Andrew Gilligan

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Andrew Paul Gilligan (born 22 November, 1968, Teddington, London, England) is a journalist best known for his 2003 report about a British government briefing paper on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction (the September Dossier) while working for BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme as its defence and diplomatic correspondent.

Contents 1 Early career 2 The Today programme 3 In Baghdad 4 The "sexing up" allegations 5 Dr David Kelly 6 Political pressure 7 Inquiries 7.1 The Foreign Affairs Committee 7.2 The Hutton Inquiry 7.3 The Butler Enquiry 8 Resignation from the BBC 9 External links 10 References

[edit] Early career

Gilligan was educated at Grey Court School, Ham, Richmond, at Richmond upon Thames College, Twickenham, and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied history. A large part of his time in Cambridge was spent on the student newspaper, Varsity, of which he became News Editor. He was also a member of Cambridge Organisation of Labour Students and stood as one of its candidates for the Cambridge delegation to the National Union of Students conference in 1994.

In 1994, after a summer placement on The Independent, he gave up his studies to work full-time in journalism. He contributed to the Cambridge Evening News as a freelance and later moved to the Sunday Telegraph where he became a specialist reporter on defence. In 1999 he was recruited by the Today programme editor Rod Liddle as Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent, as part of an attempt by Liddle to sharpen up the programme's investigative journalism.

[edit] The Today programme

On Today, Gilligan's reputation - not always fully deserved - was based on a perception that he broke stories about the British military's alleged shortcomings, particularly in relation to the Kosovo war. He obtained leaked Ministry of Defence reports showing that the Army's rifles and radios had not worked; that only a small fraction of Royal Air Force (RAF) bombs during the campaign had hit their targets; and that a £1 billion upgrade to the RAF's main combat jet had left it unable to drop smart bombs. The Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, denied to Parliament Gilligan's report that British troops were ill-equipped for the war in Iraq and called for a public apology. Some - though by no means all - of Gilligan's allegations were borne out by a National Audit Office report.

In 2000, Gilligan reported on plans being developed at an Italian university for an EU constitution. Although this report repeated many features of an earlier Economist article, the Prime Minister's spokesman, Alastair Campbell, denied any such plans and attacked the journalist as 'Gullible Gilligan'.^[1]

[edit] In Baghdad

Gilligan first came to prominence during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when he was stationed in Baghdad. On the day United States forces claimed to have entered the city centre, Gilligan broadcast on the BBC World Service saying: "I'm in the centre of Baghdad, and I don't see anything… But then the Americans have a history of making these premature announcements." Gilligan was referring to a military communiqué from Qatar that morning saying that the Americans had entered the centre of the city. In fact, it transpired that an American patrol had passed briefly through one of the south-western suburbs, and then exited again.

The previous day Gilligan had questioned a US Centcom statement that the Americans had taken control of Baghdad airport. Gilligan and three other journalists had visited the airport that morning and established that the Americans were not in control of the airport terminal or approach road. This report was confirmed by a further bus-load of journalists who were taken to the airport later that day by the Iraqi authorities; US forces did not take control of the airport until that night.

Gilligan's reporting was criticised both by the Iraqi authorities, who twice threatened to expel him for disobeying rules not to travel without a minder, and by the British Government. The British defence minister, Adam Ingram, attacked him for reporting on the day after Baghdad fell, April 10, 2003, that Iraqi civilians were "passing their first days of freedom in a greater fear than they've ever known" due to the widespread outbreak of looting, lawlessness and disorder which broke out after the Americans arrived.

Gilligan's reporting was also criticised by his own colleagues on the ground in Baghdad, in particular for revealing how a producer colleague had faked a fit in order to divert aggressive attention by a government minder.

[edit] The "sexing up" allegations

On May 29, 2003, back in Britain, Gilligan reported allegations that a dossier published by the British Government had deliberately suppressed equivocations in intelligence reports about the military capabilities of Iraq in order to bolster the argument for going to war with the country. In a subsequent newspaper article, Gilligan quoted a source as identifying Alastair Campbell, then the Prime Minister's Director of Communications and Strategy, as responsible for the suppressions.

