The transcript of the Today programme is here: Radio 4 Today Programme 29/05/03.
On page 2 towards the end of the first paragraph about the second recording we read:
we've had a statement from 10 Downing Street that says it's not true, and let me just quote what they said to you. `Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies'.
But that's not true!
See, for example, Note: Campbell/Scarlett, 17/09/2002.
The Foreword, as the preceding document indicates, is primarily the work of one Alastair Campbell.
To the best of my knowledge he isn't in the intelligence agencies.
And look at all the drafting suggestions from Mr. Campbell.
Isn't that some of the "work"?
Not to mention Alastair Campbell's input into the structure of the dossier as indicated here: Note of meeting, 09/09/02, from Alastair Campbell.
Further, we know that pages 33 to 42 of the document, Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The assessment of the British Government - 24 September 2002, were written by David Kelly.
And wasn't Alastair Campbell seeking to convince us in 2003 that David Kelly wasn't in the intelligence services?
The Number 10 statement to the Today programme on 29th May 2003 is, demonstrably, a lie.
On 20 July 2003, David Aaronovitch wrote a piece in the observer, deliberately linking the death of Vince Foster in the USA with that of Kelly as a kind of limited hangout. (the Vince Foster case is also far from closed) However Aaro writes:
ReplyDelete"The response to the suicide of David Kelly, who may have been the victim of a Westminster/newspaper feeding frenzy, is to have another, even bigger one. For papers to have decided, as several have, without the discovery of so much as a suicide note, that named Ministers have blood on their hands, is outrageous.....The listener is encouraged to believe, however, that, despite his misgivings, Kelly was not Gilligan's main source, and that Gilligan got the most damning information from someone else altogether. A someone else who, rightly, he will not name.... (commenting on a John Humphrys - Scott Ritter Radio 4 interview)..On Friday [18 July 2003] night, Jon Snow on Channel 4 News threw in a reference to a 'report' suggesting that, far from Kelly turning himself in, he had had his personal organiser rifled by the Ministry Old Bill, and been given a verbal warning. Fifteen hours later, I have yet to hear this claim repeated....The 45-minute claim, said Gilligan, 'went to the heart of the Government's case', yet, according to the source, it was a claim that had been added at the last minute by 'Campbell'.........Why, for instance, did it take a week for Gilligan's meeting with his source to translate into an item on the Today programme? It couldn't possibly be that it was timed to coincide with Tony Blair's visit to Iraq on the same day, could it? There is the whiff of agenda here. A valid last question. Why indeed?