Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 11:4 (2012) ► pp.543–561

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Missing the logic of the text

Lord Butler’s report on intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction

 | University of Reading
Published online: 25 January 2013
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.11.4.04bou
This article focuses on the final report of Lord Butler’s review of British intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD), specifically on its treatment of the accuracy of the use of intelligence on Iraqi WMD in a government dossier published in September 2002 ahead of the 2003 Iraq war. In the report, the demonstration of the accuracy of the “September Dossier” hinges on the insertion of tables that compare side-by-side quotations from this document and from intelligence assessments. The analysis of the textual and visual methods by which the report is written reveals how the logic of the comparative tables is missed in the Butler report: the logic of these tables requires that the comparison between quotations from the two documents should be performed at the level of their details but the Butler report performs its comparison only at a broad and general level.
References (11)
References
Cabinet Office. 2002. Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Assessment of the British Government. London: The Stationery Office (24 September 2002). Accessed September 24, 2012. http://www.archive2.official-documents.co.uk/document/reps/iraq/cover.htm .Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coole, Diana. 2005. “Agency, Truth and Meaning: Judging the Hutton Report.” British Journal of Political Science 351: 465—485. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coulter, Jeff. 1991. “Logic.” In Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences, ed. by Graham Button, 20—50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fornel, Michel de, and Louis Quéré (eds). 1999. La logique des situations. Nouveaux regards sur l’écologie des activités socials. Paris: Eds. de l’EHESS. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold. 1984. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Livingston, Eric. 1995. An Anthropology of Reading. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. Ethnographies of Reason. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lord Butler. 2004. Review of the British Intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. London: The Stationery Office.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McHoul, Alec. 1982. Telling How Texts Talk. Essays on Reading and Ethnomethodology. London: Routeledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morrison, Kenneth. 1981. “Some Properties of ‘Telling Order Designs’ in Didactic Inquiry.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 111: 245—262. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ryle, Gilbert. 1964. “Ordinary Language.” In Ordinary Language. Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. by V. C. Chappell, 24—40. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Mair, Michael, Chris Elsey, Paul V. Smith & Patrick G. Watson
2016. The Violence You Were/n’t Meant to See: Representations of Death in an Age of Digital Reproduction. In The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and War, ► pp. 425 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue