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The
'strange' death of Dr David Kelly | George Galloway
George
Galloway spoke with Miles Goslett, author of 'An Inconvenient Death:
How the Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Affair' about the
events surrounding the "strange" passing of Dr Kelly
If
David Kelly had died on March 4 this year, and had he been a Russian
exile, we can be sure the media would be screaming that Putin
murdered him, and the numerous inconsistencies in his alleged
“suicide” would be front page news. But when Kelly actually died
in 2005, the only country potentially implicated in his death was
Britain. And so the UK media were silent .
Theresa
May has, on the basis of no published evidence whatsoever, and
without any adherence to the bare minimum of due process, declared
Russia “culpable” for the alleged Skripal poisoning. The message
in the media is that any other potential perpetrator is not even to
be considered, even though the alleged toxin used – Novichok –
would have been obtainable by other state actors and individuals, and
even though other states would appear to have far more motive in
creating this international incident at this time. Russian “guilt”
is being established a priori by the implicit suggestion that only
Russia indulges in political murder.
The
Kelly case reminds us that it isn’t only Russians who die
mysteriously on British soil. Here is a film by PressTV (banned from
the UK as RT may well soon be) looking at some of the anomalies
Body
Of Iraq WMD Whistleblower Exhumed, Cremated After Calls To
Investigate His Death
The
body of a chemical weapons expert who was critical of the UK’s use
of “weapons of mass destruction” as a pretense for war, was
unearthed and cremated.
This
past week, the Kelly family decided to unearth the corpse of their
beloved family member and cremate his remains. In 2003, Dr. David
Kelly, formerly a United Nations (UN) weapons inspector and member of
the Ministry of Defence (UK), walked into the woods near his home,
ate a couple dozen opiates, slit his left wrist, and died.
That
was the official cause of death, but conspiracy theorists believe
Kelly was killed by members of his own government. Even now, after 14
years, many activists say an official coroner’s inquiry into his
death should take place. But it’s what Kelly said, or was reported
to have said, which some believe got him officially assassinated, and
his death made to look like a suicide.
After
9/11/01, just as the United States needed Iraq to possess weapons of
mass destruction (WMDs), so did the United Kingdom need the Middle
Eastern county to possess them in an effort to get its people on
board with a preemptive attack on a sovereign nation. Kelly was a
chemical weapons experts employed by the United Nations to inspect
Iraq’s chemical weapons programs.
In
2002, in an off the record interview with the BBC’s Andrew
Gilligan, Kelly told reporters the dossier the UK Prime Minister Tony
Blaire used to justify the invasion of Iraq was “sexed up” and
that he had personally inspected the supposed mobile chemical weapons
plants and stated they were nothing more than helium factories for
filling balloons.
They
are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for
making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are
exactly what the Iraqis said they were – facilities for the
production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.
As
an employee with the Defense Department, he was allowed to speak with
members of the media but only on the condition of anonymity and was
often referred to as “a scientist” with the government as the
media’s confidential source.
All
that changed when he started being more vocal about his doubts that
Saddam Hussein’s military was capable of launching a battlefield
chemical weapons attack within “45 minutes” of being given the
order. He admitted the country probably did possess some chemical
weapons but it was his opinion they were not capable of making them
battlefield ready in such a short period of time.
After
being outed by the media as the scientist making those controversial
claims (implying the government was using WMDs as a weak argument for
going to war), he was called before an official government inquiry
and grilled. He was forced to answer questions related to which
reporters he’d spoken to and what he’d actually communicated.
Two
days after being in the literal hot seat (the air conditioning had to
be turned off because Kelly was such a soft-spoken person), the
microbiologist walked off into the woods and killed himself. And
that’s when the conspiracy theories were launched, made possible by
the government’s attempt at secrecy, even going so far as to
classify the details of his death for 70 years.
Those
critical of the events surrounding the death of the chemical weapons
expert and member of the military pointed to several facts in the
case which remained unexplained;
The
artery which was cut was not capable of killing someone.
Paramedics
went on record as saying there was not enough blood on the scene to
conclude he’d bled out.
There
were no fingerprints found on the knife used nor the prescription
bottle of pills he supposedly took.
The
government has refused to open an official coroner’s inquiry into
his death, for the first time in modern history of someone of his
status.
The
government’s decision to classify his death as a suicide after
only an official government inquiry, and the subsequent labeling of
the details of his death as a state secret (marked classified for 70
years) was indicative that foul play was involved.
