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| Sunday, 29 June 2003 |
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Blair supporters slug it out with the BBC over Iraq arms dossier (AFP) The furore over the way Prime Minister Tony Blair led Britain into war in Iraq has turned into a very public wrestling match between the prime minister's office and the BBC, with each side calling the other's credibility into question. The row erupted on Wednesday when Alastair Campbell, the government director of communications, said BBC's claims that Blair's office had embellished intelligence to beef up the case for war on Iraq were a lie and demanded an apology. Campbell, a key Blair aide, kept up the pressure Thursday in a letter to the BBC asking if it stood by its report and demanding a reply by day's end. He got one, from BBC director of news Richard Sambrook who accused Downing Street of exerting "an unprecedented level of pressure" on the world's biggest and best-known public broadcaster. "The BBC will respond properly to these matters," Sambrook said, "but not to a deadline dictated by Mr Campbell." The argument centers on a BBC report in late May, in which an unidentified source said that Blair's inner circle "sexed up" a September 24 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to hype up the case for war on Baghdad. London and Washington used Iraq's alleged weapons program as a main justification for launching a war against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in March. On Friday, in his second appearance before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee this week, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw held firm to the government's position. "Nobody sexed up, exaggerated, that September dossier," Straw said. "No one at all - and that includes Mr Campbell." The latest salvo came late Friday, with the BBC accusing Campbell of conducting a personal "vendetta" against its defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan. At issue is a one-sentence claim in the 50-page dossier, which was compiled by British intelligence and mostly rehashed what was already known about Iraq's pursuit of chemical, biologial and nuclear arms. That sentence read: "Intelligence indicates that the Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within forty five minutes of an order to do so." On May 29, BBC radio's Today program quoted an unidentified source as suggesting that the line was inserted under pressure from the prime minister's office. "That information was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn't reliable," the source was quoted as saying. "Most things in the dossier were double-source, but that was single source - and we believe that the source was wrong," said the source, according to BBC Online's account of the report. "Most people in intelligence" were unhappy about the changes, as they "didn't reflect the considered view they were putting forward", though the official added he personally was convinced that Iraq did have a program to produce weapons of mass destruction. Gilligan testified before the Commons committee last week that his source was credible. Sambrook backed his correspondent, saying in a statement "we have to believe that you (Campbell) are conducting a personal vendetta against a particyularar journalist whose reports on a number of occasions have caused you discomfort." The government's case has not been helped by the fact that a second dossier, in February, on Iraq's efforts to hide its weapons programs from UN inspectors, turned out to have been wholly lifted from a US postgraduate student's thesis. Campbell admitted Wednesday that it had been a mistake not to have given the material due credit. |
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