IRAQ NEWS, SUNDAY, JANUARY 18, 2004
I. BBC CRITIQUES BBC, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, JAN 18
On Wed, Jan 14, Ron Suskind and Paul O'Neill were interviewed on NPR's
"Fresh Air." Suskind was asked about the document entitled, "Foreign
Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," prominently featured on "60 Minutes"
last week.
Suskind replied that 1) it was "60 Minutes," rather than he, that had
come up with the notion that it was a Defense Dep't document; 2) it was a
Commerce Dep't document; and 3) the document was identified as such in his
book
But that is not true. "The Price of Loyalty," p. 96, states:
"Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency,
Rumsfeld's intelligence arm, mapping Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas
and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging precious
assets.
"One document, headed 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,'
listed companies from thirty countries -- including France, Germany, Russia
and the United Kingdom -- their specialties, bidding histories, and in some
cases their particular areas of interest. . . ."
As the Sunday Telegraph reports, the BBC's Panorama is correcting one
aspect of the BBC's Iraq War coverage, regarding the claim of reporter
Andrew Gilligan that the British government had forced the intelligence
services, over their objections, to insert false information into a major
report about Iraq's weapons, a claim that he attributed to weapons expert
David Kelly. Gilligan was later to acknowledge, after Kelly's death, that he
had misrepresented what Kelly had said.
I. BBC CRITIQUES BBC
Sunday Telegraph
Panorama condemns BBC's own conduct in Kelly affair
January 18, 2004
By Alasdair Palmer
Panorama, the BBC's flagship current affairs programme, will this week
broadcast a special peak-time programme deeply critical of the way the
corporation handled its coverage of the events that led to the Hutton
inquiry.
The programme has caused intense divisions within the BBC as it will be
hard-hitting in its scrutiny of some of its own journalists and will also
clear the Government of dishonesty in its handling of intelligence material.
The timing of the broadcast, exactly one week before Lord Hutton makes his
long-awaited report into the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly,
the weapons expert, is also controversial.
The programme, A Fight to the Death, is expected to be particularly critical
of Andrew Gilligan, the BBC's Today programme journalist who reported
alleged concern in the intelligence services about the Government's first
dossier about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It also criticises the
corporation for standing by Gilligan before conducting an adequate
investigation to establish the facts.
Greg Dyke, the director-general of the BBC, has said privately that he will
not see the programme until it is broadcast and he will not intervene before
it is shown. The programme has led to tensions within the BBC, particularly
between current affairs staff, who made the programme, and news journalists,
who are often rivals.
Panorama will be presented by John Ware, one of the BBC's most experienced
reporters, and will last for one and a half hours. Unusually for a current
affairs programme, it will be transmitted at peak time at 8.30pm on
Wednesday. The programme's makers emphasise that they are not seeking to
pre-empt Lord Hutton's report.
The documentary is believed to contradict the position on the controversy
taken by Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC's board of governors, and
other senior BBC executives. They have said that the story - which initiated
the row with the Government over the preparation of the intelligence dossier
on Iraq and that led to the death of Mr Kelly - was substantially correct.
Panorama will examine the central allegation of the report broadcast at
6.07am on May 29 last year by Gilligan, the defence correspondent, on the
Today programme: that the Government "probably knew the 45-minute warning
[that Iraqi technicians could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45
minutes of being given the order to do so] was wrong".
Gilligan reported that the claim was nevertheless dishonestly put into the
dossier by the Government over the objections of the intelligence services.
Although the BBC has admitted that Gilligan's report was "flawed", it has
continued to maintain that his subsequent broadcasts on the same day and
thereafter - some of which continued to amount to an allegation of
dishonesty in the drawing up of the dossier - were largely correct.
The programme will be welcomed by Tony Blair because it clears the
Government of dishonesty. It says that no evidence was produced at the
Hutton Inquiry to show that Alastair Campbell, then the Prme Minister's
communications chief, or anyone at No 10, ordered anything to be inserted
into the dossier.
Rather, it asserts that any "sexing up" of the dossier was done because the
intelligence services too readily agreed to some of No 10's suggestions.
The documentary will be critical of the BBC's decision to stand behind
Gilligan's report without fully investigating how well-founded his original
claim was and the inconsistencies in his broadcasts.
Moreover, had BBC managers looked at the reporter's original notes of his
meeting with Dr Kelly, they would have discovered that these did not record
Dr Kelly as saying the words Gilligan attributed to him.
No one asked to see his notes, however, and so the BBC only discovered that
what came to be the central plank of its defence - that Mr Gilligan was
"only faithfully reporting the words that his source had told him" - was
unsupported when the reporter gave evidence to the Hutton Inquiry.
He was then forced to admit that "I do regard those words as imperfect and I
should not have said them".
The role of the Prime Minister is understood to feature prominently in the
programme, which examines Tony Blair's role in how Dr Kelly came to be named
and thus exposed to a furious political storm.
