New evidence of cover up in Dr David Kelly's death. Doctors want inquest.

[Peter Lemkin]

The problem is that those who don't want an inquest [or a REAL one] know DAMN WELL that there was murder and deception involved, and by whom and why! Further, they don't want this information to be made public.....they will have to be forced, and that will not be easy. Polite entreaties are nice, but they won't do the trick - without massive public outrage and support, IMHO. Ditto JFK, RFK, MLK, 9/11, 7/7 and SO many other such. 'Will no one rid us of these damn 'priests'?'

[Albert Doyle]

Looks like we Jimi Hendrix justice people will have to get in line behind the Daniel Morgan, Dr Kelly justice people...

[David Guyatt]

The medical and scientific records of Dr. David Kelly's death were secretly sealed for 70 years. Most unusually in such cases, the inquest into his death was indefinitely adjourned by Lord Falconer after three weeks. Falconer was a close friend of Tony Blair favoured a less rigorous public inquiry chaired by a compliant judge (Lord Hutton) chosen by Lord Falconer within three hours of Kelly's death. Hutton returned a verdict of suicide --- to everyone's evident relief.

From the Daily Mail

Ten years ago today, Dr Kelly's body was found. The subsequent cover-up is one of the great scandals of our age

By STEPHEN GLOVER FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 00:31, 18 July 2013 | UPDATED: 00:31, 18 July 2013

132View comments

Dr David Kelly, a weapons expert working for the Ministry of Defence, was found dead ten years ago with his left wrist slashed. To this day, we still do not know for certain why or how Dr Kelly died

Ten years ago this morning, the body of a man was discovered in a wood near his Oxfordshire home.
His name was Dr David Kelly, a weapons expert working for the Ministry of Defence. His left wrist had been slashed.
Six weeks earlier, a BBC reporter called Andrew Gilligan had alleged that the Blair Government sexed up' its dossier making the case for war against Iraq. The Ministry of Defence subsequently identified Dr Kelly as his source. Days before his death, government spokesmen effectively revealed his name to the media.
Ten years have passed, and we still do not know for certain why or how Dr Kelly died. The official verdict of suicide was delivered not by a coroner, as should have been Dr Kelly's right under English law, but by a judge, Lord Hutton, in an inquiry set up by the Blair Government.
There are many anomalies, inconsistencies and dark passages in this story so many that I have to pinch myself to remember that it did not happen in China or Russia but in Britain, where the rule of law, and decency, are supposed to prevail.
An inquest did open into Dr Kelly's death, on July 21, 2003. But three weeks later, the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, ordered it to be adjourned indefinitely.
This is the same Lord Falconer who, so Lord Hutton has just confirmed, telephoned the judge only three hours after the discovery of Dr Kelly's body to ask him to chair an inquiry into the scientist's death.
And it is the same Lord Falconer who that same morning of July 18 had two telephone conversations with his former flatmate, patron and friend, Tony Blair, who was on an aeroplane from Washington to Tokyo.
Lord Falconer correctly believed he had identified a tame judge friendly to the Establishment. In due course, Lord Hutton returned his verdict of suicide, absolved the Government of any responsibility for Dr Kelly's death, and declared that Mr Blair, and his sidekick Alastair Campbell, had not exaggerated the case for war.

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That last contention is now disbelieved by about nine-tenths of sentient beings. I suspect that when Sir John Chilcot finally delivers his report into the Iraq war next year it has been delayed by obstructive civil servants defending Mr Blair's interests the remaining one-tenth will be forced to come around.
But the lack of an inquest into Dr Kelly's death (which forms no part of Sir John's remit) remains an outrage. Only in a handful of previous cases has a public inquiry overridden an inquest, and then only when there have been multiple deaths, such as in a rail crash.
Lord Hutton is not a coroner, and in the view of many observers he did not investigate the causes of Dr Kelly's death as thoroughly as a practised coroner would have done. For example, he did not call the police officer heading the investigation into Dr Kelly's death, Chief Inspector Alan Young.


An inquest did open into Dr Kelly's death, on July 21, 2003. But three weeks later, the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, ordered it to be adjourned indefinitely



Lord Falconer correctly believed he had identified a tame judge friendly to the Establishment. In due course, Lord Hutton returned his verdict of suicide, absolving the Government of any responsibility for Dr Kelly's death

Nor did he summon the scientist's close friend, Mai Pedersen, who would have been able to tell him that Dr Kelly had a weak right arm. In her opinion he was incapable of cutting steak, let alone his left wrist.
My point is not that Lord Hutton would have returned a different verdict had he weighed the evidence more exhaustively. It is that the scientist's death was not examined as it should have been, and so there must be a proper inquest. Unfortunately, the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, sympathetic to the idea in opposition, has changed his mind or had it changed for him.
On the whole, I don't think Dr Kelly was murdered. I say that because even in Blair's and Campbell's and Falconer's Britain I don't believe that agents of the State went around bumping off patriotic and decent civil servants who knew embarrassing secrets.
But perhaps I am being hopelessly naive. It has to be conceded that, in addition to Mai Pedersen's testimony, there are several fragments of evidence which are not easy to explain away, and should therefore be scrutinised in a coroner's court.
For example, doctors challenging the suicide verdict have argued that Dr Kelly could not possibly have bled to death by severing the tiny artery he supposedly cut with a blunt knife. Two ambulance crew members early on the scene have testified that there was very little blood when they arrived.