Even
a group of doctors were seeking legal recourse to be allowed to
investigate Kelly’s death. But what made his family dig up his body
last week and cremate his remains was a consequence of vandals,
according to those close to the family who said that the many
conspiracy theorists visiting his grave and holding vigils was
unnerving for them. They said it was a desecration. At any rate, any
clues found in his corpse as to how he died, if he was killed, why he
died, have all been obliterated.
But
it is likely Kelly’s cremation will not be the end of the ordeal as
activists are still determined to get to the bottom of why the
whistleblower would feel the need to kill himself and make such a
mess of his own suicide. It’s ultimately not the way a scientist
would likely have taken his or her life.
In
2007, Norman Baker wrote an article written for the DailyMail titled,
“Why I know weapons expert Dr. David Kelly was murdered, by the MP
who spent a year investigating his death.” In it, Baker theorized
Kelly was either murdered by his own government, by Saddam loyalists,
Mossad, South Africans or even by the Central Intelligence Agency,
among other possible bad actors. He concluded:
This
now infamous “45-minute claim” fed through to the dossier of
intelligence which was used as the justification for our involvement
in the invasion of Iraq. It was this dossier, and the 45-minute claim
in particular, that David Kelly challenged in his crucial interview
with the BBC. By doing so, did he sign his own death warrant?
A
repost. Never was this more relevant than after the publication of
the Chilcott Report
In
retrospect: the death of Dr David Kelly in 2003
Recently
I heard Guy McPherson and Mike Silwa joking between themselves and
wondering aloud if they had much more to say on their radio show that
hadn’t been said before.
I
must say I have been feeling the same increasingly as I struggle to
keep up with the daily headlines which testify to things
deteriorating at breakneck pace on every front.
I
have been wondering if people out there are feeling the same with a
slight fall-off of numbers reading this blog and a fall-off in
Facebook activity.
Doomer
fatigue?
How
long before we have to say that we’ve got it and we can’t keep up
with the obsessive following of the race to the bottom?
That
has got me interested in taking pause and looking back to get some
sense of how we got from There to Here.
In
terms of the elite’s War on the Truth it is clear that media
organisations such as the BBC (I know far more about the British
media than the American one) have always tried to please their
political superiors and have not wanted to upset the applecart too
much.
However,
in the past they were always willing to ask questions. Now they are
plainly NOT and are no more than the propaganda arms of imperialist
governments.
I
always knew that 9/11 and the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq were
key in this. In the British context I was vaguely aware of the “dodgy
dossier”, sexed up by the government, to justify the illegal
invasion of a sovereign nation. I was aware,in the back of my mind,
of the case of Dr.David Kelly (althought I had forgotten his name and
of the whitewash that followed) and that the BBC had been forced to
apologise for telling the truth.
This
was followed by a purge of the BBC with management and some
journalists being removed.
Since
then, the BBC has died as a quasi-independent broadcaster and become
nothing more than the mouthpiece of the government.
It
is clear that Dr. Kelly was assassinated- at the very least the idea
that he committed suicide is preposterous.
The
British state has, in all probability, been responsible for at least
two high-profile cases (Dr Kelly and Princess Diana) and quite
possibly for the murder of Litvinenko (pinned on Vladimir Putin) as
well as the suiciding of Boris Berzovsky.
Below,
I have provided some resources to look at the background to Britain’s
support for the invasion of Iraq.
I'm
not usually one for conspiracy theories but the death of David Kelly
struck me at the time as distinctly odd, sinister even. Over the
summer of 2003, when like most journalists I was gripped by the
Hutton inquiry, the suspicion that he may not have taken his own life
was always at the back of my mind. So I was intrigued by last
night's Conspiracy
Files on
BBC2, which revisited the tragedy.
To
recap: David Kelly was the government scientist at the centre of a
huge, poisonous row between the government and the BBC. The row arose
from allegations that the government used evidence in a dossier
making the case for war in Iraq knowing that the information was
probably wrong. Kelly was outed by the government as the source of
the controversial report by Today reporter Andrew Gilligan and
endured a notoriously vicious grilling at the hands of a
parliamentary select committee.
