BBC under fire over dossier claims
The battle to avoid damage to the BBC’s reputation appeared to take a turn for the worse last night after rumours spread that MPs on the Foreign Affairs Committee will clear spin-master Alastair Campbell of “sexing up” the so-called “dodgy dossier” on Iraq’s capacity for weapons of mass destruction.
The report by the influential select committee will be released on Monday, with MPs having a final day of deliberation on Friday.
Should the committee conclude that Mr Campbell did not tamper with the dossier’s contents, and crucially did not add the 45-minute clause on Saddam’s lethal weapons capacity, which mysteriously found its way into the work, the BBC may have to make a public apology to Tony Blair’s director of communications and, indeed, Downing Street itself.
The BBC’s defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan claimed Downing Street pressed the British intelligence services to include unsubstantiated reports about Iraq’s capacity for WMDs “within 45 minutes.” BBC heads backed by the story.
But in a Mail on Sunday story, Mr Gilligan alleged Mr Campbell personally ordered the clause to be inserted. The BBC has distanced itself from this “freelance” work.
The BBC, for its part, said it would launch an internal inquiry into the handling of the story. It will also probe whether the Government had sufficient opportunity to respond before the report’s broadcast.
It will also reassess whether Mr Campbell’s was the spur to “sexing up” up the dossier.
According to reports, the committee is expected to both chastise the Government for plagiarising material in the “dodgy dossier” from a student’s PhD thesis and question what is claimed to be a “culture of arrogance and cynicism in the BBC.”
Michael Ancram, Shadow Foreign Secretary, told the Commons yesterday that Mr Blair had “duped” MPs over the February dossier.
“Far from being an intelligence service or even a Joint Intelligence Committee production, its authors were the ubiquitous Alastair Campbell and his small band of acolytes,” he said.
A copy of a leaked letter written by Mr Campbell, published in today’s Guardian, suggests he offered questions and alterations to the dossier, six of which were adopted.
In the letter, Tony Blair’s top aide insisted the reference to weapons being deployed “within 45 minutes” was present in the first draft sent to him on September 10th.
Regardless of the brouhaha over the government dossiers, weapons of the mass destruction have yet to be discovered in Iraq.
