Originally Posted by
DESPERADO
I am surprised by the slightly pompous attitude of some of the posters. It is a little arrogant to suggest that just because there was an investigation BAE must be guilty of something. <snip>
All that said, it was the correct decision to drop the SFO inquiry for the UK as a whole.
Well, we'll never know 'if BAe was guilty of something' because the investigation did not reach a natural conclusion. So, all of the countries that we preach to about how they should be more like us, and how corruption should be stamped-out, and how the government should be accountable to its people etc. can all now turn around and tell us that we have one rule for them, and one for ourselves.
I am certainly pragmatic - the very fact that we have to sell arms to Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, despite our pretend stance on the importance of human rights, requires a degree of pragmatism if you don’t want to be utterly exasperated with this country’s duplicity - but I also think that when we're being watched by every pair of eyes to see whether we practise what we preach, we should take it on the chin and then move on.
Moreover, I don't like the idea that we have given a country that threatened to stop sharing information on Al Quaeda with us if we carried on investigating what it wants. How many countries would the US allow to get away with that? None – they’d have added them to the axis of evil list and told them they were screwed. We give-in, and do a good job of looking like the poodle that so many portray us as sniffing around dog $hit looking for whatever morsel of food we can get.
I actually share your sentiments about the welfare of the men and women employed by BAe, but I don't do so at the expense of allowing a company to break the law simply because it could 'make lots of money and allow it to retain its work force'.
I am not baying for anyone's blood, but i'd have liked to have been able to turn around to detractors of this country - and there are many who see us as hypocrites - and told them that we had done the right thing in investigating it, and found nothing to warrant further action (or, conversely, that the individuals concerned had been called to account). I don't care whether they’d have believed me; so long as I believed it myself, that would be all that mattered.