Scandalous

Everybody seems to agree that the suicide of Dr. David Kelly, the British defense analyst, is a prelude to a scandal -- but nobody can quite seem to decide whose scandal it is. The Blair government's? The BBC's? That of Kelly himself?

For an American audience, the scandal is especially hard to understand, because it originated in a British media culture that is unlike anything that exists on this continent. There's no American equivalent of the BBC, which created the scandal. The BBC is like CBS, CNN, NPR, Comedy Central, Time magazine, and every local market's top news station all rolled into one gigantic bureaucracy, paid for out of taxes and tilting to the far left.

The scandal was then sustained by the Daily Mail newspaper. There's no equivalent of it either -- a right-leaning national tabloid famous for its hatred of the Blair government, its accusatory style, and its very British assumption that every grief or woe that occurs anywhere in the British Isles is the national government's fault and responsibility.

That's the background. Now the foreground:

Last September, the Blair government released a dossier that argued that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction already and was vigorously seeking to obtain more.

On May 29 of this year, BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan reported on the Today program -- a morning radio broadcast that is one of the most important public-affairs shows in Britain -- that a British intelligence official "involved in the preparation of the dossier" was accusing Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief communications aide, Alistair Campbell, of "sexing up" the dossier. Campbell promptly denounced the report as a lie -- and launched an internal investigation of the charge.

As the investigation proceeded, suspicion alighted on Dr. Kelly. Kelly was an occasional adviser to the British Ministry of Defense and a former U.N. arms inspector in Iraq.

This discovery was very damaging to the BBC's case, for three reasons: 1) Kelly was not a British intelligence official, as the broadcaster had suggested; 2) Kelly's involvement in the preparation of the dossier had been only very glancing -- he was in no position to know what Campbell had done or not done; 3) while Kelly was an expert on biological weapons, he was in no position to know Iraq's overall military capabilities. Moreover, in private conversations with the government, Kelly insisted that he had never impugned Campbell's handling of the dossier. So Campbell took his case public.

The Blair government released a new document detailing Kelly's refutation of the Gilligan report. On background, government briefers provided details that soon identified Kelly to the media. Kelly was hauled before a House of Commons committee. There he denied that he had ever questioned the accuracy of the dossier: "I had no doubt that the veracity of it was absolute."

At the same time, though, Kelly revealed some uncomfortable truths about himself. He acknowledged that he had spoken to Gilligan and probably other BBC reporters. Most observers of his testimony became convinced that Kelly had indeed criticized the dossier to the press, without knowing what he was talking about. This revelation must have been deeply humiliating to a man who by all accounts prided himself on his professionalism. Two days after he concluded his testimony, Kelly killed himself.

The BBC then confirmed that Kelly was the sole source of Gilligan's story -- and Kelly's family and the Daily Mail accused the government of hounding Kelly to death: "Proud of Yourselves?" asked the Daily Mail's headline over photographs of Prime Minister Blair and defense secretary Geoffrey Hoon.

But what exactly is it that the Blair government is supposed to have done wrong here? Dr. Kelly's family and antiwar newspapers like the Guardian are insisting that the Blair government somehow betrayed Kelly by failing to protect his privacy and by "bullying" him before a House of Commons committee. Even by the standards of Britain's culture of entitlement, this is some stretch.

Dr. Kelly believed that the Blair government falsified the case for war. Instead of forthrightly declaring his beliefs to the public, he whispered them anonymously to a reporter. Then, when the reporter "sexed up" (to borrow a phrase) the anonymous allegations by presenting Dr. Kelly as a much more important person than he really was, Kelly kept quiet. His silence was a form of complicity in Gilligan's untrue story -- and in all the damage that the story did to the credibility of the Blair government and public confidence in the Iraq war.

Now the same antiwar British media that (wrongly) attacked the Blair government for broadcasting untruths is savagely attacking it for catching the media in an untruth. The media that falsely presented themselves as the champions of truth are now the champions of the right to lie anonymously.

The Blair government had no obligation to protect the confidentiality of anybody involved in the Kelly/Gilligan story. As a consultant to the Ministry of Defense, it was Dr. Kelly who owed a duty of secrecy to the government, not the other way around.

If Dr. Kelly's own mental state was too fragile to bear the glare of publicity triggered by the pseudo-scandal he himself set in motion, that is very sad. But journalists who hurl the most appalling abuse at officials of the government are not well placed to act pious when that abuse redounds upon their sources. How can it be acceptable journalistic practice to call a prime minister a liar -- and then call him a bully when he seeks to prove that he is not? How can it be acceptable to charge a government with falsifying the case for war -- and then to wax indignant when the actual falsifers are exposed?

If there's a scandal here, it is not Blair's. If there is blood on anybody's hands, it is on those of the BBC -- and its abettors elsewhere.