London — ''A dead man from beyond the grave talks with terrible authority,'' writes author Polly Toynbee in The Guardian this week, ''his recorded words hang there in the air.'' So may the political fate of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his rationale for going to war with Iraq.

On July 17 at 3 p.m., Dr. David Kelly, one of the British government's leading experts on Iraq's weapons-of-destruction programs, told his wife he was going out for a walk in the countryside around his Oxfordshire home. The next morning, police found his body, wrist slashed.

A month later, as London swelters in its hottest days in over a century, the media have been boiling over with rhetoric and recrimination. David Kelly, from the grave, has launched one of the biggest confrontations between press and government since the Pentagon papers and the Vietnam War, and pitted the credibility of the Prime Minister's press office against the venerable BBC. Meanwhile, the Hutton commission of inquiry is revealing the inner workings of both in excruciating detail with enough e-mails, tape recordings and memos to tie up five Jesuit seminaries in debate.

Tony Blair's government released a dossier last September saying that Iraq could launch a biological or chemical attack "within 45 minutes." It sent a shudder around the world and helped mobilize public opinion against Iraq. But it seems that it also sat very badly with the professionals in the British intelligence and defence community. It was, in many professionals' view, not true: a product of the press office rewrite desk getting itself into a lather to shape public opinion.

Enter David Kelly, a respected adviser to the government on Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. First, forget any suggestion that Mr. Kelly was a secret, "Deep Throat" cipher, disgruntled with the system, quietly feeding damaging information to one BBC reporter. Mr. Kelly made himself available to the media and was speaking to several broadcast and print reporters on a regular basis. To me, it's inconceivable his superiors didn't know this; Mr. Kelly was clearly authorized to give deep background briefings to the press.

Neither was he a tortured pacifist. He was committed to the analysis that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous force and had programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. He may just have been too candid for his own good, and reflected the disagreement within the Ministry of Defence and the intelligence community.

Yes, Saddam Hussein had programs to develop weapons of mass destruction; no, we did not tell the government he could launch chemical or biological attacks within 45 minutes.

In an telephone conversation with BBC correspondent Susan Watts on May 30 (which Ms. Watts recorded), Mr. Kelly said "they [the Blair insiders at No. 10 Downing Street] were desperate for information . . . they were pushing hard for information which could be released, that was one which popped up and it was seized on . . . and it was unfortunate that it was, which is why there is the argument between the intelligence services and Cabinet Office/No. 10 . . . "

Alarms about the claim were being rung everywhere in the intelligence system, he said, but "people at the top of the ladder" did not want to hear them.

The first journalist to report this was BBC defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan, at 6:07 a.m., May 29, on Radio 4's Today program. He quoted an unnamed source alleging Downing Street wanted the government's dossier on Iraq "sexed up" with a reference to Saddam Hussein's ability to launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes.

Mr. Gilligan's phraseology in this first early-morning report, was, in his own subsequent words, "not perfect." The impression had been left that the Downing Street press office might have known the 45-minute statement was untrue. Mr. Gilligan cleaned up his later reports that day, but the storm had been unleashed.

Enter Alastair "Hurricane" Campbell, Tony Blair's tough, competent and sometimes explosive communications director. "The BBC story is . . . a lie . . . until we get an apology for it, I will keep making sure that Parliament and people like yourselves know that it was a lie."

Mr. Campbell then makes what may prove to be a critical strategic mistake. He doesn't just say that Mr. Blair and No. 10 honestly believed, on available evidence, the 45-minute claim.

He nails the government's entire credibility to the unequivocal assertion that Iraq could launch in 45 minutes. "I know we are right in relation to the 45-minute point," he repeats almost a month later.

Watching this ferocious drama unfold, I can't escape a shudder. I watch reporters exposed to minute scrutiny in the Hutton inquiry, their scribbled notes dissected, their decisions scrutinized. Like dozens of my media colleagues, I think back to the times we at CBC had only seconds to make critical decisions while on air, live, in network radio or television, on the phrasing of a lead sentence.

But the drama unfolding in London, for all its tragic undertow, is a credit to the BBC and to journalism. There is no doubt in my mind I would have aired a report that there was significant dissent in intelligence ranks about the 45-minute assertion. I hope I would have been careful about attributing foreknowledge and intent, but that there was internal dissention was incontrovertible. The governors of the BBC behaved with impressive coolness in the face of withering fire from the government press office, and stood by their report, refusing to apologize or retreat.

What's also impressive this week, as the e-mails and internal memos within the BBC are revealed, is the mess. Yes, the editor of the Today program expressed regret internally about the phrasing of the first reports; yes, another BBC correspondent testified the first report attributed too much deceptive intent on the part of the No. 10 press office. Yes, there is internal debate.

But the BBC stands, at the end of this week, as a pluralistic, transparent institution that measured and debated its actions responsibly and morally.

In London, the range of debate about this statement is quite narrow: It's widely assumed (rightly or wrongly) that the statement was wrong, and the question is only: Did the press office or the Prime Minister innocently believe it, or knowingly disseminate a lie? The distinction is politically and morally germane, of course, but it's lose/lose for the government. Neither answer -- willful distortion or credulous delusion -- inspires public confidence.

Polly Toynbee concluded in The Guardian this week: "In the dangerous drama now unfolding, the BBC is only a sideshow. It is the government that stands indicted by that unanswerable recorded voice from the grave that will linger on in the public imagination . . ."

Whatever one thinks about Iraq, and however this story ends -- tarring or vindicating Mr. Blair -- there is another reason this ferocious debate about the press, and government, and war seems so vivid to me. In the United States, there are few parallel tensions, if any, between media and government on this story, and the public debate is nowhere near the toxicity of the British one. Is it a purely British phenomenon, or a harbinger of what will happen in the United States this fall?

Mark Starowicz, head of documentary production for the CBC, was executive producer of The Journal and Dawn of the Eye, a television series on the history of television news and its conflicts with governments.

© 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc

###