BBC's "Independent Expert" was former CIA station chief in Iraq

By Ian Henshall

LONDON - ON the influential Today programme the BBC headlined its 8.00 am news bulletin with with the claim to an exclusive story implying that Iraq has chemical weapons, but failed to provide any hard evidence and indeed sreriously misled its audience.

The news bulletin said that a document, handwritten in arabic, supplied by the partisan Iraqi National Congress (INC) was pronounced as genuine by "three independent experts", all unnamed.

However, none of these "independent experts" is a native Arabic speaker and one is Bob Bear, ex-CIA Station Chief in Iraq. The BBC also admitted to 911dossier that the experts only agreed that the document "appears" to be genuine.

The other "experts" are Toby Dodge an unknown academic from Warwick University and Bill Tierney, described as a former weapons inspector.

It has been accepted that the former weapons inspectors contained several espionage personnel from the UK and the US. The BBC failed to inform listeners that the INC is a pro-Bush setup which has been promised a share of the spoils following a successful conquest of Iraq.

Many key INC figures are ex-Saddam henchmen complicit in chemical attacks on Iran sponsored by the US in the 1980's. The conduit for this pro-Blair story Gordon Carrera, described as a senior reporter, admitted some of these facts on the much lower profile 7.00 am session of the Today Programme, but the news team ignored this revelation and continued describe the experts as independent an hour later when most listeners were tuned in.

The BBC has a pattern of ignoring its own discoveries when they don't fit the Blair line.

After this highly misleading 8.00 headline report, Today failed to interview any anti-war figure for a comment, in flagrant breach of the BBC's legal obligation for impartial and balanced reporting.

The vast majority of the UK public opposes an attack outside the UN, recent polls show. Instead they interviewed Richard Perle (right) a long standing lobbyist for radical Zionist groups in support of Ariel Sharon, but failed to mention his background and gave him a "soft" interview, pushing for an illegal attack on Iraq in defiance of the UN Security Council.

The second item on the same bulletin was an unlikely scare story, which claimed that a group of alleged terrorists arrested in Italy was likely to be attacking London because they had a map of London among an unknown number of other documents, including a map of Nato facilities in Italy, with those facilities circled.

It was not stated whether the map of London was a tourist AtoZ of London, indeed the the report gave few details of the alleged map which was the lynchpin of the story. The headline news story had another serious flaw.

Even if the story is true it assumes that Iraq has no reason to fear a US WMD attack. In fact the US has stated that it is prepared to use WMD's against Iraq and revelations under the US Freedom of Information Act show that the in the 90's the US produced biological weapons in useable amounts in flagrant violation of the biological weapons treaty which the US recently withdrew from.

Ian Henshall is chairman of INK and proprietor of The Tea and Coffee Plant. INK is the umbrella trade organisation for the UK alternative press. Comment is written in a strictly personal capacity. To get future Crisis Newsletters, email to [email protected]. For an archive go to 911dossier.co.uk. For INK administration contact [email protected].