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August 26, 2003 BBC BASHING UPDATE....Instapundit happily quotes the Guardian today, which suggests that today's testimony in the Hutton inquiry shows that BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan was full of shit:
Now think what you will about Gilligan and the BBC, but this is just plain wrong. Here's what Gilligan said on BBC radio on May 29:
And here's what he said in his Mail on Sunday column a couple of days later:
How much clearer can things be? Gilligan never suggested the claim was "made up," and he specifically acknowledged that it came from British intelligence. And despite the fact that Scarlett is swearing up and down that nobody — nobody! — raised any objections to the material in the dossier, we already know that's not true. The Hutton inquiry found out on its very first day that two senior intelligence officers had grave doubts about some of the material in the dossier. What's more, the 45-minute claim was single sourced, it was added at the last minute, and it turned out to be completely wrong. Crikey. Posted by Kevin Drum at August 26, 2003 10:59 AM | TrackBackComments
I have come to the realization that the Right just makes shit up to piss off the Left, because the Left is trying to be honest and the Right is full of it. That is why there is cottage industry of books about the Right and their lies. Can there be a decent, truthful Right? Posted by: Bill Nazzaro at August 26, 2003 11:14 AM | PERMALINKJust checking, Kevin . . . The email stated that "forward deployed storage sites of chemical and
biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing
within 45 minutes" Kevin, like you, i've been waiting for the completion of the Hutton inquiry to draw any conclusions, so i'm not yet sufficiently familiar with the facts on the ground to know whether j mann is right or wrong. but i am completely familiar with the facts on the ground as they related to professor instanitwit: he is dishonest, thinskinned, and a complete waste of precious time. Even debunking the good prof is hardly worth the effort, since he just keeps doing it again and again and again.... Posted by: howard at August 26, 2003 11:20 AM | PERMALINKJ Mann- Ah, if only ABC (or at least CNN) was more like the BBC. Posted by: Bragan at August 26, 2003 11:36 AM | PERMALINK::sigh:: J Mann: oh yes, there's irony aplenty in this story. Does it matter if something is actually true (uranium, WMD missiles)? Or does it only matter that you have good reason to believe it to be true? I don't know if Kelly was right, of course, since the actual intelligence evidence hasn't been produced (and never will, I'm sure). But the stuff you're quoting doesn't make the case one way or the other. It simply indicates that someone believed the 45-minute story. That someone might very well be the person who made the misinterpretation that Kelly was talking about. One thing we do know, however: the claim *was* single sourced and it was added at the last minute. Everybody agrees with that. Posted by: Kevin Drum at August 26, 2003 11:40 AM | PERMALINKCongratulations, you've proven for the umpteenth time that Glenn Reynolds is a hack. Frankly, anyone who still finds Reynolds credible is so far off in to reality denial mode that they are impervious to fact and logic. Posted by: Hackmaster2000 at August 26, 2003 11:44 AM | PERMALINKKevin, I don't have a problem with your statement as long as you make
the following addition: Does it matter if something is actually true
(uranium, WMD missiles, Gilligan's accusations against Campbell and 10
Downing)? Or does it only matter that you have good reason to believe it
to be true? Kevin's been very evenhanded in his coverage of htis issue and highly critical of Gilligan, and somewhat critical of the BBC. I think those of us on the left are quite willing to see that there were some problems with Gilligan's reporting and behavior, but they seem rather dwarfed in scope and consequence by the behavior of the blair government. Posted by: Atrios at August 26, 2003 11:50 AM | PERMALINKLet's not forget, everyone, sexed-up or not, the claim was wrong. Entirely, completely, wrong. The Anglo-American allies have found neither chemical or biological agents, or chemical munitions. Blair's intelligence services are, like Blair, like the White House, either malignant or incompetent. Neither prospect is comforting. Whenever Condi Rice insists to Russert that the Administration had good reason to act on an imminent Iraqi threat, the follow-up is, "Do you now wonder why you were so hideously mistaken, given that there has been no postwar discovery of the slightest chemical or biological danger?" Let's not miss this elephant in the room, okay? Posted by: Brian C.B. at August 26, 2003 11:51 AM | PERMALINKThe point is 150 thousand American troops have been in Iraq since March 20, we have captured most of the "deck of cards," but we have found no WMDs. Story after story of WMDs proved wrong. Tony Blair's Government either had the worst intelligence possible, as did we, or the British and American poeple were not told the truth about why we had to go to war on March 20. Well, there are now tragically some 320 American and British soldier fatalities since