Iraq whistleblower Dr Kelly WAS murdered to silence him, says MP
By FIONA BARTON - More by this author »
Last updated at 00:18am on 20th October 2007
Weapons expert Dr David Kelly was assassinated, an MP claims today.
Campaigning politician Norman Baker believes Dr Kelly, who exposed the Government's "sexed-up" Iraq dossier, was killed to stop him making further revelations about the lies that took Britain to war.
He says the murderers may have been anti-Saddam Iraqis, and suggests the crime was covered up by elements within the British establishment to prevent a diplomatic crisis.
'Murdered': Weapons' expert David Kelly
The LibDem MP, who gave up his front bench post to carry out his year-long investigation, makes his claims in a book serialised exclusively in the Daily Mail today and next week.
The official Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr Kelly ruled in 2004 that he slashed one of his wrists with a garden knife and took an overdose after being "outed" as the mole who revealed the flawed argument for invading Iraq.
But Norman Baker is convinced the scientist was murdered.
He says he was told by a secret informant that British police knew about the plot but failed to act in time and that the death was later made to look like a suicide to prevent political and diplomatic turmoil.
The highly-respected MP's personal quest to uncover the truth about Dr Kelly's death was prompted by deep concerns over the circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide.
He - and a group of eminent doctors - were greatly troubled by the evidence presented to Lord Hutton.
They claimed medical evidence proved that the alleged method of suicide - the cutting of the ulnar artery in the wrist and an overdose of co-proxamol painkillers - could not have caused the scientist's death.
Mr Baker said: "The more I examined [Lord Hutton's verdict], the more it became clear to me that Hutton's judgment was faulty and suspect in virtually all important respects."
His findings are today revealed in the first extract from his book The Strange Death of David Kelly. In it, he claims:
• No fingerprints were found on the gardening knife allegedly used by the scientist to cut one of his wrists;
• Only one other person in the whole of the British Isles committed suicide in the same way as the scientist allegedly did in 2003;
• There was an astonishing lack of blood at the scene despite death being officially recorded as due to a severed artery;
• The level of painkillers found in Dr Kelly's stomach was "less than a third" of a normal fatal overdose.
The Lewes MP also suggests that the knife and packs of painkillers found beside Dr Kelly's body were taken from his home in Southmoor, Oxfordshire, during a police search after his death and later planted at the scene.
He tells in his book how he was contacted by "informants" during his "journey into the unknown".
One is alleged to have told him Dr Kelly's death had been "a wet operation, a wet disposal".
Mr Baker explains: "Essentially, it seems to refer to an assassination, perhaps carried out in a hurry."
Another secret contact told him that a group of UK-based Iraqis had "named people who claimed involvement in Dr Kelly's death".
The informant was later the victim of "an horrific attack by an unknown assailant".
The MP, who has repeatedly called for the police to re-open the case, alleges that the scientist had "powerful enemies" because of his work on biological weapons. A colleague of Dr Kelly, Dick Spertzel, America's most senior biological weapons inspector, confirmed to Mr Baker that the scientist was "on an Iraqi hit list".
Mr Baker alleges that opponents of Saddam Hussein feared Dr Kelly would "discredit" them by revealing "misinformation" they had deliberately planted to bolster the case for Britain and America's intervention in Iraq.
The MP claims Kelly's integrity might have "signed his own death warrant".
The book also alleges that British police "had got wind of a possible plan to assassinate Dr Kelly but were too late to prevent his murder taking place".
The MP suggests that the police may have tried to make the killing appear to be a suicide "in the interests of Queen and country" and to prevent any destabilisation of the sensitive relationship between the Allies and Iraq.
Mr Baker adds: "It is all too easy to dismiss so-called conspiracy theories. But history shows us that conspiracies do happen - and that suicide can be staged to cover murderers' tracks.
"All the evidence leads me to believe that this is what happened in the case of Dr Kelly."
Why I know weapons expert Dr David Kelly was murdered, by the MP who spent a year investigating his death
By NORMAN BAKER - More by this author »
Last updated at 00:13am on 20th October 2007
For Tony Blair it was a glorious day. He was in the United States being feted by the U.S. Congress and President Bush.
Their adulation was such that he was being offered the rare honour of a Congressional Gold Medal.
Naturally enough, Bush and his administration were hugely grateful for Blair's decision to join the United States in its invasion of Iraq.
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Under fire: Dr Kelly being quizzed by MPs
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Click here for Part Two of Norman Baker's shocking investigation
Iraq whistleblower Dr Kelly WAS murdered to silence him, says MP
That invasion was supposed to lead to the discovery and disposal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and make the world a safer place.
But as Blair was lapping up the grateful plaudits from the U.S. Congress on July 17, 2003, the man who had done more than almost any other individual on earth to contain the threat from WMD lay dead in the woods at Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire.
For Dr David Kelly, the UK's leading weapons inspector, there was to be no adulation, no medal, no standing ovation.
His life ended in the cold, lonely wood where he was found the next morning, his left wrist cut open, and three nearly-empty blister packs of painkillers in his jacket pocket.
His death was, of course, sensational front-page news. Dr Kelly, unknown to almost everybody at the beginning of that July, had in recent days barely been absent from media headlines.
Much to his chagrin he had been thrust into the harsh glare of publicity, accused of being the mole who expressed to the BBC deep concerns about the Government's "sexing up" of its dossier on weapons of mass destruction.
For Blair - accused of misusing, exaggerating or even inventing intelligence in order to justify the overthrow of Saddam Hussein - the stakes could not have been higher.
This was undoubtedly the greatest crisis of his premiership to date.
To add fuel to the flames, his director of communications, Alastair Campbell, had launched an unprecedented and vitriolic attack on the BBC, questioning its integrity and professionalism in the way it reported the story.
Suddenly finding himself under tremendous personal pressure, it seemed that Dr Kelly had buckled and decided to commit suicide.
That, at least, was the official version of events, as decided by the Hutton inquiry, set up by the Government with lightning speed within hours of Dr Kelly's body being found.
The media, the political establishment, indeed almost everybody accepted Lord Hutton's verdict. But the more I examined it, the more it became clear to me that Hutton's judgment was faulty and suspect in virtually all important respects.
I was not alone in these suspicions. Letters began to appear in the press from leading medical specialists, in which they queried the suicide verdict.
The letters were well argued, raising profound and disturbing questions that remain unanswered to this day.
Increasingly concerned, I decided to give up my post on the Liberal Democrat front bench to look into Dr Kelly's death.
My investigations have since convinced me that it is nigh- on clinically impossible for Dr Kelly to have died by his own hand and that both his personality and the other circumstantial evidence strongly militate against suicide.
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Adulation: Tony Blair in Iraq
Given that his death was clearly not an accident, that leaves only one alternative - that he must have been murdered.
This is not a conclusion I have come to lightly. I simply set out to examine the facts, to test the evidence, and to follow the trail wherever it took me.
The account I give in this series may not be correct in all respects, but I suggest that it is rather more credible than the verdict reached by Lord Hutton.
I certainly believe there are enough doubts, enough questions, enough of a smell of stinking fish to justify re-opening this episode officially.
My investigations have been a journey into the unknown, and one that has taken many peculiar turns. Perhaps the most sinister came soon after starting my inquiries last year.
After writing a newspaper article outlining my early concerns, I found myself on a train speeding towards Exeter to see a man who had agreed to meet me only on condition of anonymity and after some rather circuitous arrangements.
These involved much complicated use of public telephone boxes to minimise the chance that his contact with me could be traced.
Finally, we talked over a glass of wine in a rather nondescript club.
He told me that he had recently retired but had connections to both the police and the security services, a claim which I subsequently verified through careful checks.
Like me, he had many doubts about the true circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly's death and he had begun making his own surreptitious inquiries around Southmoor, the Oxfordshire village which was Dr Kelly's home.
Posing as a freelance journalist, he had attempted to contact the key policemen involved in investigating the case. In this he was unsuccessful but within an hour he received an unexpected return call.
The person on the other end of the line did not bother with formalities, but instead cut to the quick. How would my contact welcome a full tax inspection of his business, VAT, national insurance, the lot?
Life could be made very difficult, he was told. How did he fancy having no money?
Naturally, this prospect did not appeal, and there he left matters until, at a wedding, he chanced upon an old friend whom he described to me initially as a very senior civil servant, but later as a "spook" from MI6.
He told his friend of his interest in the Kelly affair and also of the threatening phone call he had received.
His friend's reply was a serious one: he should be careful, particularly when using his phone or his computer. Moreover, he should let the Kelly matter drop.
But my contact did not do so. Two weeks later he met his friend again, this time in a pub, and pressed him on the matter.
>{? His friend took him outside, and as they stood in the cool air, told him Dr Kelly's death had been "a wet operation, a wet disposal".
He also warned him in very strong terms to leave the matter well alone. This time he decided to heed the warning.
I asked my contact to explain what he understood by the terms his friend had used. Essentially, it seems to refer to an assassination, perhaps carried out in a hurry.
A few months later, I called my contact to check one or two points of his story. He told me that three weeks after our meeting in Exeter, his house had been broken into and his laptop - containing all his material on Kelly - had been stolen. Other valuable goods, including a camera and an LCD television, had been left untouched.
It was sobering to be given such a clear indication that Dr Kelly had been murdered, but the scientist himself appears to have been fully aware that his work made him a target for assassins.
