From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Here in the States, many column inches have been devoted to the question of the

missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but so far, George W. Bush has yet to feel any serious heat.

Not so in the UK. Prime Minister Tony Blair is being slowly char-grilled in the fire of accusations

that he used false intelligence reports to lead the country to war.

The most scathing criticism of the Blair government comes from a BBC reporter named Andrew Gilligan.

Gilligan claims to have spoken with a top intelligence officer who charges that Blair presented Parliament with a dossier that exaggerated the Iraqi threat.

The British press has dubbed it the sexted-up dossier.

Enter Blair's Director of Communications, Alistair Campbell, the Ari Fleischer of England.

Andrew Gilligan's Secret Intelligence Source names Campbell as the culprit who sexed up the dossier.

Now the feud between Britain's biggest broadcaster and the government has turned personal

and nasty. While Campbell and Gilligan threaten each other with lawsuits, debate about the missing

weapons of mass destruction has been all but lost in the furor. Trevor Butterworth is a research fellow at the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington.

He laid out the details of the case.

Andrew Gilligan said that a key government dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

had been made sexier by the inclusion of a piece of information,

which said that Saddam Hussein could deploy bioterror weapons within 45 minutes.

Three days later, in an opinion piece for the Mail on Sunday, Giligan indicted Alistair Campbell for being the one who made sure this sexy bit of information got into the report over the

objections of intelligence officers. Now, that's a pretty big charge to level on the basis of a single

anonymous source. But the BBC is standing by its man, is it not?

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