While Democratic Party politicians are ratcheting up the accusations against the Bush administration for allegedly misleading the American people in the run-up to the Battle of Iraq, a remarkable drama has been unfolding in Britain. The BBC has been under investigation for biased and faulty reporting in the run-up to the war, when it accused Prime Minister Blair’s government of “sexing up” intelligence to build support for an invasion of Iraq. And yesterday, a member of the House of Lords, a senior judge, handed in an exhaustive report, running to nearly 750 pages, that vindicated Mr. Blair and his government of charges that they tried to deceive the public. It also scored the BBC for shoddy and “defective” journalism. By the end of the day, the chairman of the broadcasting agency’s board of governors, Gavyn Davies, had resigned in disgrace.

The investigation had been launched after the suicide of one of the BBC’s news sources, Dr. David Kelly, whose doubts about certain intelligence questions the BBC essentially distorted and blew out of proportion. The judge, Lord Hutton, cleared Mr. Blair and his officials of wrongdoing in connection with the death and sharply criticized the British Broadcasting Corporation for its reporting. As the Associated Press reports, “Lord Hutton said he was not authorized to rule on the justification for war, but said the BBC was wrong to report officials knowingly put misleading claims in a September 2002 dossier summing up intelligence for the public.”

Not only did Lord Hutton call the charge “unfounded” but he scored the British Broadcasting Corporation’s top brass for failing to scrutinize the story properly. It would be hard to overstate how humiliating such a judgment must be for an agency like the BBC, which until recent years had enjoyed an extraordinary reputation for judgment and probity. Reports racing across the Internet indicated that the broadcasting agency’s staff of journalists were stunned by the rebuke.

For his part, Mr. Blair took an exceptionally statesmanlike position. He called the argument about the wisdom of the battle of Iraq “entirely legitimate,”adding in the Commons: “It is absolutely right that people can question whether the intelligence received was right and why we have not yet found weapons of mass destruction.” But, he said, “all of this is of a completely different order from a charge of deception, of duplicity, of deceit.” He called the “allegation that I or anyone else…lied to this house or deliberately misled the country by falsifying intelligence on weapons of mass destruction is itself the real lie.” Thos. Leonard of The Daily Telegraph called it all “the blackest day” in the BBC’s 80-year history, the “most damning of judgments on the corporation.”

The parallels between what is happening in Britain and America are not direct. There is no institution in American life that is comparable to the BBC, though our “public” television and radio channels are backed to a degree by the government. The BBC is much more directly tied to the authority of the state. But one thing that is similar is the scramble of people to question the honesty of the government’s presentation of intelligence on Iraq. It would probably be too much to hope that what is happening in Britain could give pause to those accusing President Bush of lies and deliberately misleading the American people.