British diplomat David Broucher told the Hutton inquiry that, some months before Dr Kelly's death, he had asked him what would happen if Iraq were invaded.
Rather chillingly, Dr Kelly replied that he "would probably be found dead in the woods".
At the inquiry, this was construed as meaning that he had already had suicidal thoughts. That, of course, is patently absurd.
Nobody can seriously suggest that he was suicidal at the time the meeting took place - yet Lord Hutton seems to have made his mind up about the way in which DrKelly died before the inquiry even began.
The result is a series of gaping, unresolved anomalies.
Crucially, in his report, Hutton declared that the principal cause of death was bleeding from a selfinflicted knife wound on Dr Kelly's left wrist.
Yet Dr Nicholas Hunt, the pathologist who carried out the post-mortem examination on DrKelly, stated that he had cut only one blood vessel - the ulnar artery.
Since the arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness, severing just one of them does not lead to life-threatening blood loss, especially if it is cut crossways, the method apparently adopted by DrKelly, rather than along its length.
The artery simply retracts and stops bleeding.
As a scientist who would have known more about human anatomy than most, DrKelly was particularly unlikely to have targeted the ulnar artery. Buried deep in the wrist, it can only be accessed through the extremely painful process of cutting through nerves and tendons.
It is not common for those who commit suicide to wish to inflict significant pain on themselves as part of the process.
In Dr Kelly's case, the unlikelihood is compounded by the suggestion that his chosen instrument-was a blunt pruning knife.
This would only have increased the pain and would have failed to cut the artery cleanly, thereby hastening the clotting process.
Statistics bear out the extremely low incidence of individuals dying by cutting the ulnar artery, with only one recorded case in Britain during the entire year of Dr Kelly's death.
Year long investigation: Norman Baker
Given that the average human body contains ten pints of blood, and that about half of these must be lost before death ensues, we must also ask ourselves why there were clear signs at the postmortem-that Dr Kelly had retained much of his blood.
We cannot be sure exactly how much since, inexplicably, the pathologist's report does not provide an estimate of the residual volume, but what he did record was the appearance of "livor mortis" on Dr Kelly's body.
This purplish-red discolouration of the skin occurs when the heart is no longer pumping and blood begins to settle in the lower part of the body. But if Dr Kelly had bled to death, as we are led to believe, then significant livor mortis would not have occurred. Put simply, there would not have been enough blood in his body.
More significant still, while the effects of five pints of blood spurting from a body could not easily be hidden, the members of the search party who found his body did not even notice that Dr Kelly had apparently incised his wrist with a knife.
Their arrival was followed by that of paramedics who pointedly referred to the fact that there was remarkably little blood around the body.
If the idea that blood loss brought about Dr Kelly's death is flawed, still less plausible is the suggestion that he chose an overdose to quicken his end.
Mai Pederson, a close friend of DrKelly's, has confirmed that he hated all types of tablets and had an aversion even to swallowing a headache pill.
Yet we are told that he removed from his house three blister packs, each containing ten of the co-proxamol painkillers which his wife Janice took for her arthritis.
Each of these oval pills was about half an inch long. Since there was only one tablet left, the implication is that he had swallowed 29 of them. If this is right, we are being asked to believe that Dr Kelly indulged in a further masochistic act in an attempt to take his life.
A further objection is that police evidence states there was a halflitre bottle of Evian water by the body which had not been fully drunk.
Common sense tells us that quite a lot of water would be required to swallow 29 large tablets. It is frankly unlikely, with only a small bottle of water to hand, that any would have been left undrunk.
Stranger still, tests revealed the presence of only the equivalent of a fifth of one pill in Dr Kelly's stomach.
Even allowing for natural metabolising, this cannot easily be reconciled with the idea that he swallowed 29 of them.
Forensic toxicologist Alexander Allan told the Hutton inquiry that although the levels of co-proxamol in Dr Kelly's blood were higher than therapeutic levels, they were less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose.
Furthermore, it is generally accepted that concentrations of a drug in the blood can increase by as much as tenfold after death, leaving open the possibility that he consumed only a thirtieth of the dose necessary to kill him.
As for Dr Kelly's state of mind, in the eyes of those who knew him well he was the last person who might be expected to take his own life.
A recent convert to the Baha'i faith which expressly forbids suicide, he was a strong character who had survived many difficult situations in the past.
Just a day before his 20th birthday in May 1964, his own mother had killed herself with an overdose. Though this had naturally affected him deeply at the time, there was nothing to suggest that it was on his mind at this point in his life.
His friend Mai Pederson recalled a conversation they once had about his mother's death. Would he ever contemplate suicide himself, she asked. 'Good God no, I couldn't ever imagine doing that," he is said to have replied. "I would never do it."
Later many people would conclude that the seeds of his suicide lay in his uncomfortable appearance before MPs on the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday, July 15, just three days before his death.
Grilled for more than an hour during this televised hearing, he was clearly under considerable pressure and yet one journalist recalled him smiling afterwards.
By the time he gave evidence before the Intelligence and Security Committee the following day, he was even managing to crack a joke or two.
His emotional state certainly did not appear to give any major cause for alarm on the morning of the Thursday he disappeared.
His wife Janice later described him as "tired, subdued but not depressed" and the e-mails he sent from his home during those hours suggested that his mood, if anything, was upbeat.
"Many thanks for your thoughts," he wrote to one colleague. "It has been difficult. Hopefully will all blow over by the end of the week and I can travel to Baghdad and get on with the real work."
Indeed, so keen was Dr Kelly to get back to Iraq that he spoke to Wing Commander John Clark at the Ministry of Defence about when he could return.
A trip was booked for him the following Friday and his diary, recovered by the police, shows that the trip had been entered for that day. People about to kill themselves do not generally first book an airline ticket for a flight they have no intention of taking.
Since none of this fits the profile of a man about to commit suicide, we are faced with an obvious question. If Dr Kelly did not kill himself, then who might have been responsible for his death?
There are, it must be admitted, a number of possible suspects. In the course of a long career in the shadowy world of arms control, Dr Kelly had made powerful enemies.
Back in 1991, for example, he was part of a team that exposed Russia's tests of biological weapons for offensive purposes - a field in which they had invested huge sums of money. This could easily have sparked a desire for revenge, if not from the state itself then from individual Russians.
Dr Kelly also had intimate knowledge of biological weapons research in apartheid-era South Africa that some might have preferred not to see the light of day.
It has also been suggested that he had dealings with Mossad, the Israeli secret service, about illegal bacterial weapon activity.
But it seems very unlikely that the anger of old foes would have simmered for years and then exploded just as Dr Kelly emerged in the political spotlight in 2003.
Quite simply, it would qualify as an astonishing coincidence if the cause of his death were not rooted in the furore over Iraq.
At this point, it has to be asked whether there were elements in the British intelligence services, or indeed within 10 Downing Street itself, who would have wanted Dr Kelly dead.
This is a possibility I have seriously considered. But it is difficult, frankly, to think that anyone in the Government could have thought DrKelly's death to be in their interest, even were they morally prepared to bring it about.
After all, the death of Dr Kelly presented Tony Blair with his greatest political challenge, and put the political focus firmly onto the whole Iraq debacle, which cannot be where the Government would have wanted it.
The more I investigated this affair, the more I realised that people who had worked with David Kelly suspected some kind of link with the Iraqis themselves.
Diplomat David Broucher told the Hutton inquiry that he interpreted Dr Kelly's remark about being found "dead in the woods" to mean that "he was at risk of being attacked by the Iraqis in some way".
Dr Kelly's friend Mai Pederson confirmed to the police that the scientist had received death threats from supporters of Saddam Hussein, who regarded him as an enemy on account of his past success at uncovering their weapons programmes.
This was something Dr Kelly privately acknowledged but refused to be cowed by, in a very British, stiff upper lip kind of way.
The theory that he may have been murdered by elements loyal to Saddam is supported by Dick Spertzel, America's most senior biological weapons inspector, who worked closely with Dr Kelly in Iraq.
"A number of us were on an Iraqi hit list," he told me matter-of-factly. "I was number three, and David was a couple behind that."
But Saddam loyalists are not the only Iraqis we need to consider. There are others, too, with rather closer links to the West.
Much of the information about Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction, on which Britain and America based their case for war, was provided by Iraqi dissidents eager to see his overthrow.
This information was sensational and, as events turned out, wildly distorted and in most regards plain false.
One of the central figures here was Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the so-called Iraqi National Congress and the CIA's favourite Iraqi opposition politician.
A financier with a decidedly chequered past - he was found guilty of embezzlement and forgery after $158 million disappeared from a bank he founded in Jordan - Chalabi made no secret of his wish to drag the United States into war with Saddam and was apparently prepared to say anything to achieve that end.
A key Iraqi informer codenamed "Curveball" - who claimed to have led a team equipping mobile laboratories to produce biological weapons for Saddam, but was later entirely discredited - is believed to have been the brother of one of Chalabi's aides.
Chalabi's fingerprints can also be found on the now notorious claims by another defector that Saddam had 20 or more secret sites where weapons of mass destruction could be found. Subsequent searches showed this allegation to be utterly without foundation.
Alastair Campbell: 'Unprecedented and vitriolic attack on the BBC'
Naturally, those like Dr Kelly who, by sticking to the facts, weakened the case for invasion beforehand and discredited those who had exaggerated it afterwards, were unhelpful to Chalabi and his colleagues. The last thing they wanted was the sober truth to prevail.
