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Arts, Books, Britain, Government, Legal, Politics, Society

Book Review: An Inconvenient Death

REVIEW

Dr David Kelly

July 15, 2003. Microbiologist Dr David Kelly during questioning by the Commons select committee, in London.

Intro: Fifteen years on from the apparent suicide of Dr David Kelly, a government scientist and weapons expert, we still don’t know the truth. Did he really kill himself? Or did he suffer a heart attack under interrogation by our own secret service? A new book reveals startling inconsistencies.

NATURAL conspiracy theorists are in abundance, but I’m not one of them. Maybe some might suggest that this is a weakness – an indication of being willing and ready to accept the official version of events and not to see evil plots lurking in the background.

Nevertheless, after reading Miles Goslett’s masterful book about the apparent suicide of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly in 2003, I am more persuaded than ever that the authorities have not told us the whole truth about this tragic case.

American and British forces invaded Iraq in March 2003. A few months later, Dr Kelly was a source – possibly not the primary one – of the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan’s explosive disclosure that the Blair government had “sexed up” the September 2002 dossier, which wrongly asserted that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction”.

It raises the question as to whether Gilligan himself may have sexed up what Dr Kelly had told him, since the government scientist went to his death still believing these weapons might exist. Whether that’s true or not, the journalist’s essentially accurate allegation caused angst, panic and fury in official circles. Alastair Campbell, for one – Tony Blair’s spin doctor and media manipulator – strode into the Channel 4 News studio to denounce and heavily criticise the BBC.

Dr Kelly soon admitted to his superiors that he had spoken to Gilligan. In one of the most disgraceful episodes in a shameful saga, a meeting chaired by Blair effectively authorised naming the weapons expert to the Press. The scientist immediately became the centre of a media frenzy.

Just two weeks later, on the morning of July 18, Dr Kelly was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood, a few miles from his marital home. He had supposedly taken his own life, having gone for a walk the previous afternoon. His left wrist had been reported cut, and he had taken co-proxamol tablets.

Some newspapers blamed Blair and Campbell for hounding him to death. But did he kill himself?

An Inconvenient Death painstakingly assesses a vast amount of evidence.

 

GOSLETT is no loopy conspiracy theorist. He never says Dr Kelly was murdered. Instead, he exposes the authorities’ many contradictions and inconsistencies – and urges there should be a full inquest into the scientist’s death. For the extraordinary thing is that there has been no such inquest.

Within hours of Dr Kelly’s body being found, the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, had set up an official inquiry with miraculous speed. Falconer was an old friend and former flatmate of Tony Blair, who at that moment was in the air between Washington and Tokyo.

The legal effect of the decision to ask a senior judge – the elderly Establishment figure of Lord Hutton – to chair an inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death was to stop the inquest in its tracks.

But, as Goslett points out, neither Hutton nor his leading counsel James Dingemans QC had any experience of a coroner’s duties. And whereas in an inquest evidence is taken on oath, it wasn’t in the Hutton Inquiry.

The list of its errors and omissions is mind-boggling. A huge number of important witnesses who might have thrown doubt on the theory that a severely depressed Dr Kelly had killed himself were not called.

These included Sergeant Simon Morris, the Thames valley police officer who led the original search for Dr Kelly, and his colleague, Chief Inspector Alan Young, who became senior investigating officer.

Also never questioned was Mai Pederson, a translator in the American Air Force, and a very close friend of Dr Kelly. She later alleged he had a weak right hand, which would have made it more difficult for him to sever his left wrist.

Moreover, the knife he often carried with him – and was said to have used in the suicide – had a ‘dull blade’. She also claimed he had difficulty swallowing pills.

Dr Kelly’s friend and dentist, Dr Bozana Kanas, was also not examined. She discovered on the day his death was reported that his dental file was missing from her Abingdon surgery. This file was inexplicably reinstated a few days later. Police tests revealed six unidentified fingerprints.

Dingemans seemed intent on establishing that Dr Kelly had been downcast once the Press knew his name.

Yet according to the landlord of a local pub and several regulars, on the night the weapons expert discovered from a journalist that he was about to be identified, he happily played cribbage in the Hinds Head.