March 20. For what? What the hell were we fighting for? Posted by: Ari at August 26, 2003 11:51 AM | PERMALINK"Let's not forget, everyone, sexed-up or not, the claim was wrong. Entirely, completely, wrong." Perfectly stated! Posted by: Jenn at August 26, 2003 11:53 AM | PERMALINKFunny how thinly the wingnuts are willing to slice the baloney when no one's getting a blowjob... Posted by: dave at August 26, 2003 12:06 PM | PERMALINKOk, I know I need to quit, but it seems to me that there's a spider-fly problem. Another difference is that Gilligan made clear in his story that is was "a source within..." stating his info was from a single source. The Blair Administration merely stated it as if it were fact -- shedding no light on its crediblity by alerting people that it was from a single source. That's a damn big difference if you ask me. However, I doubt that will change your mind. It's clear that ideology trumps logic....even with the Hutton enquiry's reams of primary source documents available on the web. Posted by: kija at August 26, 2003 12:36 PM | PERMALINKHere's the thing: in the 6.07am trailer to the report, Gilligan was a bit loose in his choice of words, implying in an unscripted one-minute piece that the claim was 'wrong' rather than 'questionable'. He clarified that in all his subsequent reports, which amounted on that day alone to around a dozen head-to-heads. His editors also immediately criticised his 'loose use of language and lack of judgment in some of his phraseology.' So, InstaMuppet is blowing that claim out of proportion, while the Graun is engaging in slightly Gilliganesque misrepresentation of the main Today report. What makes Reynolds look like a fool, though, is that while the quotation is technically correct -- that is, Gilligan's first one-minute piece was sloppy -- InstaHack takes 'original' to mean the entire piece of reporting, rather than an unscripted head-to-head broadcast in the early hours of the morning. Which is utterly factually inaccurate. Reynolds is a hack. He's also not a reader. Posted by: nick sweeney at August 26, 2003 12:38 PM | PERMALINKWith a name like Gilligan, can it be? One man is an Island? Posted by: California Carol at August 26, 2003 12:39 PM | PERMALINKYou're right, J Mann. Bad reporting is bad reporting. My point is that the question of bad reporting is obcuring a much more troubling one: why was British and American intelligence so horribly wrong? Don't forget, George W. Bush has made preventive war national policy. That suggests that a whole round of states are newly-eligible for eradication based on sorry fact-gathering, or listening closely to discredited sources. When Scarlett says of the 45-minute munitions deployment claim, "it was based on a credible source," shouldn't one respond, "That's self-evidently untrue, isn't it?" The inquiries are not mutually exclusive, but I think that one is going on without the other, to the detriment of the world order. Posted by: Brian C.B. at August 26, 2003 12:43 PM | PERMALINKDo you see any irony at all in the fact that Gilligan relied on a single source to make an accusation that turned out to be wrong? No, the irony is that the Blair government's lies would have never been investigated to this extent had Campbell tried to jujitsu Gilligan's story into a BBC witchhunt. Otherwise, it would have rolled off the duck's back like everything else in this tragicomedy. Perhaps we need a bit more "single-sourced" personal fingerpointing on this side of the pond. If that's what it takes to get the ball rolling, maybe we need more personal on this side of the pond. Posted by: Sven at August 26, 2003 12:48 PM | PERMALINKWhat matters is that news report after report shows Americans and British were lied to about WMDs as a reason for going to war. Remember, Tony Blair used a doctoral dissertation that a California student published on the internet as part of the rationale for declaring WMDs at the ready in Iraq. If this is intelligence, we are in big big trouble. Tony Blair is a disgrace. Posted by: Jenn at August 26, 2003 01:09 PM | PERMALINKOn a semi-related topic, I just received a response from Dr Justin Lewis re that study purporting to show that the BBC had no anti-war bias. As the material he kindly sent me hasn't yet been published I won't be excerpting any of it, but it does seem to be quite compelling. Back to the topic, I've found the Independent's coverage of the Hutton inquiry to be the best around, but YMMV. Posted by: Anarch at August 26, 2003 01:19 PM | PERMALINKBrian and Sven - I absolutely agree. I think the British inquiry is
great, and is a credible example of how the US might be able to do a
similar inquiry without compromising security or creating a partisan