Another important figure here is Iyad Allawi, leader of the Iraqi National Accord, another organisation created to oppose Saddam. Before they parted ways, he was Saddam's supporter and friend.
There are many who tell of Allawi's violent history. As a young man, he is alleged to have been present at the torture of Iraqi communists who were hung from the ceiling and beaten.
While living in London in the Seventies, he was allegedly the head of Iraq's intelligence operation in Europe, informing on opponents of Saddam who will have faced torture and death when they returned home.
Allawi went on to develop a fruitful relationship with MI6 and the CIA. After the Iraq invasion, he was appointed Prime Minister in the country's interim government - only to face allegations (which he strongly denied) that he had personally shot seven insurgents in the head with a pistol at Baghdad's Al-Amariyah security centre.
"This is how we must deal with terrorists," Allawi is alleged to have told a stunned audience of close to 30 onlookers. "We must destroy anyone who wants to destroy the Iraqi people."
The new Prime Minister's actions are said to have prompted one U.S. official to comment: "What a mess we're in - we got rid of one son of a bitch only to get another."
The Americans apparently referred to Allawi as "Saddam lite".
Before the Iraq invasion, Allawi's organisation - just like Ahmed Chalabi's - was responsible for eye- catching but groundless intelligence exploited by supporters of war. #
In the case of Allawi's group, it was reports passed to MI6 in the spring and summer of 2002, including the false claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction which he could deploy at 45 minutes' notice.
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.
It was a normal day in Westminster. The House was sitting and Parliament was full of the usual collection of weary MPs like me traipsing from one meeting to the next, and primly dressed men in ceremonial tights harrumphing around the place.
I left my office and took the stairs down to the reception area where my next appointment was waiting for me.
I had never heard of him before and my mind was on the pile of unfinished work on my desk rather than the meeting about to take place.
I assumed it would be a short and uneventful one, but I couldn't have been more wrong.
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Happier times: Dr Kelly was known as a devoted husband and father
My visitor was nervous and distracted. I began to wonder if he was unwell. Then he suddenly decided to open up.
The ostensible reason given for the meeting was essentially a pretext. My visitor really wanted to talk about the death of David Kelly.
Let me say here that I subsequently checked out this person's bona fides and was able to confirm them. He was who he said he was, and worked where he said he worked.
I have to be very careful with what I say about him, as he clearly believes that he is at risk if he is identified as producing information. For this reason, I can also relate only a fraction of what he said to me, and what is recorded in my extensive contemporaneous notes.
He told me of a meeting where members of a UK-based Iraqi circle had named people who claimed involvement in Dr Kelly's death.
It seems the Iraqis felt Dr Kelly had besmirched them through his publicly reported actions in doubting the intelligence their organisation had provided to MI6, not least in respect to the now infamous September dossier.
There was also concern that, had he lived, Dr Kelly might have gone public with even more details.
I stayed in contact with my informant, by necessarily elaborate means, and one day he undertook to send me some specific material. It never arrived, and he went quiet.
Some weeks later, I discovered why. When we met again, he was even jumpier than at our first meeting and what he told me was chilling.
On the day after he had undertaken to post me the material we had discussed, he kept an appointment, made at short notice. He had been promised certain information, which was to be conveyed to him by a contact.
I learnt that at that impromptu meeting he was subjected to an horrific attack by an unknown assailant, the full details of which he has asked me not to reveal. Perhaps not surprisingly, he has been reluctant to get any further involved, though he remains well.
The information he had given me had pushed my investigation on immeasurably. It now seemed that I was closer than ever to understanding who had killed Dr Kelly but one thing remained unexplained. Why would his death have been made to look like suicide?
I realised that a clue to this might lie in another piece of information given to me by my visitor at Westminster before he decided, for his own safety, that he could help me no longer.
He told me that the police or the security services had got wind of a possible plan to assassinate Dr Kelly but were too late to prevent his murder taking place.
Suppose this were true - and suppose also that they were told that, in the interests of Queen and country, this information should not come out for fear of destabilising both Britain and Iraq.
Under those circumstances might it just be possible that they saw it as their patriotic duty to intervene - allowing the impression to be formed that Dr Kelly had killed himself?
It seemed incredible but the more I thought about it, the more I realised it might explain some strange anomalies in the police's handling of Dr Kelly's case.
The first relates to a secret file of evidence submitted to the Hutton inquiry by Thames Valley Police.
While the contents remain classified, the cover is publicly available and reveals that the codename for the investigation was Operation Mason.
This has given rise to wild rumours of a freemasonry angle to the case but, while these are almost certainly without foundation, what is more concerning is that the start time of Operation Mason is given as 2.30pm on Thursday July 17, which was half an hour before Dr Kelly set off from his home for a walk from which he would never return.
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Grief-stricken: Mourners at Dr Kelly's funeral
When I challenged this curious timing, I was told that the starttime of an operation is fixed not to relate to the moment that the police know of an incident but to reflect the period of interest to them. This sounds superficially plausible until one reflects that any police investigation worthy of the name would look back way before 2.30 on that Thursday afternoon.
Yet what is the explanation, if this is not the case? Premonition and occult powers can be safely discounted, which leaves us with the possibility that some element within Thames Valley Police had foreknowledge, to at least some degree, of that afternoon's tragic events.
This might help us understand other curiosities about the case - including two searches made of the Kelly home in the early hours of the morning after Dr Kelly vanished.
The first, conducted shortly after midnight when officers first arrived at the house, made some sense. Dr Kelly might, for example, have suffered a heart attack in a little-used part of the house - but a second more detailed search at around 5am is more difficult to understand.
Surely if Dr Kelly had been there, he would have been found the first time. More puzzling still, Mrs Kelly was asked to wait in the garden while a dog was put through the house.
A chief constable with whom I have discussed this matter was unable to explain why Mrs Kelly would have been asked to leave her home.
In his view, if the objective was to locate Dr Kelly, her knowledge of the house's layout would have been helpful in any search.
He described the police actions as "bizarre" but, as we shall see, they become entirely understandable if there was a hitherto undisclosed reason for this second search.
Could it be linked, for example, to a number of strange inconsistencies in the testimony of those who saw Dr Kelly's body on the morning it was discovered?
Two key pieces of evidence suggesting that Dr Kelly had taken his life were the presence at the scene of the blunt pruning knife with which he was supposed to have cut his wrist, and the halfdrunk bottle of water which, we are led to believe, he used to help him swallow his wife's painkillers.
Strangely, however, no mention was made of these items by Louise Holmes and Paul Chapman, two volunteers who had joined the search party that morning and came across Dr Kelly's body at about 8.30am.
They must have been truly unobservant to miss the bloodied knife and water bottle.
Yet this was not the only apparent difference between what they saw and the accounts given by others. For example, Paul Chapman told the Hutton inquiry that Dr Kelly's body was sitting on the ground and leaning up against a tree, a view with which Ms Holmes concurred.
But those who came later said that Dr Kelly was lying on his back with the knife and water bottle next to him.
The position of the water bottle was interesting: propped up, at a slight angle, to the left of Dr Kelly's head, with the cap by the side of it.
Given that Dr Kelly was righthanded, the police might have been expected to find it on that side of his body, but the configuration is just about possible if DrKelly were sitting up against the tree.
If, however, he was lying on his back, we are asked to believe that he placed the water bottle, presumably with his undamaged and natural right hand, by his head on the left and placed the cap neatly next to it.
Despite his serious injuries, he even managed, at this contortionist's angle, to ensure that the bottle was propped up.
It's also strange that no mention was made at the Hutton inquiry of whether there were any fingerprints on the knife. No- one volunteered any information on this and no one was asked.
After some delay, Thames Valley Police finally told me earlier this year that no fingerprints were recovered from the knife. And yet we know from the evidence of forensic biologist Roy Green that the knife was blood-marked.
Try holding a knife tightly, as if you were about to use it to make an incision. Is it not a natural action to use your fingers to apply pressure on the knife to hold it firm and in place?
Did Dr Kelly then have a most curious way of holding a knife? Or are we being asked to believe that he tidily wiped his prints off, just as he tidily put the bottle cap next to the water bottle by his left shoulder, and the empty coproxamol blister packs tidily back in his coat pocket?
Other confusion arose over what he was wearing when he left home. Many of the papers published in the weekend immediately following his death suggested that he had been jacketless - a view supported by Acting Superintendent David Parnell of Thames Valley Police, who was quoted as saying he was "dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt".
Lord Hutton: His findings were controversial
By contrast, the Hutton inquiry was told that he was wearing a coat when he was found - variously described as a green or blue Barbour-type wax jacket.
Given that it was a warmish day in July, albeit somewhat cloudy, it's perhaps questionable whether he would have donned a wax Barbour, but, if the theory that he committed suicide is correct, it's conceivable that he would have needed the pockets to transport his knife, water bottle and tablets.
If, on the other hand, he was murdered, then perhaps not just the coat, but the knife, the pills and the water bottle were all taken from the Kelly home to Harrowdown Hill by someone other than Dr Kelly with the express purpose of creating a suicide scene.
Someone wanting to kill themselves might have been expected to use a sharp blade - a razor blade, for instance - rather than a blunt pruning knife.
But then, the knife was one that Dr Kelly had owned since boyhood, making it a very convenient clue to support a suicide verdict, just like the painkillers that could be traced back to others at his home.