But neither the landlord nor Dr Kelly’s fellow players were called by Hutton to give evidence. This is particularly strange since at the very time he was said to be in the pub, he was, according to his wife’s evidence to the inquiry, with her in a car on the way to Cornwall, escaping from the media attention. There were other anomalies in her evidence which Goslett details, though he offers no theory to explain them.

Nor did the inquiry grapple with the oddity that in the early hours of July 18 a helicopter with specialist heat-seeking equipment spent 45 minutes flying over the land around Dr Kelly’s house, passing directly over the site where his body was discovered a few hours later.

 

ACCORDING to an official pathologist, Dr Kelly was already dead at the time of the flight, yet the helicopter did not locate his still-warm body. Might it have been moved subsequently to its final position in the wood? Hutton did not examine the pilot or crew.

Perhaps most striking of all was the inquiry’s failure to investigate conflicting medical evidence.

A volunteer searcher who discovered the body at 9.20am on July 18 testified that it was slumped against a tree, and there was little evidence of blood.

Yet police issued a statement asserting that the body was lying ‘face down’ when found, while the post mortem recorded a profusion of blood.

After the inquiry, a group of distinguished doctors expressed concern as to its conclusions. They doubted the severing of the ulnar artery on Kelly’s left wrist could have been responsible, as such an injury would produce relatively little blood. Goslett’s point is that a competent coroner would have picked up on this and the many other inconsistencies.

A properly constituted inquest would also have registered that Dr Kelly’s death certificate didn’t give a place of death. It states he died on July 17, though July 18 is equally plausible. Maladministration or conspiracy? It’s impossible to say. Despite having gathered all this evidence, which he presents in a gripping way, Goslett for the most part resists speculation to a degree – given his enormous accumulation of facts casting doubt on the official version of events – that is almost heroic.

At the very end, he airs the question as to whether Dr Kelly (who according to the post mortem had advanced coronary disease) might have suffered a heart attack under interrogation.

Is it conceivable that undercover intelligence agents panicked and dumped his body in an Oxfordshire wood?

This book by James Goslett does journalism a great service. The author’s forensic skills put the then government’s legal counsel to shame.

In a spirit of even-handedness, it should also be pointed out that it is incorrectly stated that Robin Cook resigned and demitted office as Foreign Secretary days before the invasion of Iraq. He was actually Leader of the House, having been replaced as Foreign Secretary two years earlier. Nevertheless, this is a formidable, and disquieting analysis. We should hope it has the effect of reigniting calls for an inquest. If our rulers believe in justice, they would surely sanction for the establishment of a full inquest with due haste and speed.

Yet, a future coroner would admittedly face a serious handicap: that Dr David Kelly’s body was recently mysteriously exhumed and, according to reports, secretly cremated.

–  An Inconvenient Death by Miles Goslett is published by Head of Zeus for £16.99

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Foreign Affairs, Government, Iraq, Middle East, Politics, United States

Events in Iraq have forced a reluctant West to act…

IRAQ

Intro: The West’s decision to act in Iraq is one based on the threats posed by the Islamic State. Its intervention is not based on nation-building, as was the original aim in 2003, but to stop the proliferation of evil by the terrorists and in protecting religious minorities

The advances being made by the Islamic State in Iraq, formerly ISIS, is a tragedy for those religious minorities unfortunate enough to be standing in their way. Among those fleeing are the Yazidis, believers in an ancient religion who have survived countless attempts before in being wiped out. Their religion has been maintained and kept alive through oral history, passed down through the ages by Talkers who memorise the text of a holy book they believe was stolen by the British.

The Yazidis are men and women of flesh and blood fleeing for safe protection. Far from being anthropological curiosities they are hiding in and around the region of Mount Sinjar, in desperate need of attention as many are dying of hunger and thirst. Tens of thousands have fled their homes in the face of death threats from the Islamic State if they fail to convert to Islam.

