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 BBC Names Adviser as Its Source |
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
BBC Names Adviser as Its Source
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 21, 2003; Page A14
LONDON, July 20 -- The BBC today disclosed that a government scientist who apparently committed suicide last week was the source for its controversial report claiming that Prime Minister Tony Blair's office had exaggerated claims about Iraq's access to weapons of mass destruction.
In a statement, the broadcaster named David Kelly, 59, a senior scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defense who was found dead Friday with his wrist slashed near his home in central England. Richard Sambrook, the BBC's director of news, said the corporation was "profoundly sorry" for Kelly's death but believed it had correctly interpreted and reported the information he had provided.
Speaking to reporters during a trip to Asia, Blair said: "I am pleased that the BBC has made this announcement. Whatever the differences, no one wanted this tragedy to happen." He pleaded for politicians and journalists to show "respect and restraint, no recrimination," during an independent judicial inquiry into the circumstances of Kelly's death. Blair also pledged to cooperate with the probe.
Today's disclosure was the latest development in a bitter dispute between the government and the BBC over accusations that officials "sexed up" an intelligence dossier on weapons of mass destruction to persuade a reluctant public and House of Commons to support the U.S.-led military action against Iraq. Blair and his aides have heatedly denied the allegations, which were first made in a BBC radio report on May 29, and which parallel similar allegations in the United States against the Bush administration.
Blair's government launched an aggressive campaign to discover the confidential source and to compel the BBC to retract its story. Kelly eventually came forward to tell Ministry of Defense officials that he had met with BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan a week before the report appeared, Kelly later testified. Officials then provided clues to Kelly's identity to the press. After his name appeared, he was obliged to testify at a grueling session of a House of Commons committee.
Friends and family have said that Kelly felt betrayed by the ministry and humiliated by the way he was treated by the committee. "Events made David's life intolerable," his family said in a statement Saturday.
Kelly told the committee he had spoken to Gilligan, but said he did not believe he was the main source for the BBC report, or for a follow-up article in the Mail on Sunday. That article said the source had accused Alastair Campbell, Blair's top aide, of insisting the intelligence dossier, which was published last September, include a dubious claim that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes.
"I don't see how [Gilligan] could make the authoritative statement [he] was making from the comments I made," Kelly told the panel. But in comments made to journalist Tom Mangold, a friend, Kelly said he believed he was the source for about 60 percent of Gilligan's report.
The BBC statement raised several possibilities: that Kelly lied to the committee about what he told Gilligan; that Gilligan hyped or otherwise distorted what Kelly had said; or that Gilligan had another source for the specific allegations against Campbell.
In a statement today, Gilligan said that "I want to make it clear that I did not misquote or misrepresent Dr. David Kelly."
The representative of Kelly's home district in Parliament, Robert Jackson, laid the blame for his death on the BBC and called for senior officials in the state-funded corporation, as well as Gilligan, to resign because of the "very damaging story."
Others defended the BBC and said the blame rested squarely with Blair's government. Some members of Blair's governing Labor Party even called for him to step down.
Blair dismissed those calls, but did not rule out resignations by others in his government, including Campbell, his director of communications.
?2003 The Washington Post Company
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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