According to Gilligan's account of his source - though he was never able to produce uncontested notes to substantiate this account - the "classic" example of the exaggeration was the dossier's claim that Iraq was able to deploy biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so. Gilligan reported that experts had expressed serious doubts about this claim before publication, but these had not been heeded. In the first, unscripted report, broadcast live at 6.07 am on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Gilligan claimed to have been told by his source that the Government "probably knew that the 45 minute figure was wrong even before it decided to put it in". This was not the formula he had used in the script approved by his night-editor - that formula, used in a later broadcast, was that the claim was 'questionable' rather than 'wrong'; before the Hutton Inquiry Gilligan admitted that his source had not told him that the government "probably" knew the 45 minute claim "was wrong".^[2]

While most comment critical of Gilligan was directed at his having mistakenly reported his source as saying the 45 minute figure was wrong, Lord Hutton worded his conclusions as follows:

The allegations reported by Mr Gilligan on the BBC Today programme on 29 May 2003 that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong or questionable before the dossier was published and that it was not inserted in the first draft of the dossier because it only came from one source and the intelligence agencies did not really believe it was necessarily true, were unfounded.

[edit] Dr David Kelly

Gilligan's source was one of the world's foremost biological weapons experts, Dr David Kelly. Kelly was found dead, having committed suicide, shortly after being identified as the source for the story. An inquiry (the Hutton Inquiry) subsequently set up to investigate the circumstances leading up to Kelly's death heard much evidence about Gilligan's claims, and ruled that they were unfounded. The Inquiry could not establish exactly what had transpired at the meeting between Gilligan and Kelly as Gilligan took notes using a palmtop computer. Two versions of the notes were found, only one of which mentioned Alastair Campbell.

However, Gilligan's general account of the conversation - though not that the government "probably" knew that the 45 minute claim "was wrong" - appeared to many observers to have been substantially corroborated by independent interviews given to two other BBC journalists, Susan Watts and Gavin Hewitt. Watts had recorded her conversation with Kelly, in which Kelly did indeed say that Alastair Campbell might be responsible for changes to the dossier. Both Gilligan and Watts spoke to Kelly on an unattributable basis.

[edit] Political pressure

The Government began to demand that the BBC name the source for Gilligan's report. The BBC refused to do so. However, after rumours began to circulate amongst his colleagues, Kelly himself eventually revealed to his employers that he had spoken to Gilligan, though he denied making the crucial "probably knew it was wrong" comment. As he was not a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee which had drawn up the dossier, and did not have any dealings with 10 Downing Street, Dr Kelly could not have known directly of any input by Alastair Campbell into the dossier and, for that reason, Campbell wanted Kelly's identity revealed in order to refute Gilligan's story.

It was later revealed that Campbell had written in his diary: "It was double-edged but GH (Geoff Hoon) and I agreed it would fuck Gilligan if that was his source." The name of David Kelly became known when several journalists picked up clues from a Government press release. Hutton later concluded that it was inevitable that Kelly's name would become public knowledge.

[edit] Inquiries

Several official enquiries into the affair were made, with different scopes.

[edit] The Foreign Affairs Committee

Kelly was called to give evidence before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, which was undertaking an inquiry into the dossier. Gilligan emailed several members of the Committee to tell them that Susan Watts' unattributed Newsnight source was David Kelly, thereby implicitly revealing Kelly as his own source. Though Gilligan supported his own case by doing this, it unnerved Kelly — who was forced to deny making the comments which were quoted verbatim in the committee. Susan Watts' tape of the conversation would prove this a lie, placing Kelly in jeopardy. Gilligan's actions in identifying another journalist's source went against a principle of investigative journalism: protect the source.

