If Kelly was a liar, why was he a source?

The Telegraph ^ | 08/13/2003 | Janet Daley

[LSUfan]

Yesterday in the Royal Courts of Justice, Andrew Gilligan effectively called David Kelly a liar. Days after a government spokesman had smeared Dr Kelly as a fantasist with delusions of grandeur, Gilligan alleged explicitly that the civil servant's evidence to Parliament had been systematically and knowingly false.

[thegreatbeast]

The article ends with a warning (and veiled suggestion) against Tony Blair. Apparently they have a tempest brewed over there about what the gov't did to their intelligence on Iraq. But from this vantage point the only persons damaged by what was going on are Kelly and Gilligan, the late source and the BBC reporter.

[piasa]

continued

...What are we to make of this? In this war of attrition between the two most powerful forces in British public life - the elected government and the BBC - both sides seem in effect to be undermining the reputation of a dead man who, by all previous accounts, was known for his integrity and professional conscience.

Anyone who doubted how much might be at stake here will have to think again. Behaviour like this could arise only from a matter of institutional life and death.

The morning's testimony by Gilligan was generally believed to be hugely, probably fatally, damning of Alastair Campbell. But if it injured Mr Campbell's credibility, it did far more than that to the memory of Dr Kelly.

If Mr Campbell's veracity remains contentious and his claims ambiguous in the Gilligan account, the word of Dr Kelly is utterly, comprehensively impugned. Gilligan can only be in the right if what Dr Kelly said to the foreign affairs select committee was utterly wrong.

Gilligan says that virtually all of his major allegations (including the most notorious: that the "45-minute" claim went into the questionable dossier at Mr Campbell's instigation) came directly from his discussions with Dr Kelly. And further, that the subject of the "45-minute" claim, and the Campbell name, were introduced into the conversation by Dr Kelly, and not by Gilligan himself.

So much for Dr Kelly's statement to the parliamentary committee that he had not made these allegations, that he did not recognise his own account in the Gilligan story and thus did not believe that he could be its "single source".

Gilligan's only serious reservations about his own part in this drama seemed to involve the imperfect means of expression he now believes that he used in his first unscripted Today broadcast, and in failing to take enough account of Dr Kelly's worries about being revealed as his source.

(What the latter might imply, of course, is that Dr Kelly had reason to withhold the full truth from the foreign affairs committee, so perhaps it is a relatively easy form of guilt for Gilligan to shoulder.)

Gilligan had not meant to imply, he told Lord Hutton, that the Government had "lied" about the threat from weapons of mass destruction, or that Mr Campbell had personally inserted a statement into a supposed "intelligence" dossier that he knew to be untrue. (Even though that was what virtually everyone extrapolated from his story.)

We heard yesterday of the internal BBC memos that expressed misgivings and anxiety about Gilligan's "loose language" and "flawed reporting". (This is, I must say, consistent with talk that I have heard at the BBC.)

But if Gilligan had regrets about his first "unrepresentative" and more sensational live report, and the BBC itself was so concerned about what might be suggested by it, why has no one rowed back from the unequivocally bullish BBC line until now?

Even the quite supine BBC governors, it seems, regarded the lack of notes to back up the Gilligan story as a "weakness" in the corporation's case. As I recall, you would never have guessed that from the solidly united front they presented to the world.

So, thus far, it is the word of one man against another. And one of those men is dead. Even if we take Gilligan's account of their transactions at absolute face value, isn't there a problem with the logic of his defence?

If Dr Kelly lied to the FAC because, as Gilligan puts it, he may have felt that he had to "keep faith" with the Ministry of Defence (and had not intended to discredit the Government), why should we put so much faith in his accuracy as a source for the Gilligan story? Either he is an impeccable, unfailingly reliable witness or he isn't.

Almost everything that Gilligan said about him yesterday implied that, at least under some circumstances, he was not. So in order to defend his own decision to broadcast his story, Gilligan must, in effect, undermine the veracity of his own single source.

Problems of that knotty kind can usually be avoided by doing what journalists call "standing up" a story: getting more than one source to corroborate it. Gilligan claims to have had other, unnamed sources for his belief that the dossier had been "sexed up" against the wishes of the intelligence services, and that that background information made Dr Kelly's remarks seem credible.

But doesn't his entire report, which may or not be true in spirit and in detail, consist essentially of hearsay possibly conveyed by a man whom we now know to have been professionally discontent?

None of this mitigates the damage to the Government, or to Alastair Campbell, or to Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary. It goes almost without saying that they are left looking shabby at best and deceitful at worst.

Were they right to pursue the war against Saddam Hussein? I think so. Did they do the right thing for the wrong reasons - or, at least, with the wrong official rationale? Quite possibly. But that is not directly material to the matter of the day.

It is absolutely imperative that democratic governments do not deliberately mislead their electorates, especially over matters of war and peace, and that they do not behave like bullying gangsters when they are found out.

If that is what has happened, then there will be no coming back from this for Tony Blair.