The lack of an inquest into Dr Kelly's death remains an outrage. Only in a handful of previous cases has a public inquiry overridden an inquest, and then only when there have been multiple deaths, such as in a rail crash

Freedom of Information requests carried out since Lord Hutton's inquiry have established that there were no fingerprints on the five items found by Dr Kelly's body, including the knife. No gloves were found on his body, or in the vicinity.
One theory is that spooks arriving to find Dr Kelly dead cleaned up the crime scene, and tampered with the evidence. That possibility obviously prompts a new set of disturbing questions.
It may well be, of course, that there is an answer to all these and other oddities, and that Dr Kelly, shocked by being suddenly thrown into the limelight, and devastated after being disowned by his employers at the Ministry of Defence, did take his own life.
But only a myopic Blair stooge could dismiss this evidence without it being tested by a coroner. Is it possible that the dark forces' to which the Queen allegedly once referred in the context of Princess Diana's death were at work in respect of Dr Kelly?

Lord Hutton is not a coroner, and in the view of many observers he did not investigate the causes of Dr Kelly's death as thoroughly as a practised coroner would have done

Interestingly, a freelance journalist called Miles Goslett, who has unearthed much useful information about this case, has discovered that all the medical and scientific records relating to Dr Kelly have been secretly sealed for 70 years. That seems a bit over the top, even in secrecy-obsessed Britain.
As I say, I'm not a natural conspiracy theorist, and I can't easily accept the idea that this loyal civil servant was murdered by the British State. Much more likely, it seems to me, he was at least partly driven to suicide after being disowned by the MoD, and outed by spin doctors answerable to Alastair Campbell.
They couldn't bear that he had told the truth to a BBC journalist, and one way or another they were determined to destroy him. If he wasn't murdered, he was effectively hounded to his death.
David Kelly lies in a perfect English churchyard in a lovely Oxfordshire village, far from the machinations of spooks and the lies of politicians. One way or another, this decent man was betrayed by the government for which he worked.
He's not the only victim. His unexplained death, and the lies of Blair and Campbell which lured us into a futile and probably illegal war, have contributed greatly to the public's disenchantment with politicians and the political process.
Perhaps Sir John Chilcot will eventually tell us the truth about Iraq. But the full truth of this tragic episode in our history will not be revealed unless there is an inquest into David Kelly's death.
The Government or spooks or dark forces continue to resist. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell continue to be treated as respectable figures. And David Kelly, a man who served the State, which killed him in one way or another, continues to be betrayed.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/articl...z45itX9F00
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[Paul Rigby]

The medical and scientific records of Dr. David Kelly's death were secretly sealed for 70 years. Most unusually in such cases, the inquest into his death was indefinitely adjourned by Lord Falconer after three weeks. Falconer was a close friend of Tony Blair favoured a less rigorous public inquiry chaired by a compliant judge (Lord Hutton) chosen by Lord Falconer within three hours of Kelly's death. Hutton returned a verdict of suicide --- to everyone's evident relief.

The betrayal of Dr David Kelly, 10 years on

Andrew Gilligan, the journalist at the centre of the 'dodgy dossier' row, reflects on the shocking facts that have emerged since Dr David Kelly's death

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics...rs-on.html

By Andrew Gilligan, 7:00AM BST 21 Jul 2013

I still remember, of course, how I heard about David Kelly's death. It started with an early-morning phone call from my friend Mick Smith, then defence correspondent of The Daily Telegraph. Dr Kelly had gone missing, and the police were looking for a body.

Even then, I couldn't really believe that he had died. Surely it was some sort of misunderstanding? Perhaps he'd just decided to go off for a few days and would turn up in some hotel, à la Stephen Fry? As soon as I got to the BBC, the director of news, Richard Sambrook, called me to his office. While I had been on the way in, he said, not sounding like he believed it himself, Dr Kelly's body had been found, and it looked like suicide. He'd taken painkilling tablets and slashed one of his wrists.

If Sambrook sounded shaken, it was nothing to how I sounded. He had to get me a glass of water to calm me down. But as well as being upset, I was very, very surprised. I hadn't known David all that well, but he didn't strike me as the suicidal type, if there is such a thing.