It is all too easy to dismiss so-called "conspiracy theories". But history shows us that conspiracies do happen - and that suicides can be staged to cover murderers' tracks.
All the evidence leads me to believe that this is what happened in the case of Dr Kelly. In Monday's Mail, I'll describe how I believe his killing was carried out.
• EXTRACTED from The Strange Death Of David Kelly by Norman Baker, published by Methuen on November 12 at £9.99. ° Norman Baker 2007. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.
NORMAN BAKER is the Lib-Dem spokesman for Cabinet Office Affairs who brought down Peter Mandelson over the Hinduja passport affair and blocked attempts to hush up MPs' expenses.
Did two hired assassins snatch weapons inspector David Kelly?
By NORMAN BAKER - More by this author »
Last updated at 08:14am on 22nd October 2007
Marked man: Dr David Kelly made himself unpopular
Weapons inspector David Kelly was the decent man apparently hounded to suicide after exposing Tony Blair's lies on Iraq.
But the crusading MP Norman Baker felt sure there was something more to his death - and gave up his front-bench role to investigate the case.
In the Mail he revealed extraordinary evidence that he believes proves Kelly did not take his own life and was instead murdered by Iraqi dissidents. Here, he reveals how the murder may have been carried out . . .
While investigating the death of Dr David Kelly I have made many strange discoveries, not least some disturbing parallels with the case of a young American journalist named Danny Casolaro.
Mr Casolaro made himself deeply unpopular with elements in the murky world of U.S. defence by probing too deeply into their activities.
One morning in August 1991, he was found dead in a hotel room near Harpers Ferry in Virginia. He was in the bath, naked, with his wrist slashed.
There were no signs of bruising or other marks on the body and the police concluded that he had committed suicide.
But this was totally false according to Dr Christopher Green, who was the CIA's chief forensic pathologist for decades.
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Could America have been involved in the death of Doctor Kelly?
Did Britain give a nod and a wink to the killers of Dr David Kelly?
Dr Green participated in Casolaro's autopsy and last year he told veteran White House reporter Sterling Seagrave that the young journalist had been killed before being stripped, put in a full bath, and his left wrist cut in precisely the same manner as Dr Kelly's.
And as with Dr Kelly, there was remarkably little blood, bar a small amount smeared on the edge of the tub, suggesting that the wrist wound had been inflicted after the heart had stopped pumping.
This compelling demonstration of how effectively a murder can be disguised as suicide drove me on in my search for the truth about Dr Kelly, who was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood on July 18, 2003, having apparently taken his own life.
Before Danny Casolaro died, the journalist had been investigating the activities of America's private security companies which, according to Sterling Seagrave, are linked to the 'Grey Ghosts' - an army of professional killers commissioned by the Pentagon to carry out assassinations.
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Norman Baker at the spot where David Kelly was found dead
The similarities between the two men's deaths led Seagrave to suggest that Dr Kelly might also have fallen victim to these shadowy figures.
After all, he was the source behind a BBC report that the British government had 'sexed up' intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. This can hardly have been well received by the White House.
As I explained in Saturday's Mail, my own information strongly suggests that those behind Dr Kelly's death were Iraqi dissidents opposed to Saddam Hussein's regime and angry at Dr Kelly for undermining the case for toppling him.
A well-placed source also told me that the British police or security services had been warned of a likely assassination attempt but were not in time to stop it.
Did they then try to disguise the murder as suicide for reasons of political expediency?
To understand what may have happened, we must return to Thursday, July 17, the day
Dr Kelly disappeared. That morning he was at home with his wife Janice in the village of Southmoor and it must be said that none of his behaviour fits the profile of a man about to commit suicide.
In her evidence to the Hutton inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, his wife said he was 'tired, subdued, but not depressed'. Indeed, it seems it was Janice Kelly, not her husband, who was more seriously under par.
During phone calls that morning, Dr Kelly told a colleague that he was basically 'holding up all right', but that his wife was having a difficult time, both physically and mentally, under the pressure of long-standing ill health and the political storm that had engulfed them.
At lunchtime she went to bed with a nauseous headache and arthritis pains. He, on the other hand, appears to have carried on working normally, eaten some lunch and taken the trouble to go upstairs to check on his wife, shortly before 2pm, to see how she was feeling.
Given his obvious concern, it hardly seems likely that he would want to exacerbate matters for her by committing suicide that day.
Dr Kelly told his wife he would be going out for one of the regular walks he took to help his bad back. These were normally short affairs lasting no more than 25 minutes.
Mrs Kelly estimates that her husband left the house shortly after 3pm. With him, we are led to believe, he had the knife later found by his corpse and three packets of the painkillers his wife took for arthritis. These would later be discovered in his jacket pocket - empty but for one of the 30 tablets.
According to the Hutton inquiry, Dr Kelly set out on that walk intent on killing himself.
But, if so, why does he appear to have waited so long before doing it?
Since the pathologist inexplicably failed to take Dr Kelly's body temperature when he first arrived on the scene the following day - a standard procedure which would have helped give an accurate time of death - we have to make our own deductions about when he died.
The pathologist offered a wide window of between 4.15pm on Thursday and 1.15am on Friday. But there is every reason to think this window is far too wide.
The Hutton inquiry heard that after Dr Kelly's body was found on Friday morning, two paramedics moved his arm away from his chest at about 10am so that they could attach electrodes and confirm that he was dead.
Clearly, rigor mortis - the stiffening of the body - had not yet fully set in. Since it is generally accepted that it reaches its peak after 12 hours, we can assume that Dr Kelly most likely died at some time after 10pm on the Thursday night, and quite possibly much later.
What then happened to him in the missing hours - at least seven of them - between leaving home and supposedly killing himself?
The last person known to have seen Dr Kelly alive was his neighbour, Ruth Absalom, who met him about three-quarters-of-a-mile from his home.
They passed the time of day briefly before going their separate ways. Dr Kelly's parting words were: "See you again then, Ruth."
According to Ms Absalom, he was heading towards the nearby village of Kingston Bagpuize.
That would be consistent with a circular half-hour walk back to his house - but in quite the wrong direction to reach Harrowrecords-down Hill, the lonely area of woodland where his body was discovered.
One of the few clues to what happened next is that Dr Kelly's phone was switched off when a colleague from the Ministry of Defence tried to call him between 5pm and 6pm.
This was odd. Dr Kelly himself would tell friends that his mobile was always on and, given that he had been in regular contact with the MoD that morning, and that the furore surrounding him was developing from hour to hour, it seems unlikely that he would have turned it off or let the battery run down.
If he did indeed intend to commit suicide, turning off his phone could be seen as a preliminary step. But for reasons I have made clear, I do not believe suicide is a credible explanation for his death.
This leaves us with an alternative possibility. Did someone else turn Dr Kelly's phone off so that his movements could not be traced via signal kept by the phone company? In other words, was he forcibly abducted?
If he headed in the direction Ms Absalom described, his walk would probably have taken him along Appleton Road, a quiet and rather empty stretch with only sporadic development alongside.
From there he is likely to have turned right into Draycott Road, which is even more deserted. A no-through road with some derelict buildings part-way down, it peters out into a footpath at the end.
On either of these roads it would certainly have been relatively easy for determined abductors to have forced the 59-year-old weapons inspector into a van without anyone seeing.
According to the information I have been given, the murder itself was carried out by a couple of not very well-paid hired hands.
As to the method used, I am told that they gave Dr Kelly an injection in his backside, which perhaps points to the use of succinylcholine, a white crystalline substance that acts as a muscle relaxant.
For less beneficent purposes, it can be used to induce paralysis and cardiac arrest and frequently goes undetected in post-mortems.
I asked Thames Valley Police whether the body had been checked for the presence of this or a similar substance. They told me that they did not know.
If this was not the substance used then, alarmingly, there appear to be a large number of other ways in which Dr Kelly might have been killed that would be difficult or even impossible to trace.
For this we can no doubt partly thank the work of Project Coast - a highly unpleasant chemical and biological warfare programme run by the South African government from 1981 onwards to develop exactly such capabilities.
With aims including the creation of a biological weapon designed to attack the black population while leaving whites unscathed, its prime mover was Dr Wouter Basson, variously described as 'the South African Mengele' and 'Dr Death'.
Ironically, in the week before Dr Kelly died, it is alleged he was due to be interviewed by MI5 about his links with Dr Basson, who in 1985 had visited the Porton Down research centre, where Dr Kelly was then head of the Chemical Defence Establishment.
This visit had happened at a time when Mrs Thatcher's government claimed that the South Africans were developing biological and chemical weapons solely for defensive purposes.
Only later was it revealed that they were working on chemicals such as parathion, an organophosphate that can be introduced into the body through hair follicles, perhaps under the arm or around the crutch.
This causes vomiting - evidence of which could be seen on Dr Kelly's body - and leads to a respiratory attack. It is extremely difficult to detect traces of such a chemical in the body, unless you know what you are looking for.
When I tracked down Wouter Basson at his home in the Western Cape earlier this year, I asked him if he thought Dr Kelly had been murdered.
He paused, as if choosing his words carefully, then replied that Dr Kelly 'didn't seem the sort to commit suicide'.
He was also in no doubt that the UK, and indeed other Western countries, have a capacity for assassination.
Other possible methods of killing Dr Kelly included the use of saxotoxin, found in some shellfish and known as the CIA Shellfish Toxin, after its alleged use by that agency to kill one of their targets. Even a tiny amount is effective seconds after injection and is completely untraceable after autopsy.
