I happened to visit Andrew Sullivan's site again today, because I'd heard he was turning on the Church of Rome. And he is. And that amuses me. Maybe next he'll turn on the Republicans. But that's neither here nor there. I noticed a teeny bit of commentary about the Kelly Affair in the UK, and it's the funniest darned thing. Sullivan has a positive loathing for the BBC, and attacks it every chance he gets. (Along with Paul Krugman.) Naturally, he's convinced that Lord Hutton's inquiry will be a huge black eye for the BBC. He links to this story from the Guardian on Andrew Gilligan's grilling by the Commons foreign affairs committee, just before Dr Kelly's suicide. The Guardian has seen transcripts; I love the way UK papers lace their stories with phrases like 'the Observer can reveal' and 'the Guardian has learned'. It's charming. Anyhow, members of the committee accused Gilligan of bald-faced distortion, of changing his story on his source's (Kelly's) fingering of Alastair Campbell as the source for a specific (false) claim in an intelligence dossier. The committee was accusing Gilligan of having cut this from whole cloth, of having put these words into his source's mouth. Sullivan's summation: 'Hard to get more damning than that.'
Now, the punchline! The esteemed Mr Sullivan didn't read past the first two paragraphs, which report only what the committee members claimed, not what Gilligan actually said. The rest of the story asserts completely the opposite: 'The transcripts reveal Mr Gilligan holding his ground that Mr Campbell was responsible for transforming the dossier in the final weeks prior to publication.'
Andrew Sullivan is no more a journalist than I am a bag of crisps.
I certainly don't know exactly what Dr Kelly said to Mr Gilligan. I'm inclined to think, however, that it was, for the most part, just as Mr Gilligan claims. Newsnight's Susan Watts also broke a very similar story about the Government's diddling of intelligence, also based on information from Dr Kelly, also casting doubt on the '45 minutes' claim, though not attributing it specifically to Campbell. Furthermore, Ms Watts recorded one of their conversations. Moreover, and so forth, it appears that Gilligan discussed with Dr Kelly which quotes from their conversation he could and could not use, prior to his report. The BBC has his notes, which are, with the recording and all the other records kept, a formidable body of documentary evidence. If the notes did not bear out Gilligan's claims, the BBC would be utterly sunk, and a lot of resignations would be in order, given that the top brass have all come out in Gilligan's defence. If the BBC is willing to stick to its guns, it probably has a solid case, and the inquiry will show it.
Vote Liberal Democrat, dammit.
Posted by aloysius at August 03, 2003 02:10 PM | TrackBack |