He was quite used to confrontation and pressure: he'd been a weapons inspector in Iraq, for goodness' sake. I thought his famous grilling by the Foreign Affairs Committee had been distasteful, and symptomatic of the committee's stupidity, but it hadn't been that bad. And the affair was tailing off. Politics was breaking for the summer, both the BBC and I had refused to confirm or deny whether David was my source, and the battle between us and Downing Street had essentially reached stalemate.

What a lot I didn't know. Even now, almost precisely 10 years since David Kelly's last journey, we are still learning just how extraordinary and inexcusable the behaviour of our rulers was both towards him, and in the wider cause, defending the Iraq war, for which he was outed and died. On July 18 2003, I did not consider myself a shockable person; I was an experienced, sceptical journalist with, I thought, a realistic idea of how politicians, intelligence officers and civil servants behaved. But over the months and years that followed, my views, and those of most of the country, changed. To borrow the famous words of David Astor over Suez, we had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness.

You probably remember Dr Kelly's main contention, which became the centrepiece of my BBC story that a government dossier making the case against Iraq had been "transformed" at the behest of Downing Street and Alastair Campbell "to make it sexier", with the "classic example" being the insertion in the final week of a claim, based on a single source, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could be deployed within 45 minutes. The intelligence services were unhappy about the 45-minute claim, David said. They believed it was unreliable. In the first of my 18 broadcasts on the story, I added a claim, mistakenly attributing it to David, that the Government probably knew the 45-minute claim was wrong.

What we now know is that at precisely the same moment as the Government was launching hysterical attacks on the BBC and on me for reporting this, Whitehall had quietly conceded that it was true. In July 2003, literally as David Kelly was outed, MI6 secretly withdrew the 45-minute intelligence as unreliable and badly-sourced.

What we now know is that according to Major General Michael Laurie, the head of the Defence Intelligence Staff at the time of the dossier, "we could find no evidence of planes, missiles or equipment that related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It was clear to me that pressure was being applied to the Joint Intelligence Committee and its drafters. Every fact was managed to make the dossier as strong as possible. The final statements in the dossier reached beyond the conclusions intelligence assessments would normally draw from such facts."

What we now know is that, according to an MI6 officer working on the dossier, the 45-minute claim was "based in part on wishful thinking" and was not "fully validated". Another MI6 officer said that "there were from the outset concerns" in the intelligence services about "the extent to which the intelligence could support some of the judgments that were being made".

What we now know is that on September 17 and 18 2002, a week before the dossier was published, Alastair Campbell sent memos to its author, Sir John Scarlett, saying that he and Tony Blair were "worried" that on Saddam's nuclear capability the dossier gave the (accurate) impression that "there's nothing much to worry about". On September 19, Campbell emailed Scarlett again, suggesting the insertion of a totally false claim that, in certain circumstances, Saddam could produce nuclear weapons in as little as a year. This fabrication duly appeared in the dossier.

What we now know is that in his September 17 memo, Campbell suggested 15 other changes to the text of the dossier. Most were accepted; their effect was to harden the document's language from possibility to probability, or probability to certainty. Campbell lied to Parliament about the content of this memo, giving the Foreign Affairs Committee an altered copy which omitted his comments on the 45-minute claim and played down his interventions on most of the other issues.

And what we now know is that, contrary to his campaigning certainty at the time, Blair admits in his memoirs that he privately saw the case for war against Iraq as "finely balanced". No wonder a little tipping of the scales was needed or, as Blair also put it in his book, "politicians are obliged from time to time to conceal the full truth, to bend it and even distort it, where the interests of the bigger strategic goal demand that it be done".

We knew nothing of this then. Indeed, in his evidence to the Hutton inquiry, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, described the 45-minute claim, straight-faced, as "a piece of well-sourced intelligence", two months after his own service had discredited it. Despite his key role as Dearlove's military counterpart, General Laurie was never called to Hutton at all; his explosive statement, and that of the two MI6 people, emerged only in 2011, at the Chilcot inquiry.

I don't blame you if you knew nothing of all this until now; most of it, by happy coincidence, came out only long after public attention had moved on, and the government could no longer be damaged.
But the government knew and this is what makes its behaviour towards the BBC and David Kelly so incredible. He came forward to his bosses as my source under a promise that his identity would be kept secret, but was effectively given up to the world after Campbell, in his words, decided to "open a flank on the BBC" to distract attention from his difficulties over the dossier.

Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, the FAC, was inquiring into the dossier. After it failed to denounce me to Campbell's satisfaction, he confided to his diary that "the biggest thing needed was the source out". That afternoon, on Downing Street's orders, Ministry of Defence press officers announced that a source had come forward, handed out clues allowing anyone with Google to guess who he was, then kindly confirmed it to any reporter who guessed right. One newspaper was allowed to put more than 20 names to the MoD before it got to Dr Kelly's.

