Thursday, Jan 22, 2004
David Kelly, the weapons expert at the heart of the row between the government and the BBC, told the corporation he believed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could have been deployed within days or weeks, it emerged last night.
Mr Kelly's comments were made in a BBC interview not previously screened and were last night broadcast by the corporation's current affairs programme Panorama as part of a preview of next week's report by Lord Hutton into the scientist's apparent suicide.
In an interview conducted one month after the publication of last September's government dossier on Iraq's WMD, Mr Kelly was asked if Saddam Hussein was a real threat who possessed WMD and replied: "Yes. Even if they're not actually filled and deployed today, the capability exists to get them filled and deployed within a matter of days and weeks."
His comments indicate he could have been sceptical about the much discussed claim in the government dossier that Iraq could launch WMD within 45 minutes.
However, the government could also claim that Mr Kelly's interview - a transcript of which was sent to the Hutton inquiry while it was sitting - shows he clearly believed Iraq had WMD, despite the embarrassing inability of US and UK officials to find the material after the war.
In the rest of his interview, Mr Kelly said the Iraqi leader's WMD posed a "real threat" to neighbouring countries. "We are talking about Iran and Israel and certainly he can use those weapons against them and you don't need a vast stockpile to have a tremendous military effect."
But he said Iraq posed a lesser threat than before the first Gulf war. "Iraq's intrinsic capability has been reduced since 1990-1991."
The programme marked the latest stage in the BBC's acknowledgement that sen-ior executives failed properly to check reporter Andrew Gilligan's claims that Downing Street doctored the September dossier to exaggerate the case for war. John Ware, the programme's reporter, concluded: "The director-general and his senior executives bet the farm on a shaky foundation."
The mounting frustration inside the corporation last summer - that it had made mistakes over the handling of the Gilligan report - was revealed. At one stage Greg Dyke, director-general, told aides: "Have we fucking got this right? Because if we haven't, we had better go back on it now." The programme added: "Unlike the government, (the BBC) has admitted it has made some errors . . . The BBC still insists it got its story largely right despite some flawed reporting."
By JAMES BLITZ and GAUTAM MALKANI
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