The BBC and the sanctions coverage is a two-part judgement John Kiriakou gave on 3 March 2026, when a viewer in the United Kingdom observed that the BBC is seen as biased at home and comparatively neutral in America, and asked how that could be.
Ted Rall proposed the asymmetry — that the BBC is less trustworthy about British domestic affairs and less biased about the United States — and Kiriakou agreed with it, then gave the reason. “The BBC has has a long history of of offering both sides. Which we we don’t do here in the United States.”[1][2]
The assessment is consistent with the reading habit he prescribes elsewhere, in which the BBC is one of the outlets he samples daily precisely because it is not domestically aligned with him.
What it sounded like from the inside
The endorsement is not uncritical, and the qualification comes from his own service. “And you know what? When I was in the CIA and we were getting ready to to to liberate Kuwait, it would drive me crazy to watch the BBC.”[2]
What drove him mad was a specific line of coverage, which he reproduces as an argument he had to sit through: “yeah, the the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, but the poor starving Iraqi children, the sanctions are killing them.”[2]
His objection was factual rather than editorial. “But but food’s not sanctioned. It’s this It’s just that Saddam won’t distribute the food. That drove me nuts.”[2][3]
The two positions together
Kiriakou does not reconcile the two halves, and the article does not either. The same institution earns his approval for the structural habit of putting both sides on air and his lasting irritation for what that habit produced in one case he had standing to check — a broadcaster giving airtime to a humanitarian claim he believed misassigned the blame from Saddam Hussein to the sanctions regime.[2][3]