Complaint to BBC about John Simpson

John Simpson, the BBC’s prestigious World Affairs Editor, played a vital role in making the British Government’s case for military action against Iraq in March 2003. Few people listening to his supposedly objective contributions in the month before the invasion would have had any doubt that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and lots of them – and that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who deserved to be overthrown.

A “profile” of Saddam Hussein by Simpson was broadcast several times in that period (for example, on BBC4 on 9 March 2003). In it, speaking about UN weapons inspectors, he said:

“They spent eight frustrating years combing Iraq, but their efforts were thwarted at every turn by Saddam’s grip over his own people. Eventually the inspectors were thrown out. It had been an unequal struggle. As they left, they suspected that Saddam had kept much of his deadly arsenal intact.”

(Compare that to the words of Rolf Ekeus, the first head of UNSCOM, who was asked at a seminar at Harvard on 23 May 2000, if he thought Iraq had been “qualitatively disarmed”. He replied:

“I would say that we felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq’s capabilities fundamentally.  There are some question marks left.”)

I have good reason to remember John Simpson’s words because I made a formal complaint to the BBC about them on the grounds:

(1) that the inspectors were not thrown out by Iraq, but withdrawn for their own safety because Clinton and Blair were about to bomb Iraq, and

(2) that the statement that UN inspectors “suspected Saddam had kept much of his deadly arsenal intact” was contrary to what they had written in their reports.

I asked that these errors of fact be corrected.

A year later, on 19 April 2004, the BBC’s Head of Programme Complaints finally conceded that “the phrase ‘thrown out’ should not have been used in relation to that withdrawal” and a note to that effect appeared in the BBC’s Complaints Bulletin. No correction was broadcast. However, I was told:

“On your other point, about the inspectors suspecting ‘that Saddam had kept much of his deadly arsenal intact’ you made a strong case for thinking that viewers would not have appreciated the extent to which Saddam’s arsenal had in fact been depleted (though ‘much’ is an indefinite term). However, I remain of the view that John Simpson’s words were defensible as an encapsulation of information he had been given in lengthy conversations with one of the inspectors.”

Apparently, the BBC considers that the appropriate way to establish what UN “inspectors suspected” in December 1998 is talk to just one of them in 2003 and take that as the opinion of them all, without checking this single source against the plethora of official reports by inspectors in 1999 and earlier, in which a very different view was expressed.

My complaint to the BBC, and the extensive correspondence which followed, is posted below. It took nearly six months before I got an initial response, which contained a factual howler, and rejected both elements of my complaint. My reply pointing out the howler was ignored until I wrote to the Director General six months later.

Apparently, there had been a lot of illness in the BBC Complaints Department which had delayed the BBC’s reply.