Gilligan misled us
From Richard Hoare Sir: In your desire to defend a reporter who has contributed to your esteemed organ, and to attack a government that you oppose in Parliament, you seem sadly to be willing to gloss over important facts that do not suit your argument (Leading article, 26 July).
It is, as you say, the job of journalists to bring facts into the public domain — and if that were all Andrew Gilligan had done, this story would have died long ago. One does not have to be a supporter of the Labour government (and I am emphatically not one) to recognise that Andrew Gilligan was at best deliberately misleading when he described his source as 'a member of the intelligence services' who had been involved with drafting the dossier; while Dr David Kelly specifically denied telling him that Alastair Campbell had inserted in it the reference to weapons of mass destruction being deployable within 45 minutes. It is significant that neither of the two other BBC reporters who interviewed Dr Kelly included either of these allegations in their reports.
It is intellectually dishonest of you to conflate the issue of press freedom with the actions of a single journalist in a particular case. Andrew Gilligan has a case to answer, and you should be prepared to recognise that without branding all his critics as being in favour of 'the suppression of truth in a sandstorm of obfuscation'.
Finally, in defending Andrew Gilligan's every act, you clearly imply that Dr Kelly lied in his evidence to the House of Commons foreign affairs committee. If you believe this, why do you not have the courage to say so openly?
Richard Hoare
East Lavant, West Sussex
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