Three
days later he was found dead, slumped against a tree on Harrowdown
Hill, near Oxford, his wrists slashed and half-empty packets of the
drug Coproxamol at his side. The Hutton
inquiry -
which called witnesses including the Prime Minister, Alastair
Campbell and the future head of MI6 - was set up to investigate his
death. The report, published in January 2004, exonerated the
government and excoriated the BBC's journalism, leading to the
departure of both the corporation's chairman and director-general.
Lord Hutton also concluded that Kelly had committed suicide, the
assumption that had prevailed from the time of his death.
Last
night's programme spoke to a number of people who have doubts about
the official verdict, including the earnest Kelly-ologist Rowena
Thursby and
Liberal Democrat MP Norman
Baker.
(There was also a rather excitable barrister who claimed to have a
hotline to international intelligence agencies and spotted
similarities between Kelly's death and the plot of a Tom Clancy
novel.) As with most conspiracy theories, the case against the
official verdict springs from strange details rather than compelling
counter-evidence.
Many
medical experts find Kelly's method of suicide unconvincing. Would
the incisions to his wrists have caused sufficient blood loss to kill
him? Paramedics who attended the scene have spoken out about how
little blood they saw. And why did the toxicology report indicate a
level of Coproxamol in his system that is usually non-fatal?
The
sceptics also believe that the Hutton inquiry was in some respects
inadequate. It supplanted a standard inquest, invoking an almost
unprecedented legal power to do so, but did not take evidence under
oath. The doubters think evidence pertaining to the physical
circumstances of the death was insufficiently heard and scrutinised.
There
are also questions about Kelly's state of mind. Clearly, he was
undergoing great stress and had been to some extent publicly
humiliated after a proud career working as one of Britain's top
experts on Iraq's weapons programme. But emails sent shortly before
he went out for his last walk looked forward to a time when the
controversy would "blow over". Why would he be suicidal
given that the worst had apparently already happened?
So
can you infer from these doubts that Kelly was murdered? Hardly,
despite whisperings from intelligence sources that it was a "wet
disposal", ie a rushed assassination. And who would have
benefited? Did the secret services really need to silence him, given
that so much had come out anyway? A former colleague of his who was
highly critical of the way Kelly was treated by the government
scoffed at the notion. Last night's programme also put some of the
medical irregularities to independent experts, who were able to
explain them way.
Nevertheless
there are many peculiarities about the case. Perhaps because Kelly's
widow is sure that he killed himself, the "conspiracy theory"
has gained little ground. Nor is evidence abundant, and last night's
programme struggled to fill the hour. As the heat generated by the
Iraq war fades over the years, Kelly's death seems destined to be
abandoned by all but the most ardent conspiracy theorists and to go
down as merely a fishy footnote to a far greater political
controversy.
From Press TV
The Death of Dr. Kelly: An Open Case
Dr
David Kelly Iraq War Cover Up Conspiracy - Norman Baker MP
The
Death of Dr. David Kelly. Murdered on the Orders of Her Majesty’s
Government? By
Dr. David Halpin and James Corbett
On
July 18, 2003, British biowarfare expert and UN weapons inspector
David Kelly was found dead on Harrowdown Hill, near his home in
Oxfordshire. Ruled a suicide by the official judicial inquiry chaired
by Lord Hutton, now a group of British doctors is challenging the
Attorney General’s decision not to hold a coroner’s inquest into
the death, citing the overlooked, suppressed and modified evidence
suggesting Dr. Kelly was murdered.
This
is the GRTV Backgrounder on The Death of Dr. David Kelly.
From
the outset, there have been questions about the nature and timing of
Dr. David Kelly’s death, as well as the official investigation and
subsequent inquiry into the events of that day.
As
a UN weapons inspector who had been to Iraq dozens of times to
investigate allegations of Saddam Hussein’s bioweapons stockpile,
Kelly became the centre of attention in the summer of 2003 when he
was revealed as the source of a controversial BBC report alleging
that the Blair government had “sexed up” its dossier on Iraqi
WMD. In the wake of that scandal, he was called to testify before a
parliamentary committee investigating the BBC report and was
aggressively questioned about his role in the scandal. He was
found dead two days later.
As
a UN weapons inspector who had been to Iraq dozens of times to
investigate allegations of Saddam Hussein’s bioweapons stockpile,
Kelly became the centre of attention in the summer of 2003 when he
was revealed as the source of a controversial BBC report alleging
that the Blair government had “sexed up” its dossier on Iraqi
WMD. In the wake of that scandal, he was called to testify before a
parliamentary committee investigating the BBC report and was
aggressively questioned about his role in the scandal. He was found
dead two days later.