[edit] The Hutton Inquiry

Despite this error and the overstatement in the first report, Gilligan maintained he had uncovered a potentially important news story, originating from a credible source. However, his story suffered from weaknesses which were demonstrated during the inquiry. Lord Hutton ruled that while Alastair Campbell had made comments on the dossier, the Joint Intelligence Committee had taken all the decisions on its content. Hutton ruled that the Defence Intelligence Staff had raised doubts about the 45 minute claim, but they had been dismissed by the Secret Intelligence Service and had not reached 10 Downing Street. Doubts were raised during the inquiry about Gilligan's journalistic standards, with criticism from the editor of Today, Kevin Marsh that his report on the 45-minute claim was "flawed" and from the BBC's director of news, Richard Sambrook that he was a reporter "who paints in primary colours" rather than "subtleties and nuances".

[edit] The Butler Enquiry

A later official enquiry into the government's use of intelligence, conducted by the former head of the civil service Lord Butler of Brockwell, found that "more weight was placed on the intelligence than it would bear", that the dossier "put a strain on the Joint Intelligence Committee in seeking to maintain their normal standards of neutral and objective assessment", and that the judgments in the dossier went to the "outer limits … of the intelligence available."

On the 45-minute claim, Butler endorsed the concerns of the Defence Intelligence Staff and said they should have been heeded. The 45-minute claim should not have been included in the form it took, and there were "suspicions that it had been included because of its eye-catching character". He did not, however, conclude as Gilligan had originally claimed that "the government probably knew it was wrong."

It also emerged that some of the intelligence underpinning the dossier, based on reporting from a new and untested source, had been withdrawn by MI6 as unreliable. Lord Butler of Brockwell revealed that much of the remainder of the intelligence was described by MI6 as "patchy" and "fragmentary", contrary to the characterisation of it by the Prime Minister as "detailed, authoritative and compelling". However, Lord Butler of Brockwell cleared both the Prime Minister and the chairman of the JIC, John Scarlett, of bad faith or dishonesty.

[edit] Resignation from the BBC

During the Hutton Inquiry, Gilligan played a major role in briefing senior BBC executives preparing the BBC defence. His assurances to, among others, Director-General Greg Dyke and chairman Gavyn Davies ensured that both men's positions were, in the end, indissolubly linked with that of Gilligan. All three resigned from the BBC following the publication of the Hutton Inquiry report. Gilligan was belligerent in his departure, saying: "This report casts a chill over all journalism, not just the BBC's. It seeks to hold reporters, with all the difficulties they face, to a standard that it does not appear to demand of, for instance, Government dossiers."

After leaving the BBC, Gilligan became Defence and Diplomatic Editor of The Spectator. As of 2005 he writes for the Evening Standard on defence and diplomatic affairs and on other issues, including the paper's campaign to preserve the Routemaster London bus. Public transport has long been one of Gilligan's private interests. In a speech to the Edinburgh TV Festival in August 2004, the main annual gathering of the broadcasting industry, Gilligan spoke of his "awe" at the Government's "industrial-strength, 45-carat shamelessness" over the dossier and said that the BBC should not retreat from journalism probing of the Government.

In a drama-documentary The Government Inspector made by Peter Kosminsky and broadcast on March 17, 2005 by Channel 4, the discrepancy between the two computer versions of Gilligan's record of his meeting with Dr Kelly was explained by showing Gilligan altering the file to make it tie in with what he had reported. Gilligan described the depiction as "demonstrably, even absurdly, false", and his denial was supported by Greg Dyke. However, Kosminsky said that he had been advised by a computer forensics expert.

More recently, Gilligan began reporting for the London Evening Standard. He has also worked for Channel 4 on the investigative programme Dispatches, looking at the treatment of British soldiers returning from war in Iraq.

Gilligan currently presents Forum, one of Press TV's current affairs programs. At the heart of the show is the audience driving the debate with their own mix of questions.^[3] Press TV is Iran's new English language international news channel.

[edit] External links

• Andrew Gilligan on plans to build a supermosque in East London

[edit] References