witchhunt. j mann, i hadn't really intended to pursue this further because i think you've been making some generally sensible points, but since you bring up the '91 scenario, for the record: what we discovered was that saddam's production facilities were further along than we had imagined. While nothing to sneeze at, the production facilities didn't mean much without uranium, which, of course, is why the bush administration went to such great lengths to portray "uranium shopping." P.S. Or, to put it another way, you and i and 3 MIT grad students could build a nuclear bomb (and you and i would be the ones getting pizza and taking out the trash) - if we had the uranium. Production facilities are the easier of the two things necessary for a nuclear bomb to acquire (which is why the recent reports about iran and weapons grade materials are far more frightening than anything that was surfaced about iraq). Posted by: howard at August 26, 2003 02:20 PM | PERMALINK"Back in 91, we found out that we severely *underestimated* the imminence of the risk Saddam presented." Realistically, if Saddam had invaded Syria instead of Kuwait in 1991, we wouldn't have cared a bit. We probably would have supported him, like we did when he attacked Iran. The imminence of risk you speak of really applies only to the prospect of his invading a rich, neighboring oil-producing state with tight connections to the US president. Posted by: Jon H at August 26, 2003 02:23 PM | PERMALINKIt seems the Guardian has now changed their story from stating that "the claim was known to be made up" to "the claim was known to be wrong." Either that or Glenn Reynolds quoted it incorrectly. Anyway, what's most interesting to me is how the Gilligan reporting is an example of how the press works in general. Newspapers and TV news are filled with errors every day, some big and some small. It really would be hard for it to be otherwise, given deadline pressure, lack of resources, etc. However, reporters are welcome to make gigantic, catastrophic errors -- eg, Judith Miller's reporting on Iraq over the past year for the NY Times -- as long as they're erroneously saying things the government likes. However, if reporters like Gilligan make comparatively tiny errors while saying things the government DOESN'T like, it's a huge scandal and proves the media is liberal, anti-war, etc. -- even when the gist of the story is correct. This is a large part of why hack reporters thrive, and good ones are driven out of the business. Posted by: Jon at August 26, 2003 03:10 PM | PERMALINKThe Guardian is of course Britain's leading upscale left-wing paper.
I'm not blaming Instacretin for citing it, even if their claim is false.
And this is a huge false claim: it's the center of the BBC-Blair war. I
just read the Guardian article, and it's got other thin claims about
key gov't players being justified (Campbell, Scarlett). The Guardian has
biased hawks that I know: not these authors. Unique among major world
papers, says Palast, The Guardian is funded by a trust whose purpose is
to publish The Guardian. So it's got no Black or Murdoch to enforce a
line. My feeling: I've been following the Guardian's recent flood of
articles on the Hutton Inquiry, and they now seem schizophrenic. You
sense a real urge to cover the wagons and protect the UK's
longest-serving Labour PM in history. I think we might do the same for
Clinton. A few things have troubled me, but this (speficic falsehood,
not slant) is the worst. We can email them, but I'd hope they're getting
many from UK readers. The main point in all this is of course, that they didn't have any recent intelligence (or, more specifically, recent intelligence on the existance of weapons, they had plenty of recent intelligence about no proof of weapons). So they extrapolated, embellished, "sexed-up". The Guardian story referenced above misses the point (to put it nicely) because it mentions something the government defended itself against which it was never accused of: Having made up the 45min claim. That's a line of defense right out of the bowels of the No10 press office, from Campbell and his assorted PR hacks: Loudly reject something you were never accused of (although sufficiently easy to be confused with the real claim of Gilligan), then cry "we've been vindicated!", when it turns out not to be true (who would have thought). Check out the Guardian talkboard thread on the topic, and the official site for the Hutton inquiry. Posted by: Felix Deutsch at August 26, 2003 04:05 PM | PERMALINKGreat blogging Kevin. That really cuts to the heart of this whole overblown debate. Robert Fisk writes a touching article about this here. Vive la resistance! Posted by: Dom at August 26, 2003 04:18 PM | PERMALINKOK, I just sent them an overlong letter, including this post and
thread. I said "I'm sure you'll agree" a lot. They can't just be going
around lying like that. It seems the Guardian has now changed their story from stating that "the claim was known to be made up" to "the claim was known to be wrong." Either that or Glenn Reynolds quoted it incorrectly. Anyway, what's most interesting to me is how the Gilligan reporting is an example of how the press works in general. Newspapers and TV news are filled with errors every day, some big and some small. It really would be hard for it to be otherwise, given deadline pressure, lack of resources, etc. However, reporters are welcome to make gigantic, catastrophic errors -- eg, Judith Miller's reporting on Iraq over the past year for the NY Times -- as long as they're erroneously saying things the government likes. However, if reporters like Gilligan make comparatively tiny errors while saying things the government DOESN'T like, it's a huge scandal and proves the media is liberal, anti-war, etc. -- even