A crude attempt to smear the critics of the war

Close analysis shows that al-Jazeera is no more an instrument of Baghdad than the BBC is of New Labour

It is strange, is it not, that the critics of the Anglo-American war against Iraq find themselves, one by one, besmirched by documents said to come from the files of Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency. First to be splattered with mud was President Chirac, then George Galloway MP and now, over the weekend, the influential al-Jazeera TV network, the so-called "CNN of the Arab world". When looked at closely, these stories turn out to be hardly worth the newsprint on which they are published.

Newspapers know this even though they put the stuff on their front pages. Thus the headline in The Sunday Times told us that Saddam's spies "infiltrated" the television network. The use of inverted commas was in effect a warning that the material was flimsy. So is the repeated use of the formula that so-and-so-claims that something is the case, as in "the intelligence service claimed to have successfully influenced the content of the network".

Then we learn that "according to the documents" an al-Jazeera employee was an Iraqi agent. Likewise we read that this same gentleman "allegedly" helped the regime to gain favourable coverage, in this way mimicking the techniques of court reporting where no presumption of guilt can be made. The newspaper even made use of the old weasel phrase that something "purports" to reveal that such-and-such is the case.

On the other hand, what would we have learnt by assuming that everything the intelligence documents showed was true? First, that Iraqi intelligence had three agents working inside the network: one was involved with international relations for the station, the two others were cameramen.

Secondly, that the three people provided Iraqi intelligence with specific help. The international relations executive helped the regime gain more favourable coverage, giving advice, for instance, on how the regime could most effectively plant pro-Iraq voices on the station's programmes. As for the cameramen, one gave information on his colleagues' views, while the other furnished the Iraqi authorities with footage from the 1991 Gulf War.

Thirdly, all three appear to have been Iraqi citizens and thus unfortunately subject to the sort of pressure that Saddam Hussein's government knew only too well how to apply, involving if need be the victim's families.

What is striking is that, even if true, this amounts to little, although it was the lead story on Channel 4 news on Saturday evening. The three individuals apparently suborned by the Iraqis were small fry. I don't know exactly what being involved with international relations at the station comprised, but it clearly did not include being a reporter or a newscaster or an anchor on a show, or being a programme researcher or editor. It must have been a back-office job of some kind. And cameramen are not part of the decision-making process.

Moreover, helping a government gain more favourable coverage from a station is not in itself a highly disturbing activity. Many governments use public relations firms in Western capitals to achieve the same result. It's not like being involved in manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. Likewise, from time to time, all news organisations find that they have been employing dubious staff, as the startling apology in yesterday's New York Times shows.

In addition, close analysis of al-Jazeera's output does not yield the conclusion that it had become, as the Iraqi intelligence documents claimed, an instrument of Baghdad – no more than the BBC is an instrument of New Labour, as Iain Duncan Smith sought to suggest over the weekend.

More interesting, I think, is the provenance of the documents implicating al-Jazeera as an unwitting tool of Saddam Hussein. It appears that the material was left over from a bonfire of intelligence papers that took place after American forces had captured Baghdad.

Luckily, an officer of the Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Saddam Hussein organisation recently returned to the capital from exile abroad, turned up – just in time – to retrieve what had not been burnt. The INC, whose leader is the controversial Ahmed Chalabi, favoured by the Pentagon but not by the US State Department, has had poor relations with al-Jazeera.

At all events, the al-Jazeera files were shared with American intelligence and leaked to The Sunday Times. The newspaper is part of Rupert Murdoch's empire as is the Fox TV news operation, responsible for the most gung-ho coverage of any US network. If al-Jazeera was at one end of the spectrum in its reporting of the Iraq war, Fox represented the other pole.

By what sort of evidence should we be impressed? In the first place, al-Jazeera would have had to have a reputation for acting as a mouthpiece for the Saddam Hussein regime, rather like Radio Moscow during the Cold War. Without that the story lacks basic credibility.

Secondly, penetration of the station by Iraqi agents would have had to have been much more far-reaching than one functionary and two cameramen. And thirdly, the documentary evidence would have to have been untainted by association with intelligence agencies. Without these elements, the story cuts no ice at all.