The
official inquiry into that death, the Hutton Inquiry, was quickly
convened and issue its report in January 2004, officially concluding
that Dr. Kelly had taken his own life by a combination of slitting
his left wrist and overdosing on coproxamol. Over the course of the
decade, however, information has come to light suggesting that the
Hutton Inquiry not only ignored key evidence in the case pointing to
foul play, but that the report in fact actively covered up such
evidence.
The
cover up into Dr. Kelly’s death seemingly began before it even
started. Operation Mason, the official police investigation into Dr.
Kelly’s death, started nine hours before his family even reported
him missing.
One
of the key witnesses to the Hutton Inquiry and the man who found Dr.
Kelly’s body, Detective Constable Coe, now admits that there was
surprisingly little blood at the scene for a man who supposedly bled
to death. Stunningly, he also admits that he lied to the inquiry in
saying that there was only himself and his partner at the scene that
day, now admitting that there was an unidentified third man there
that many have speculated was someone with the security services.
David
Bartlett, the paramedic who pronounced Dr. Kelly dead at the scene,
claimed that his body had obviously been moved and confirmed there
was surprisingly little blood near the body, saying “I’ve seen
more blood at a nosebleed than I saw there.” He also said that as
soon as the body was found, the police threw a “blackout” around
the scene. He was even banned from speaking to his own control room
over radio, the first time that this had happened in his career.
A
flight log released under the Freedom of Information Act earlier this
year proves that a helicopter landed at the scene just 90 minutes
after the discovery of the body. The flight log, which has been
heavily redacted, shows that the helicopter only remained on the
ground for five minutes before taking off. To this day, the presence
of the helicopter at the scene has never been officially explained
and there is no indication as to what it was dropping off or picking
up from the scene of the crime.
In
2008, one of his colleagues and personal confidants, Mai Pederson,
came forward to say that Dr. Kelly could not have killed himself in
the manner suggested because he had difficulty using his right hand
for strenuous activities because of a painful injury he had sustained
to his right elbow. Still, the official conclusion of the Hutton
Inquiry holds that Kelly used a knife in his right hand to slit his
left wrist.
Perhaps
the most compelling evidence, however, is the testimony of a group of
doctors who have come together in recent years to provide expert
testimony challenging the official claim of suicide.
It
is their contention that the verdict of suicide does not fit with the
medical evidence presented in the case, and they have formed a group
in recent years to petition the UK government to convene a coroner’s
inquest into the death, something that should have been done in the
first place but was not.
Last
week I had the chance to talk to one of the doctors who has been
vocal in challenging the results of the Hutton Inquiry, Dr. David
Halpin. I asked him about some of the medical evidence that
problematizes the official verdict that Dr. Kelly’s death was a
suicide.
Shortly
after the group of doctors and barristers questioning Dr. Kelly’s
death formed in 2009 to put pressure on the government to re-open the
investigation, it was revealed that Lord Hutton had taken the
extraordinary measure of classifying all of the medical records used
by the inquiry, including the post-mortem findings and photographs of
the body, for 70 years, a decision that not even the Ministry of
Justice was able to explain the legal basis for.
A
widespread public backlash forced the government to release the
post-mortem documents in late 2010. After reviewing the post-mortem,
Dr. Michael Powers, QC, a former coroner and one of the doctors
demanding an inquest, noted that there was in fact no new information
revealed in the report and that the release of the documents may have
been an attempt to close off the option of a coroner’s inquest into
the death in the face of massive public support for the reopening of
the Kelly case.
Indeed,
in June of 2011, UK Attorney General Dominic Grieve did refuse to
open an inquest into the matter.
Now,
Dr. Halpin is involved in an attempt to open a judicial review into
the decision not to convene an inquest on the death. Paying for the
proceedings out of his own pocket, this retired orthopedic surgeon is
now shouldering the brunt of the responsibility for attempting to see
a proper investigation into the many discrepancies in the Dr. Kelly
case.
In
recent months an independent grassroots campaign to raise funds for
the legal battle for an inquest has sprung up, and the public
continues to show great concern over this case.
In
my conversation, I had the chance to ask Dr. Halpin about the
public’s support, and why convening an inquest into Dr. Kelly’s
death is a matter of such importance.
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