One private detective even suggested to me that Dr Kelly's killers might have made gruesome misuse of the equipment employed by undertakers in embalming, placing a tube into an artery and forcibly pumping the blood out of the body.
This would cause unconsciousness and then death, and reinforce the assumption that the victim had lost a lot of blood through a cut - the conclusion reached by Lord Hutton in Dr Kelly's case.
The detective told me that this process did not need access to a main artery like the jugular, but could be achieved through, say, the ulnar artery.
This was the one slashed with a knife in Dr Kelly's wrist. Was that incision an attempt to cover up the artery's previous use?
Another ghastly suggestion came to me from someone who signed themselves only as 'Nemesis'. Their letter alleged that he or she had been told by a 'member of the non-English diplomatic corps' that air had been introduced into Dr Kelly's bloodstream through a needle in a vein.
Apparently, if present in sufficient quantities, air in the major organs will kill and leave no scar. 'Nemesis' was in no doubt that this was how Dr Kelly's life had ended. "His heart and lungs were full of air," the letter said.
We know that the pathologist did retain one of Dr Kelly's lungs and some blood to test for substances such as chloroform but Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page, who gave evidence at the Hutton inquiry, revealed that the tests to the lung had not actually been carried out.
This was, he said, because no suspicious substances had shown up in the blood tests.
Whatever method might have been used to murder Dr Kelly, we have to wonder why those responsible did not kill him immediately. There would have been no insurmountable obstacles to doing so, after all.
Perhaps his kidnappers wanted an opportunity to take him into the woods at Harrowdown Hill under cover of darkness to minimise the chances of being spotted or disturbed.
It certainly would not have been difficult to have given him a shot to render him temporarily unconscious until his assailants forced him to walk to the spot where he would be killed and found the next day.
If they drove him there, the closest they could have got by road was about half a mile from where his body was found.
That walk is rather a public one, but there is another route and one seemingly not investigated by the police.
This path runs from a remote reach of the River Thames, about 500 yards away, up through a field and into the woods. With no houses or other dwellings nearby, anybody walking here is unlikely to be seen, particularly in the dead of night.
Intriguingly, this area was searched the following morning by Louise Holmes and Paul Chapman, the two volunteers who eventually found Dr Kelly's body.
They told the Hutton inquiry that some time after beginning their search at 8am they came across a group of three or four people in a boat and had a brief conversation with them.
Who they were, and what they were doing on the river at that time of the morning, has never been established. They could, of course, have been holidaymakers. But was the truth more sinister?
• EXTRACTED from The Strange Death Of David Kelly by Norman Baker, published by Methuen on November 12 at £9.99, copyright Norman Baker 2007. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.
You're welcome. The book is being serialised all week. Here is today's installment. It would be great to think the Daily Mail would do something similar for a 9/11 book such as Ian H's new one. What a bizarre world we now inhabit where a paper of the traditions of the Daily Mail is seen as the best hope getting fair coverage of difficult stories in the MSM
Travesty of the truth: Was the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly's death just part of the cover-up?
By NORMAN BAKER MP - More by this author »
Norman Baker is one of Westminster's most respected MPs.
In a major new book, he reveals the results of his year-long investigation into the death of weapons inspector David Kelly — and why he believes the scientist was murdered after exposing Tony Blair's lies over Iraq.
Here, he claims the Hutton Inquiry into Kelly's death was just part of the cover-up...
Even before I published the results of my investigation into the death of David Kelly, I knew what the reaction of senior politicians and commentators would be.
Norman Baker has been investigating the death of David Kelly (pictured)
Read more...
David Kelly: The belly-dancing spy whose secrets they just ignored
Could America have been involved in the death of Doctor Kelly?
Did Britain give a nod and a wink to the killers of Dr David Kelly?
Did two hired assassins snatch weapons inspector David Kelly?
"Not another conspiracy theory!" they always cry when confronted with anything that challenges the orthodox explanation of events.
"Such things don't happen in Britain."
Of course not. After all, it's not as though a Bulgarian dissident could be murdered at a London bus stop with a ricin-tipped umbrella, an Italian with close links to the Vatican be left hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, or a Russian dissident be poisoned with radioactive - polonium-210 at a sushi bar in Piccadilly, is it?
Those who seek to discredit my year-long inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, and my belief that he was murdered, will no doubt point to the findings of the Hutton Inquiry.
Costing £1.68million and hearing evidence from nearly 100 witnesses — from members of Dr Kelly's family to Tony Blair — this confirmed the official view that the scientist's death was suicide.
Yet, as we will see, the truth was hardly like to come out in this travesty of a process.
It was highly unconventional — not least in the way it was instigated.
At the time the body of the UK's leading weapons inspector was found in a wood on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire on the morning of July 18, 2003, the Prime Minister was aboard an aeroplane en route from Washington to Tokyo.
Yet by the time he touched down in Japan, he had already announced there would be a inquiry into the circumstances of the death, led by Lord Hutton, formerly Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland.
Conspiracy? Lord Hutton's final report was flawed
This, no doubt, took the heat out of a very difficult situation for Mr Blair but, even so, the speed of the appointment startled many. Government wheels normally grind slowly.
According to journalists accompanying the then Prime Minister, he turned for advice during the flight to two of his closest allies: Charlie Falconer, the recently appointed Lord Chancellor, and his old Svengali, Peter Mandelson.
Mr Mandelson would certainly have been well acquainted with Lord Hutton from his stint as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
And yet when I tabled a Parliamentary question about his involvement in the appointment, I was told simply: "Mr Peter Mandelson played no part."
As this was completely at odds with the recollections of a number of journalists I had spoken to, I requested the background material used to draft this answer.
Noticeably absent from this material was any record of Mr Mandelson having been contacted to ask him for his recollections.
So it is unclear how the answer that he "played no part" could be quite so definitive.
Whoever was behind the decision, Brian Hutton was the ideal appointment for those looking to help the Prime Minister out of a dangerous spot.
He had only ever chaired one public inquiry — into the diversion of a river — but in his career as a judge he had always shown himself supportive of the forces of law and order and sympathetic towards the authorities.
On his appointment, he said that the Government had promised him "full cooperation". But the hearing was compromised from the start.
Unlike a full statutory inquiry — the setting up of which would have required Parliamentary debate, something the Government was keen to avoid — Lord Hutton's inquiry had no formal powers.
The Lord Chancellor argued that its informal nature would give Lord Hutton "flexibility of form" in conducting the inquiry as he felt appropriate.
That might better be described as the abandonment of procedures and safeguards essential in establishing the truth.
Witnesses could not be compelled to attend, and — since no one was required to give evidence under oath — they could not be found guilty of perjury if they lied.
Moreover, Lord Hutton had sole control over which witnesses were called, what documents were or were not produced and, to a large extent, what questions were asked or left unasked.
This was all the more alarming since Lord Hutton's inquiry took the place of a properly constituted coroner's inquest.
What did Nicholas Gardiner, the independent coroner in whose jurisdiction Dr Kelly's body was found, think of this very unusual departure? Not much, the evidence suggests.
Mr Gardiner had opened an inquest into Dr Kelly's death on Monday, July 21 — three days after the body was found.
Subsequently he was told by the Lord Chancellor that it should be adjourned to "prevent duplication" because Lord Hutton would now be looking into the matter, effectively supplanting him.
Clearly concerned about the informal status of the Hutton inquiry, Mr Gardiner wrote to the Lord Chancellor on August 6, suggesting that he might continue with his own inquest.
Norman Baker at the spot where David Kelly was found dead
His letter, which I have seen, makes plain that he was unhappy at the way he was being marginalised.
"As you will know a coroner has power to compel the attendance of witnesses. There are no such powers attached to a public inquiry.
"If I do adjourn, I would be unable to resume, if at all, until after the public inquiry has been concluded and thus would not be in a position to assist Lord Hutton."
This was indeed the position, but it seems not to have worried Lord Hutton, who throughout his inquiry appeared unconcerned about what Mr Gardiner might or might not be doing or thinking.
Mr Gardiner's protests seem not to have been well received by the Lord Chancellor, who wrote back in blunt terms, insisting that he adjourn the inquest and not resume unless "an exceptional reason" arose.
It was reluctantly agreed that Mr Gardiner could first take evidence from the pathologist Dr Nicholas Hunt and the forensic analyst Alex Allan, but he was asked to "keep the proceedings as short as possible" and take evidence in writing "so far as the Coroners' Rules allow".
The coroner was, it seemed, being bundled off the case.
More to the point, he was effectively being asked to cut corners in his own procedures.
Such pressure from a Government minister on a coroner is highly unusual.
On the basis of this truncated inquest, the coroner concluded that Dr Kelly had committed suicide by slitting his wrist and taking an overdose of coproxamol painkillers.
It is surely troubling that such a conclusion could have been based on this rushed process — especially as Alex Allan would later tell the Hutton Inquiry that Dr Kelly did not have enough coproxamol in his body to kill him.
This meant that one of only two witnesses at this peculiar inquest would presumably disagree with the contents of the death certificate that arose from it.
As for Dr Hunt, his appointment as pathologist was curious from the outset.
Given that this was an extremely high-profile death commanding front-page headlines, Mr Gardiner might have been forgiven for employing the most experienced person he could find.
