The Beeb v The Government

There's a bit of a brouhaha between the UK goverment and the BBC going on at the moment. Basically, the BBC reported that a senior British official said that Downing Street had a report on Iraq's WMD "sexed up".

First of all, here is an AudioFile of the report that caused all the kerfuffle from the BBC's Today show on Radio 4.

And then here is the letter from Alastair Campbell to the BBC. Alastair is the Tony Blair's director of Communication.

And here is the response from Richard Sambrook. Richard is the Director of BBC News.

I just think it's interesting in these cases to look at the actual correspondence between the parties involved.

-- Added the following on June 28, 2003 --

And here's Campbell's reaction to the BBC letter.

-- Added the following on July 7, 2003 --

The BBC Board of Governors' Report supporting the BBC

Extract from foreign affairs select committee report regarding the 45-minute claim

And this report by the Guardian on Commons' Dossier Report has a number of useful links at the bottom including both the September and February Dossiers and

-- Added the following on January 29, 2004 --

Here is the full text of the Hutton Report:
HTML version
PDF version

In particular, it may be useful to read the Terms of Reference of the report which lays out which questions Lord Hutton intends to address in the report.

And the Today programme has put together an archive of all the Today Programme broadcasts on the controversy from the first radio report onwards.

-- Added the following on February 1, 2004 --
A Fight to the Death Transcript of a Panorama programme about the Hutton Inquiry and more specifically how the dossier at its centre was put together.