The Guardian. BBC's Panorama to air new Iraq WMD investigation

The BBC is planning a new investigation into claims about weapons of mass destruction made in the run-up to the Iraq war in a special hour-long episode of Panorama, ten years after a report caused one of the biggest crises in the corporation's history.
Andrew Gilligan's Today programme report in 2003 that Tony Blair's government had "sexed up" intelligence information about WMDs, which later turned out not to exist, prompted an almighty row that led to the departures of both the director general Greg Dyke and the BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies.

BBC sources insisted that the programme is "not intended as a look back to the past" but is a "look forward" to the findings of the report by Sir John Chilcot into the reasons for the conflict, which is due to report towards the end of this year

The documentary comes at a difficult time for the BBC in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal and the Pollard report, which highlighted key journalistic mistakes in the making of a Newsnight report that wrongly implicated Lord McAlpine in a story about sexual abuse

The BBC said: "Panorama's experienced team has an excellent record of managing investigations on a daily basis.