BBC rejects demand for WMD apology

Richard Sambrook, the BBC's head of news, said the corporation had nothing to apologise for. He insisted that reports that intelligence officials had been unhappy with the government's claim that Iraq could launch WMD attacks within 45 minutes were based on briefings by "a senior, credible and reliable source".

He said: "Frankly, I don't think the BBC needs to be taught lessons in the use of sources by a communications department which plagiarised a 12-year-old thesis and distributed it unattributed."

In a previous statement, issued following Mr Campbell's testimony to the foreign affairs select committee, the BBC had reiterated its claim that intelligence reports had been "transformed" by the time they were published in the "dodgy dossier".

The statement also defended BBC defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan's report that intelligence officials had been concerned by the 45-minute claim. The corporation said Mr Gilligan's report, which Mr Campbell denounced as "a lie", had been confirmed to "a number of other journalists" in the context of "general disquiet" over the government's handling of intelligence reports.

Mr Sambrook rejected Mr Campbell's claim that the BBC had accused the prime minister of lying and misleading the Commons. "We never said any such thing," he said. He also denied Mr Campbell's assertion that the BBC had an anti-war agenda, saying: "That's untrue, we have no agenda."

"We are not going to apologise for something we haven't said, it's as simple as that," he said. "So Alastair Campbell can try and pretend we said all sorts of things we didn't say. We are absolutely clear about what we said."

Mr Sambrook's comments came as Ibrahim al-Marashi, the author of the PhD thesis plagiarised in the government dossier, rejected Mr Campbell's claims that he had "sexed down" rather than "sexed up" the reports.

"What I wrote was an academic, neutral article," he told LBC radio today. "This was written on a political agenda, and in that kind of conversion you would need to sex it up, and that's what they did."

Mr Campbell's statement also met with a mixed reaction from politicians.

Writing in the Independent today, former foreign secretary Robin Cook said the "deserved odium" attracted by the dossiers risked diverting attention from the fact that government reports on Iraqi WMDs "have turned out to be wildly out of touch with the reality on the ground".

Labour MP Brian Donohoe echoed Mr Cook's comments, telling BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "We have to be shown that at the time there was the best information available that there were weapons of mass destruction."

Meanwhile, Tony Wright, chairman of the Commons public administration committee, told the BBC that while he accepted Mr Campbell had not "messed about" with evidence, the question of whether intelligence "sustained the case for war" remained "a pretty big test".



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