when the gist of the story is correct. This is a large part of why hack reporters thrive, and good ones are driven out of the business. Posted by: Jon at August 26, 2003 04:34 PM | PERMALINKYou have some sort of inferiority complex with Instapundit. You must post something from there once a week: "Look what THEY said!!!! I'm telling Mom!!!!" How about some original posting - we already know you disagree with any blog that is the area starting at the center onwards towards the right. Posted by: whatever at August 26, 2003 04:57 PM | PERMALINK"Whatever", Reynolds is still the single most read political blogger by far -- and when he makes major howlers (which he does with disturbing regularity), there's every reason to mention the fact. Posted by: Bruce Moomaw at August 26, 2003 06:01 PM | PERMALINKposted by ari: ...we have found no WMDs. Story after story of WMDs proved wrong... there are now tragically some 320 American and British soldier fatalities since March 20. For what? What the hell were we fighting for? (please also remember lots of iraqis died as well, some soldiers, some conscripts, some simply innocent civilians) A friend mailed me this 19th century quote today. "There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent not only says the same thing but unequivocally proves it with detailed research over a century later. The major press bodies of the world are tied into the general thrust of neo-liberal capitalism (free trade), which is not a surprise when the 'reality' of n-lc is to benefit the minority of individuals who control the majority of ownership of production around the world. Although it is impossible for them to stop the boat being rocked, there is no way the global elite will allow the boat to be tipped over. Jean Baudrillard has suggested that the modern media saturated society we live in is constructed of 'simulations', which are basically constructed realities that have no basis in anything actually real. That what we are presented with, not only in the media but also in our everyday social interactions, are constructed illusions. The Matrix follows his philosophical musings to create the Construct (as simulation) and Sion (as the alternative reality concealed behind the simulation). and as all good sci-fi should, reflects the social from which it is born. we live in a society of simulation, of realities concealed behind illusionary alternative realities that are created to hide the agendas of the ruling elite. there have been no wmd found in iraq. they were the reason we went to war. or rather they were the constructed simulation used as the excuse to go to war, and to conceal the truth, the reality. the reality is that the owners of production want a global free trade system that they can control and manipulate in order to further their simple agenda of control through the accumulation of political power and economic wealth. iraq was an easy target because saddam was an evil tyrant. all they needed was a justifiable simulation to get the majority of the humanitarian west on their side, then they'd be off, thank you very much. no one wants to die from terrorist activities. saddam is a nut and by believing he could kill us in 45 minutes (or 45 days even) will sway people into accepting something has to be done. now saddam is gone western companies are slicing up the new market (or were doing so before the war had even 'started') and the west is attempting to slip democratic capitalism into a muslim enclave. whether gilligan lied or blair lied or campbell lied is ultimately irrelevant. it is another veil being pulled over the real point, which is that the war was illegal and unjustified. that the reasons for its implementation were scaremongering at best and blatant lies at worst, and the whole debate about language use and semantics in the bbc/blair showdown is simply another ruse by the ruling elite to deflect attention from what is going on. the ruling elite, using america as their front, are attempting to reshape the world to fit in with their neo-liberal agenda, and will attempt to do so no matter what the cost, rather than actually giving a shit about what people really want. talk to muslims from the middle east. the koran tells them capitalism and democracy is wrong. these people believe their words of god. they do not want it (capitalism and democracy). they may not have wanted saddam, but i bet they don't want america inc. either. So ari, that is what ‘we’ were fighting for. All those people died in ‘our’ name so a few rich power hungry bastards could have a little bit more. Lynch Gilligan. Vilify the BBC. Do whatever it takes to stop the world asking the most important question. When are Bush and Blair going on trial for murder (theirs) and manslaughter (ours)? Posted by: jules at August 26, 2003 08:14 PM | PERMALINKI just read the Guardian's latest raft of articles on the Hutton Inquiry (for the 27th). They don't repeat their false claim anywhere, just that Scarlett made it. Here's their archives for "blows out of the water": "Origin of 45-min claim revealed online casinos | casino bonus | casino directory | high roller casinos | casinos Posted by: doi at May 23, 2004 11:50 AM | PERMALINK
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