| "Bitter, party of one, your table is ready." |
Greg Dyke, the former BBC director general ousted over the broadcaster's coverage of the Iraq conflict, unleashed a scorching attack on the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, blaming it for trying to bully the BBC into submission.| Dyke's got it all wrong. It was the Beeb doing the bullying. |
Dyke, in excerpts of his upcoming book "Inside Story" published in The Observer and the Mail on Sunday, also scalded the BBC governing board for pandering to Blair's office by pushing him out. "We were all duped," he said of the argument Blair made to drum up support for the Iraq war. "History will not be on Blair's side, it will show that the whole saga is a great political scandal."
| Depends on which side wins the WoT. We've already established that it won't be Greg Dyke's side... |
Blair was "either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding, or he lied when he told the House of Commons that he didn't know what the 45-minute claim meant." Dyke referred to a claim made, then retracted, by Blair's office in arguing for Saddam Hussein's overthrow, that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons in just 45 minutes. A BBC reporter accused the government of "sexing up" its dossier with the false claim, thereby triggering a scandal that pitted the BBC against the government in an open and rare conflict. An official inquiry, led by Lord Hutton to look into the death of a scientist used as a source for that story, cleared the government of blame but criticized the BBC. Dyke resigned under pressure after six members of the governing board voted for his removal. "I had no idea I would be sacked by a board of governors behaving like frightened rabbits caught in car headlights," he said, calling for the six now to resign. |