Instead he chose Dr Hunt, who had been on the Home Office's register of approved forensic pathologists for only two years. And whatever assessment of the cause of death he gave when the coroner originally opened his inquest on July 21, he clearly had a change of heart in the days that followed.
In his letter of August 6 to the Lord Chancellor, Mr Gardiner says that "the preliminary cause of death given at the opening of the inquest no longer represents the final view of the pathologist".
We are not subsequently told in what way the pathologist had changed his mind.
Nor was Dr Hunt asked about this when he appeared before the Hutton Inquiry the following month.
Worryingly, the pathologist was not subject to any cross-examination, despite the curious aspects of the case.
Nothing is mentioned about the onset of rigor mortis, for example, though this is surely a key indicator for ascertaining time of death.
Nor do we learn whether a full battery of tests were done on the lungs, the blood, the heart or the soil — all vital in determining whether Dr Kelly might have been over-powered and poisoned, or whether he really could have bled to death after cutting his wrist, given the small amount of blood at the scene.
On that last question, it would surely have been helpful to know how much blood was left in Dr Kelly's body — but Dr Hunt's report does not even provide a measure of this.
These are all crucial pieces of forensic evidence that are simply missing.
Why were they not produced, and why did neither Lord Hutton nor James Dingemans, the inquiry QC, seek to elicit them?
And why, when Dr Hunt himself made interesting observations were they not followed through, but instead left hanging in the air?
At one point, for instance, he was asked if there were any signs of a third-party involvement in Dr Kelly's death.
His answer was intriguing. "The features are quite typical, I would say, of self-inflicted injury, if one ignores all the other features of the case."
What were these other "features"?
We do not know because Dr Hunt was not asked. Instead, Mr Dingemans asked him if there was anything further he would like to say on the circumstances leading to Dr Kelly's death.
"Nothing I could say as a pathologist, no," he replied.
Again, it was an enigmatic answer. Did no one think to ask him what he meant by this remark?
If Dr Kelly's death was indeed murder, covered up to resemble suicide, not many need have known the truth.
But some in authority may have suspected.
Very much against etiquette, Dr Hunt broke ranks on Channel 4 News in March 2004 to call for the coroner's inquest to be reopened.
It is possible to surmise that perhaps Lord Hutton was told the truth, and was asked to go along with the cover story for the sake of the country, although there is, of course, no evidence to this effect.
Certainly, I challenge anyone to say that the suicide verdict was settled "beyond reasonable doubt" on the basis of the evidence presented to Lord Hutton's inquiry.
On the contrary, the most sensational death of the year, and one of the most politically sensitive deaths in recent British history, was investigated to a less rigorous standard than would have been applied to any sudden or violent death subject to a normal inquest.
Lord Hutton himself does not accept that criticism.
Judges rarely comment on cases over which they have presided, but — perhaps stung by criticism of his performance — Lord Hutton has done so.
In a letter to me, he asserted: "You are under the misapprehension that my inquiry was not a rigorous investigation into the cause of Dr Kelly's death and into the question whether it was suicide or murder.
"The question was fully and thoroughly investigated."
Yet this assurance is brought into significant doubt by Lord Hutton's own hitherto little-noticed contribution to a highly specialist legal publication, The Inner Temple Yearbook for 2004/5.
In it, he wrote: "At the outset of my inquiry it appeared to me that a substantial number of the basic facts in the train of events which led to the tragic death of Dr Kelly were already apparent from reports in the press and other parts of the media.
"Therefore I thought that there would be little serious dispute as to the background facts… I thought that unnecessary time could be taken up by cross-examination on matters which were not directly relevant."
In other words, Lord Hutton appears, to a large degree, to have made up his mind in advance.
This perhaps explains why so many aspects of evidence appear to have been overlooked throughout the inquiry, not least when it came to the conduct of the police.
Anyone reading the transcripts of their evidence is left with a feeling of dissatisfaction, even unease.
After Dr Kelly's death, for example, the Daily Mail received a number of letters and telephone calls reporting that there were men in black clothes on Harrowdown Hill early on in the morning, significantly before Dr Kelly's body was officially found.
After plotting the positions of his officers, Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page told the inquiry he was satisfied that the men in question were police officers, but we are not told their names or what they were doing there.
As to the officers who gave evidence, they seemed unable to agree on such basic details as how many of them were at the scene, and their testimony also conflicted with that of civilian witnesses.
Earlier in this series, I described how two members of the search party that first found Dr Kelly said that he was sitting propped up against a tree. They made no mention of a knife.
Yet by the time we come to the testimony of the police officers, we are told that he was lying on his back and that there was a knife beside him.
Clearly someone was mistaken or some adjustment was made to the scene.
This supports my view that someone wanted to make Dr Kelly's death look like suicide — but Lord Hutton seemed unperturbed by these anomalies.
He suggested in his final report that where the police officers disagreed among themselves, this suggested that they were honest because otherwise they would have colluded beforehand to produce identical stories.
Had their accounts been consistent, would Lord Hutton then have concluded that the officers were, therefore, not revealing all they knew? Clearly not.
The implication of such an approach is that, no matter what the police said, Lord Hutton was going to believe it.
When his final report was published, it was its political conclusions that captured the headlines.
These would, of course, provoke widespread derision and anger, as he cleared the Government of virtually everything, and came down like a landslide on the heads of the BBC.
In all the fuss, the question of whether Lord Hutton had properly investigated the death of David Kelly was completely overlooked.
Clearly, though, Thames Valley Police were happy with the result.
When Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page retired last year, the eulogy at his farewell dinner was given by none other than Lord Hutton himself.
I learned of this from a police officer who declared himself very surprised that Lord Hutton should have been in attendance.
I asked Lord Hutton for a copy of what my contact had described as his "long and fulsome" speech but he was unable to provide me, with one, telling me that his comments had been impromptu.
Lord Hutton himself has also retired.
His inquiry into the death of David Kelly was his last major endeavour and is what he will always be remembered for, but it must not be allowed to be the last word on the subject.
David Kelly was a good man and we owe it to him to set aside the farce of the Hutton Inquiry, and create a new process that examines this matter officially, openly and with the rigour we are entitled to expect.
Extracted from THE STRANGE DEATH OF DAVID KELLY by Norman Baker, published by Methuen on November 12 at £9.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.
David Kelly: The belly-dancing spy whose secrets they just ignored
By NORMAN BAKER MP - More by this author »
Last updated at 00:59am on 23rd October 2007
Bewitching: Mai Pederson
Uuncorrected to this day, the transcripts of the Hutton Inquiry still refer to a mysterious figure called Mike Peddison, mentioned in the testimony of David Kelly's wife Janice as a family friend.
In fact, the transcribers misheard the name.
Mrs Kelly was talking about Mai Pederson — a bellydancing US Army sergeant who, according to both her ex-husbands, is a spy with an astonishing ability to bewitch men.
Charismatic and exotic, Ms Pederson was an Arab-American linguist whom David Kelly met in Iraq in 1998.
Jim Pederson, her former husband, suggests getting to know Dr Kelly was part of an official assignment.
"She undoubtedly viewed him as an intelligence source," he said.
Whether or not this was her motive, the two became close.
She introduced Dr Kelly to the Baha'i faith, which teaches respect for life — and expressly forbids suicide.
On his frequent trips to the U.S., Dr Kelly crossed from New York to California, where Ms Pederson was stationed, whenever he could. It was a long way to go just to say hello.
Travesty of the truth: Was the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly's death just part of the cover-up?
Postal records show that in the 16 months prior to Dr Kelly's death, Ms Pederson was registered at three different addresses in America where he was also registered as living.
As late as July 2003, the month Dr Kelly died, their names appear on the register for a house in Montgomery, Alabama.
They were an odd couple: he giving all the appearance of a boffin in his glasses, sports jacket and jeans; she fabulously attractive, seductively dressed and 16 years his junior.
After Dr Kelly's death, Ms Pederson was at pains, through her lawyer, to reject suggestions that their relationship was anything but platonic.
She claimed he simply used her address to secure loans — which seems unlikely given that he could have used his existing British credit references.
Pederson told the Mail on Sunday that she did not believe that Kelly commited suicide
Lord Hutton told me that he had first learnt of Ms Pederson through press reports and asked the Thames Valley Police to interview her in the States. Two detectives flew out and spent two days questioning her.
Later, he was assured by the police that she had nothing to say about Dr Kelly that was not available from other sources.
This seems strange. After all, she appeared uniquely placed to offer insights into his personality and frame of mind.
Indeed, an interview she subsequently gave to the Mail on Sunday was electric in its content.
She bluntly said she did not believe Dr Kelly committed suicide and revealed that he hated all types of pills.
I have since learned that on one occasion she visited Dr Kelly's home in Oxfordshire, and when she said she was in pain for some reason, Janice Kelly offered her some of the coproxamol pills she took for arthritis.
She accepted, but Dr Kelly criticised his wife for offering tablets prescribed for her alone.
This can only reinforce doubts that he chose to kill himself by ingesting 29 of these tablets.
Platonic friend or not, Ms Pederson was clearly a key figure in David Kelly's life.
It is difficult to see how Thames Valley Police concluded she had nothing of interest to say.
Could America have been involved in the death of Doctor Kelly?
Can American involvement in Dr Kelly's murder be entirely ruled out? In the weeks before his death, he was clearly identified as making statements which undermined the case for the Iraq invasion.
