard time understanding it.   

Many of the witness tell slightly similar versions of the same stories and there is much repetition of evidence so the idea was made more difficult by these factors.  

A cynic might say that this is, of course, how the Inquiry was supposed to be experienced.