Once outed, Dr Kelly was openly belittled by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw. The FAC, by the way, didn't want to question him its inquiry had finished and its report had already been published but Downing Street forced it to hold a special hearing anyway. The day before, for several hours, he was intensively coached in the need to "f---" me. Under great pressure, he blurted an untruth in the glare of the TV lights; an untruth which, on the morning of his death, his bosses told him they would investigate.

Dr Kelly defined himself by his work and his reputation for integrity. The fear of losing it must have been terrifying, even if it was almost certainly unfounded. Understanding that is one reason why I am certain that he did indeed kill himself, for all some people's obsession to the contrary.

They'll hate this comparison, but there's an odd symmetry between the Kelly conspiracy theorists and Mr Blair. In both cases, their convictions seem to require them to fit the facts into unusual shapes. For Dr Kelly to have been murdered, as the pathologist's report makes clear, it would have needed someone to force 29 pills down his throat, making him swallow them without protest. Then they would have had to get him to sit on the ground without any restraint, making no attempt to defend himself, while they had sawn away at his wrist with a knife. That knife, by the way, came from the desk drawer in Dr Kelly's study, so they'd also have had to burgle his house to get it.

The even more telling question, though, is what motive anyone could have had for murder. Even if you believe the British government goes round bumping off its employees in cold blood, killing David Kelly would simply not have been in its interest. It was guaranteed to create a scandal and a crisis, as anyone with an iota of sense would have known. There's no need to claim that David Kelly was murdered; his suicide is scandal enough.

Ten years on, there are some Groundhog Day elements. Over successive crises, the BBC's management has been as incompetent as ever. Politicians still appear to think that set-piece inquiries are worth the paper they're written on despite the evidence from Lord Hutton's and Sir John Chilcot's efforts on Iraq, the latter entering its fifth year with few signs of a report.

Whatever Chilcot may eventually say, the debate on the war appears to have been decided. Few would now dispute the dossier was sexed up. But there is still a fascinating degree of dispute about David Kelly. I have sometimes asked myself why the self-inflicted death of one scientist should matter to us as much as, if not more than, the violent deaths of perhaps 120,000 Iraqis (535 of them this month alone, by the way so much for making Iraq safe for democracy).

I think it's partly because there may still be some excuses for what the Government did in Iraq. They expected it to be like Kosovo: the operation would succeed, the troops be welcomed and the predictions of doom confounded. They expected, too, that a few barrels of WMD would probably be found that could have been cast as a threat. Even the charge of "lying" about those weapons is not quite cast-iron: I prefer the charge I made, of sexing-up, or exaggeration. I and most others always thought Iraq had something in the WMD line; the exaggeration lay in the fact that it was nowhere near threatening enough to justify a war.

But there are no excuses for what the government did to the BBC and to Dr Kelly. He was outed to further a series of denials which we can, quite plainly, call lies. An explanation, if not an excuse, may rest in Campbell's mental state: even Blair, in his memoirs, called him a "crazy person" who by that stage "had probably gone over the edge". But that doesn't explain the really scary part: how the machinery of government, in a mature democracy such as Britain's, allowed itself to be captured by someone in that state.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former MI6 chief responsible for the dossier, was once asked what he thought of me. Flatteringly, he said: "I wouldn't want you to print my views on Andrew Gilligan." My own views on Sir Richard, Sir John Scarlett and the other distinguished knights of Iraq who got too close to New Labour are perfectly printable: they failed catastrophically in their duty, bringing their professions, their services and their country into deep, possibly permanent, disrepute.

[David Guyatt]

The problem with Gilligan's argument that Kelly killed himself is that I don't think it accounts for the medical evidence - at least that part we know, because the government has sealed it all for 70 years, itself an indicator, for me, that there is something to hide.

I was a member of the Kelly Investigation Group until I had to leave due to time constraints at the time, and the doctors who were part of this private investigative group - especially David Halpin, a one time trauma surgeon, regarded the wounds on his wrist to be de facto neglible and impossible for the exsanguination necessary to result in death, and that because of their small size clotting would have quickly occurred and the wounds shut down and closed.

My guess is that we're not going to know the reality until the 70 years is up. If then.

[Michael Barwell]

Seems the Telegraph picks'n'chooses as it likes - they've just given a resounding two-fingers to an Orgreave clear-up inquiry - There is no case for an Orgreave inquiry - TELEGRAPH VIEW - 6 MAY 2016 6:21AM - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/...e-inquiry/
How they can think "justice delayed is justice denied" on the one hand, and "stuff the miners" on the other, is something of a curiosity.