Wide Area News
What’s it good for?
by Russell Brown
A veteran of more than 35 wars, BBC correspondent John Simpson talks about fudged figures and friendly fire.
John Simpson is not about to apologise. When the veteran correspondent’s employer, the BBC, looked to raise interest in his personal documentary Exit Strategy (which screened here recently on Prime), it plucked out perhaps the most incendiary part of the programme: Iraqi health ministry figures that appeared to show that coalition and Iraqi forces had been responsible for more civilian deaths in Iraq in the second half of 2004 than terrorist insurgents had.
Response to a BBC press release containing the claim was swift: the Iraqi ministry insisted that, despite repeated advice to the contrary, Simpson’s Panorama team had misinterpreted the figures. The report that 1233 deaths had been caused in “terrorist” incidents and 2041 were as a result of “military action” was incorrect. The “military action” figure included those killed by insurgents, the ministry said, as well as terrorists.
The corporation expressed unreserved regret for “mistakes in its initial published and broadcast reports”, and the original figures were removed from the programme just before it screened in Britain.
Simpson’s only regret is that the original information was released before the programme went to air.
“What happened was simply that the word got back. We started asking for comments on that kind of thing, on the figures, from different senior figures in the American and British and Iraqi hierarchies. And suddenly, weirdly, it was all changed,” he says.
“The ministry came back with a statement that said they couldn’t understand why we were making all this fuss about it, and the figure did indeed include insurgents. So we were left with nothing to do, really. If the ministry that gives us these figures, then insists that they’re different from what they first told us, we’ve got no leg to stand on, alas. And we just thought the quickest way out was to say, ‘Okay, sorry, let’s move on to something else.’
“But I have no doubt at all that those figures were correct, and that we were correct in the assessment we made of them.”
Simpson’s shrugging off of his employer’s apology will fuel the belief, popular in some quarters, that the BBC is a hive for covert left-wing liars. But it has not, and will not, endanger the 60-year-old reporter’s job. Eason Jordan, the executive editor of CNN, was not so lucky.
Jordan resigned earlier this year to try to quell a storm of protest at a statement – made in an ostensibly off-the-record seminar at the World Economic Forum in Davos – in which he seemed to suggest that US troops had targeted journalists. Jordan corrected himself in virtually the next breath – US forces had simply been less than careful – but it was too late. Right-wing bloggers eagerly claimed another media trophy.
“I was very upset about Eason Jordan,” says Simpson. “Although he and I have crossed swords about various things over the years and I wouldn’t exactly regard him as a friend, he was someone for whom I had great respect, in his willingness to stand up and say what is undoubtedly the case: that the American military have not been as careful as they should be about killing journalists. This is something that has now become almost habitual with them.”
Simpson, of course, has a story here. It was his crew that was mistakenly attacked by US aircraft in northern Iraq, during the initial phase of the Iraq war. The incident, in which Simpson was injured and his translator and 17 other people were killed, became the basis of an earlier documentary, In the Line of Fire. He does not believe that he was targeted as a journalist (“I’m sure they didn’t know we were there”), but it clearly still rankles that the incident was not, in his view, properly investigated.
“[Jordan] may have overstated it slightly when he talked about journalists being ‘deliberately’ targeted and put a number on that. But American forces have attacked al-Jazeera on at least two different occasions. There is a sort of pattern that is clearly established and I do think it’s the duty of journalists to point these things out – and I don’t think Eason did anything other than his duty as a leading journalist. I’m very sorry that he felt the necessity to go. I really don’t understand why he should have. There are forces in American politics that fortunately don’t apply to the rest of us – and he fell foul of those.”
Yet the Iraq war unleashed forces in British politics, too. Andrew Gilligan’s brief, fateful radio report claiming that the government had knowingly falsified published intelligence on Iraq set in motion a chain of events that cost Dr David Kelly his life and the BBC its chair and director-general. Simpson was among those who expressed qualms that the Hutton Report, with its stinging criticism of the corporation, would make all journalists more cautious in future.
“I think that the BBC paid a very heavy price indeed for what happened, for what one of our people had said in that whole, dreadful business,” he says. “But we do not have a licence to be careless and we do not have a licence to just say the first thing that comes into our heads. If it was a lesson on that, well, maybe we needed a lesson.
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