The Bush administration did not take kindly to such criticism, as former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson discovered when he rubbished claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy weapons-grade uranium from the Republic of Niger.
The response was rapid. On July 14, 2003, four days before David Kelly's body was discovered, the conservative journalist Robert Novak, a man closely associated with the White House, wrote an article exposing Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.
An act of petty vindictiveness which effectively ended her career and compromised every network she was party to, this sent a clear warning to others tempted to blow the whistle on faulty intelligence.
Mr Wilson certainly noticed the close juxtaposition of the outing of his wife and the death of Dr Kelly.
"I received several calls from friends wondering, first, whether it had been a suicide; and if not, was I watching my own security?" he wrote.
"I, too, wondered about Kelly's death. I was horrified that I could harbour suspicions that a democratic government might actually do bodily harm to a political opponent."
In fact, soon after 9/11, Bush overturned the 25-year ban on state assassinations and gave the CIA permission to eliminate individuals designated by the President. Might Dr Kelly have been just such an individual?
If so, I think it likely that America would have forewarned the British Prime Minister, though not necessarily sought his permission.
Of course, if Tony Blair had received such a call, knowing what we do of his subservient approach to Bush, one can well believe he might have said yes. Another explanation comes from John Simkin, a historian specialising in CIA covert action.
He, too, believes Dr Kelly may have been murdered by the Americans, and suggests the motive may have been to apply heavy pressure on the British government to ensure there was no undermining of the occupation of Iraq, through admission that the grounds for invasion were flawed.
Mr Simkin makes the Machiavellian suggestion that the pressure could have been maintained by a threat to Blair from America to leak information about the death in a way that would have implicated the British government if Blair failed to follow the Bush line on the war.
The Blair/Bush relationship was a peculiar, even unhealthy, one in which Blair seemed willing to give ground where none had to be offered, to cause problems for himself when that could have been avoided and to behave submissively when it was not necessary to do so.
What are we to make of the instruction sent by Downing Street to Sir Christopher Meyer, British ambassador in Washington, to 'get up the a*** of the White House and stay there'? Is this normal behaviour for a Prime Minister?
One has to ask: if the White House had made Blair aware it held information that would force him to resign were it released, in what way would he have behaved differently from how he did?
Indeed, so submissive was Blair towards Bush that a wild story - passed on to me by two unconnected sources - is circulating that this was exactly the situation, and the Americans were aware of a deeply personal scandal involving Blair dating from the early 1980s.
There are, however, strong reasons to doubt any U.S. role in Dr Kelly's death. First, although his actions were unwelcome to America, the problems caused were predominantly for the British government and so would not have required a U.S. response.
Second, if the U.S. had wanted to prevent Dr Kelly from making further unhelpful comments, there were other levers to pull. He could have had his pension position threatened, for example.
Third, if the U.S. did have something on the PM, it would have no need to apply pressure in this way.
As part of my investigations I have spoken to a number of individuals in the U.S. well connected to the CIA. None is aware of the names of the others I have engaged.
Nor could any be reasonably characterised as advocates for the White House. Each, separately, has come back to me to say that the inside track does indeed report Dr Kelly as having been murdered, but that the U.S. was not part of it.
Joined: 12 Sep 2006 Posts: 3889 Location: North Down, N. Ireland
Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 12:02 pm Post subject:
Odd that Alastair Campbell, Blair's chief fixer, is not even mentioned when his bizarre and bizzarely timed resignation was contemporaneous with the Kelly affair. _________________ Dissolution of the Global Corporations.
It's the only way.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 1959 Location: South London
Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2007 8:42 am Post subject:
Mark Gobell wrote:
The Strange Death of Dr David Kelly by Norman Baker, MP.
Published today.
Yeah! By Methuen @ £9.99. You can order a copy by phoning 0870 428 4115.
The book is reviewed by Nigel Jones in the magazine section of yesterday's (18 11 07) Sunday Telegraph. It does not appear to be on their web-site. I could find nothing disparaging or dismissive in Nigel Jones' review.
I haven't read the book, but I did hear Norman Baker talk in his constituency, Lewes, about his research to a packed meeting organised by our Changing Times group there. At that meeting he firmly concluded that David Kelly was murdered, but he would not be drawn on the issue of "by whom?"
Now, in his book, according to Nigel Jones, he reluctantly rules out MI6 and the CIA as likely to have carried out the assassination directly but maintains both were probably aware that it would happen and covered up the fact that it did.
"Instead he fingers a rogue Iraqi hit team - either vengeful Saddam loyalists, still furious at Kelly's worming out their concealed WMD - or, more likely, followers of the exiled CIA- and MI6-backed 'dissidents' Ahmed Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, cousins both hoping to be installed in power in the wake of a successful Anglo-American invasion."
To my mind it is irrelevant whether the CIA and MI6 actually assassinated the man with their own directly-employed agents, or whether they merely knew that it was going to happen and had their agents try to make it look like a suicide after the event. Either way, they would be culpable. But whether Norman Baker has unearthed enough evidence to prove these theories seems doubtful.
The Strange Death of Dr David Kelly by Norman Baker, MP.
Published today.
Yeah! By Methuen @ £9.99. You can order a copy by phoning 0870 428 4115.
The book is reviewed by Nigel Jones in the magazine section of yesterday's (18 11 07) Sunday Telegraph. It does not appear to be on their web-site. I could find nothing disparaging or dismissive in Nigel Jones' review.
I haven't read the book, but I did hear Norman Baker talk in his constituency, Lewes, about his research to a packed meeting organised by our Changing Times group there. At that meeting he firmly concluded that David Kelly was murdered, but he would not be drawn on the issue of "by whom?"
Now, in his book, according to Nigel Jones, he reluctantly rules out MI6 and the CIA as likely to have carried out the assassination directly but maintains both were probably aware that it would happen and covered up the fact that it did.
"Instead he fingers a rogue Iraqi hit team - either vengeful Saddam loyalists, still furious at Kelly's worming out their concealed WMD - or, more likely, followers of the exiled CIA- and MI6-backed 'dissidents' Ahmed Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, cousins both hoping to be installed in power in the wake of a successful Anglo-American invasion."
To my mind it is irrelevant whether the CIA and MI6 actually assassinated the man with their own directly-employed agents, or whether they merely knew that it was going to happen and had their agents try to make it look like a suicide after the event. Either way, they would be culpable. But whether Norman Baker has unearthed enough evidence to prove these theories seems doubtful.
yes i have listened to his thesis that rogue Iraqi agents carried this out but i cannot see it myself.
This has to be the work of USA,MOSSAD,OR MI6. or a co-operation between them.
Iraq would have not have benefitted from his death as he could have pulled the wheels off the British involvement and therefore caused embarresment to the America Neo-con agender.
Born in New York City to a Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother, Judith Miller grew up in Miami and Los Angeles, where she graduated from Hollywood High School.
Her father, Bill Miller, was a Las Vegas entertainment icon. She attended Ohio State University where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and she graduated from Barnard College in 1969 and received a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In 1971, while at Princeton, Miller traveled to Jerusalem to research a paper. She became fascinated with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and spent the rest of the summer traveling for the first time to Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.
Campbell attended City of Leicester School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages (French and German, for which he received a 2:1, or Upper Second) and claimed that he wrote essays based solely on criticism and did not always read the works themselves.
Quote:
Campbell also became interested in journalism. His first published work was "Inter-City Ditties", his winning entry to a readers' competition run by pornographic magazine Forum. This led to a lengthy stint working for Forum, writing articles such as "The Riviera Gigolo" and "Busking with Bagpipes" which Campbell purported to be based on autobiographical events.[2]
Quote:
Campbell was a close advisor of Neil Kinnock, going on holiday with the Kinnocks, and worked closely with Robert Maxwell. Campbell's loyalty to Maxwell was demonstrated when he punched The Guardian journalist Michael White after White joked about "Captain Bob, Bob, Bob...bobbing" in the Atlantic Ocean shortly after Maxwell's drowning in 1991.[4]
Oxbridge are Jewish strongholds and spy recruitment centres.
Who owned 'Forum'?
Maxwell nee Koch Israeli firster and hyper fraudster _________________ Belief is the Enemy of Truth www.dissential.com
I have reluctantly come to that belief myself. Zionism is a curse on the planet. In the past few weeks we have discovered that we have a British AIPAC. Abrahams chanelling Israeli money to the Labour party etc.
Re Norman Baker. It looks like he was got at. He was working all this time on the book and then he blows it by blaming rogue Iraqi elements.What absolute nonsense! The same people that bumped off Robin Cook, John Smith and Princess Diana did it. They are probably the same people that threw the poor Marconi worker off the Brunel Bridge in Bristol tied to a park bench. That was called suicide too!
Oxbridge are Jewish strongholds and spy recruitment centres.
Instead of reds under the beds, the whole world revolves around the Jews for you doesn't it?
My world revolves around moving towards a better understanding of it, and the universe it spins and orbits in. Unlike you I choose to look @ and remark upon the elephant in the room.
EDIT
Reds are the same team. McCarthy was 100% right. _________________ Belief is the Enemy of Truth www.dissential.com
Political Assassination: Media Disinformation regarding the Death of
Dr. David Kelly
UK Physicians respond to The Guardian
Global Research, 16 December 2007
-------------------------------
Global Research editor's note
The following letter by Drs. C Stephen Frost, David Halpin and
Christopher J Burns-Cox was sent to The Guardian in response to a
review of Norman Baker's recently published book The Strange Death of
David Kelly.
