Tony Blair’s Washington visit and the curious case of a disappearing BBC s

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On Friday 26 May, just hours after Tony Blair and George Bush began talks in Washington on the “progress” of their occupation of Iraq, a curious article appeared on the BBC’s website. Headlined “Iran FM begins first Baghdad trip”, it was posted at 0617 GMT. Penned by one Pam O'Toole, it painted a faux-objective, strangely upbeat, picture of the Iranian foreign minister’s impending visit to Iraq.

This was all the more extraordinary because the US and British governments, through compliant sections of the media – including the BBC which is now virtually the official mouthpiece of the Blair government – have been engaged in a propaganda campaign demonising the Tehran government in preparation for an aerial assault on Iran.

In short, the article was strikingly out of tune with the anti-Iranian chorus which continues to insist that Tehran is almost incomprehensively evil and the mainstay of most world terrorism.I picked up a link to this article while browsing the rather selective “1st Headlines” site (http://www.1stheadlines.com). Within hours, it had disappeared from the BBC’s website, although O’Toole’s articles appear to be comprehensively archived there, some dating back to the late 1990s.

I haven’t followed O’Toole career, but on the evidence of this article she’d have been right at home scribbling for the Stalinist regime of the old USSR. To make this point a little clearer I couldn’t resist adding a few words (bold in square brackets) and deletions (struck through) and with those changes her report could be something one might have read in Pravda in the 1960s.

PNN