The article by Richard Norton-Taylor suggests in no uncertain terms
that the Hon. Norman Baker is a "conspiracy theorist".
The authors of the letter are prominent physicians who have analysed
the causes of Dr. Kelly's death in several Global Research Articles.
-----------------------------------
Dear Sir
Richard Norton-Taylor struggles mightily to discredit Norman Baker and
his recently published book The Strange Death of David Kelly, in his
review of that book (Guardian, 1 December 2007). The struggle is all
the more confusing because Norton-Taylor does concede that "the
inquiry [the Hutton Inquiry] into the circumstances surrounding
Kelly's death, which also became a quasi-inquest, shed a bright light
on the way Downing Street, with the help of intelligence chiefs who
should have known better, conspired to draw up the disgraceful Iraqi
weapons dossier."
Norton-Taylor entirely misses, and one has to wonder whether he does
so deliberately, the central point made by the many reasonable people
who are concerned that Dr David Kelly has been denied a proper
inquest: that due process of law has not been followed, indeed it has
been comprehensively subverted.
These two articles point unerringly to a Government cover-up. The
importance of such a cover-up (in the context of the investigation of
the suspicious death of the world expert on biological and chemical
weapons who, at the time of his death, was perceived to be blowing the
whistle on the Government which had taken the country to illegal war
on a pack of lies) cannot be over-emphasised. That is the end of the
argument. Richard Norton-Taylor (and others in his position) should
be pressing for a proper investigation of Kelly's death, ie a proper
inquest, rather than wasting his time attempting to rubbish Norman
Baker's book, while claiming the moral high ground. Otherwise, there
is a risk that he and other apparent apologists for the dreadful Blair
and Brown governments are seen in the future as the shameless enablers
that perhaps they are.
Yours faithfully
Dr C Stephen Frost BSc MBChB Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology
(Stockholm, Sweden) Drws-y-Coed, 78 Pen-y-Bryn Road, Colwyn Bay,
North Wales LL29 6AL
07919 677138 (daytime) 01492 532352 (home)
David Halpin FRCS Kiln Shotts, Haytor, Newton Abbot, Devon TQ13 9XR
01364 661115
Dr Christopher J Burns-Cox FRCP MD Southend Farm, Wotton-under-Edge,
Gloucs. GL12 7PB
01453 842243
Richard Norton-Taylor is unconvinced by the conspiracy theories in The
Strange Death of David Kelly by Norman Baker
by Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian, 1 December 2007
The Strange Death of David Kelly
by Norman Baker
399pp, Methuen, £9.99
Norman Baker, Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, is one of parliament's
most persistent harassers of ministers and officials. Over the past
year he has diverted his energy to the many theories, encouraged by
some disturbing and unanswered questions, surrounding the death of
David Kelly, the government's highly respected weapons expert whose
body was found in a wood near his Oxfordshire home on July 18 2003. An
unintentional whistleblower, his remarks to the BBC reporter Andrew
Gilligan, about how the Blair government had exaggerated the threat
posed by Saddam's weapons programme, provoked an intense and ugly row
between Downing Street and the BBC, leading ultimately to Kelly's
death.
With terrier-like persistence Baker searches and turns over all the
conspiracy theories, which began to hatch even before Lord Hutton's
inquiry ended. The inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Kelly's
death, which also became a quasi-inquest, shed a bright light on the
way Downing Street, with the help of intelligence chiefs who should
have known better, conspired to draw up the disgraceful Iraqi weapons
dossier. Hutton, as we all know, cleared the government and criticised
the BBC. He also concluded that Kelly had indeed committed suicide,
but skirted over some of the questions about what exactly caused his
death.
When his body was found, his left wrist was cut open and an empty pack
of coproxamol painkilling tablets was in his jacket pocket. Baker
makes much of apparently conflicting evidence about Kelly's last
movements, when precisely he died and when his body was discovered. It
is extremely rare, he writes, for a death to follow injury to the
ulnar artery. He examines the motives of all those he says had a
possible interest in getting rid of Kelly, including US and British
agents. In the end, Baker seems to come down in favour of an Iraqi
exile group on the grounds that more revelations from Kelly would have
further dented its credibility.
This reviewer believes that Kelly was the victim of the escalating
fight between Alastair Campbell's Downing Street and the BBC, with the
Ministry of Defence - Kelly's employers - outing him, then continuing
to hound him on the government's behalf. Baker points to an incident
during Kelly's appearance before the Commons foreign affairs committee
shortly before he died. Kelly was unsettled, the author agrees, by a
detailed question from the Liberal Democrat MP David Chidgey, about a
conversation the weapons expert had with the Newsnight science editor,
Susan Watts. Kelly evaded the question, thus misleading the committee.
Kelly "would be exposed as less than truthful, something that went
strongly against his personal ethic", writes Baker. "He thus took a
sudden decision to end it all." This, according to him, is the "most
plausible" explanation for Kelly's suicide. Surprisingly, what he does
not say is that Kelly was asked about Watts after Chidgey had been
briefed by Gilligan. The question, which Kelly was to remark later had
"totally thrown him", contained material that Gilligan had supplied in
an email to Chidgey. The Hutton inquiry was told that such email
priming by Gilligan of Chidgey was unprecedented and "highly
inappropriate". Baker passes over this.
There is no evidence supporting the many theories that Kelly was
murdered and plenty of evidence supporting the conclusion that he was
driven to suicide. Baker may have done a service by reminding us of
one of the nastiest episodes arising from the invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps he should now concentrate his energy on current iniquities.
Total impunity: Shoot-to-kill commander McDowall promoted as
'anti-terror chief'
Indymedia UK, 13 December 2007
Does this Top terror role for the Menezes officer mean that it has
been accepted that we adopt a routine "shoot to kill any suspect"
policy from now on?
"The man who launched the surveillance operation that led to Jean
Charles de Menezes's death has been appointed to the UK's top
counter-terrorist role.
Cdr John McDowall will take over from Deputy Assistant Commissioner
Peter Clarke as national co-ordinator of terrorist investigations.
He will also lead the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism unit SO15."
"So what is new here, is not police murdering people. It's that
they dare to do it in broad daylight, admit they did it, and pledge
to do it again! Basically, shoot-to-kill has been covert British
police policy for a long time
De Menezes family 'absolutely disgusted' at Cressida Dick promotion
------------------------------------------
2 COMMENTS:
Yes
13.12.2007 11:06
Death Squads, Internment, Torture, Kidnap (Rendition) and not
forgetting Imperial Genocide -- these are now "normal" -- welcome to
the "Post-9/11 World" of perpetual resource wars justified by the
bogus "Clash of Civilizations".
War of Terror
Homepage: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/topics/terror/
Assassination by agents of the British State.
13.12.2007 15:00
The "shoot to kill" policy has existed in the UK for many years. Look
back at 1969 and the Investiture when representatives of the Welsh
Nationalist movement were shot by the British in cold blood. The story
that was fed to the media was that they blew themselves up with their
own expolsives. The reality was that they were captured by the British
agents and shot the following day.
Then there was Gibralter when the Britsh gunned down a number of Irish
people, again in cold blood. The tale they told then was that these
had explosives and guns. When there was an examination of them and
their vehicle, this proved to be false.
The British army had a shoot to kill policy in the six counties for
very many years. It was the custom to eliminate people who were
Catholics, or Republicans. In many instances the loyalist
paramilitaries were given a free hand to do this.
It is perhaps to be expected that there has now been an extension of
this to allow the neo cops to kill people that don't comply to the
"conform, consume and obey" culture.
Glyndwr
Joined: 27 Mar 2006 Posts: 3187 Location: Here to help!
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 12:06 pm Post subject:
David aaronovitch wrote:
But there is a way to settle this. Since the fearless Mr Baker believes it is impossible to die in the way Dr Kelly is supposed to have done, then he should be able to meet the simple challenge of himself taking 29 co-proxamol tablets and then slitting his left ulnar artery. Unless, of course, he secretly suspects that the next day Nick Clegg or Chris Huhne would find themselves looking for a new Shadow to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
That guy is a disgrace _________________ Free your Self and Free the World
I once had the misfortune of meeting the wretch, so I'll second that with knobs on.
The whole MSM is a disgrace but the Grauniad is the very worst having ditched the Scott Trust credo wholesale in favour of the bottom line - and that's what I told him. Not that it made any difference to the dollar signs in his eyes... _________________ "We will lead every revolution against us!" - attrib: Theodor Herzl
"Timely Demise to All Oppressors - at their Convenience!" - 'Interesting Times', Terry Pratchett
Joined: 27 Mar 2006 Posts: 3187 Location: Here to help!
Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 2:21 pm Post subject:
The hard part of the exericse would actually be hitting the left ulnar artery... which is kind of the point. I certainly trust the medical opinion that its a heck of a poor way to try to commit suicide
Of course one would never say one would actually take that challenge, one would be vunerable to being foricibly sectioned.... _________________ Free your Self and Free the World
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 5:43 pm Post subject:
He's been conned I expect. Or it might come from a lack of understanding of the lies behind 7/7 etc. He may or may not believe that.
But why focus on the one annoying thing? Don't you like the pic.? What about the 999 brilliant things he's done. He wouldn't be human if he didn't have a fault.
London Mick wrote:
Yes, yes, yes but why has he backed off and started blaming Iraqis for the murder?
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