The lack of a powerful lobby and representation for religious minorities has led to the West becoming strangely reticent about what is happening in Iraq. One maybe inclined to perceive that their cause is simply not fashionable; the anecdotal evidence is perhaps proof enough. For instance, prior to the Iraq war there were around 1.5 million Christians domiciled – amongst them Chaldeans, Syro-Catholics, Syro-Orthodox, Assyrians from the East, Catholic and Orthodox Armenians. Today, the number is just 400,000 and is predicted to shrink further. After sacking Mosul, in which the church bells were silenced for the first time in 1,600 years, the Islamic State then conquered Qaraqosh, Iraq’s largest Christian town, and imposed its medieval caliphate and sharia law on those who suddenly find themselves its subjects.

Many Westerners may struggle to conceive, too, that Christians in several Muslim countries have similarly become an oppressed minority. Many are being slaughtered, overlooked by the West out of ignorance or awkwardness. The mess is bloody and terrible none the less.

Another possible explanation is that the West simply does not want to think about Iraq. After squandering and plundering so much treasure there – both in terms of financial resources expended and human lives sacrificed – politicians would rather draw a line under the whole subject. But to do so is to negate responsibility for a crisis that the West helped create the conditions for. What is happening in Iraq today is directly connected and linked to its recent history.

When it comes to foreign affairs, the West is often caught looking the wrong way. The situation in Ukraine was allowed to fester until the shooting down of flight MH17. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians died before the West even considered action and then backed off. With minds now understandably drawn to Gaza, the risk of missing a catastrophe occurring in the east is self-evident.

No one will doubt the complexity of the situation, and there will be no appetite for a direct military response involving air strikes. But by talking seriously about what is happening in Iraq would be a start. There has to now be recognition of the threatening menace posed by the Islamic State both to the minorities of that region and, should they secure a power base, to the West and the wider world.

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Such barbarism occurring in the 21st century is hard to conceive given that expression of religious freedom is a right that all should enjoy. The Islamic State, however, represents the flowering of a grim fundamentalism that is willing and able to go to appalling lengths to achieve its aims. Its objectives pose a threat not only to the vulnerable religious minorities in the north, but also to the Iraqi government, the stability of the Middle East region and the security of the entire world. The Islamic State has created a crisis that demands a response.

Suddenly the West is prepared to act by doing something. The United States has begun a military campaign designed to prevent the hardliners from advancing much further and to coordinate the provision of humanitarian aid and support to those many tens of thousands of internally displaced refugees. Britain has announced that it will support America with surveillance and refuelling assistance, and will help with aid drops from the air.

Although there will be a degree of reluctance by the West in ‘returning to Iraq’, given all that has happened since the 2003 invasion, it is precisely because the West played a significant role in creating the circumstances in which the Islamic state has flourished, that it now feels there is a responsibility to act. With a mix of too much action in Iraq and, arguably, too little in Syria, the terrorists found easy shelter and incubation. The Islamic State bridges both Iraq and Syria.

America and Britain are not engaging in anything remotely connected to nation-building, as was the original aim in 2003. The plan is simply to halt the advance of the Islamic State and to protect those threatened by it. It is felicitous, too, that the US shoulders the burden of the airstrikes while Britain provides logistical support. This is a clear example of the Atlantic alliance’s traditional arrangement, one in which we offer intelligence and support to our American partner in the cause of international law and order.

This is a mission which will have to be approached with due care and caution and every political and diplomatic avenue should be explored. Sometimes events do move fast to a point where action is necessary. As far as the Islamic State is concerned, that point is the ghastly threat it poses to the fleeing innocents of Iraq and the future of their country. Such evil has to be confronted.

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Afghanistan, Britain, Government, Iraq, Military, National Security, United States

The scandal of the Afghanistan war that no one is to blame…

BRITISH INVOLVEMENT IN AFGHANISTAN

Intro: The futility and waste of British lives in Afghanistan far exceeds that in Iraq. The end of our involvement there is greeted with a mixture of silence and boredom. But these heroic sacrifices require an official inquiry, not least to the memory of the soldiers that died

There is a widespread and justified consensus that we were finagled into a war in Iraq by Tony Blair which has cost Britain dear. On Iraq, there have been several official inquiries, of which the last, chaired by former mandarin Sir John Chilcot, has yet to report. Sir John has been held back in his reporting because the Chilcot inquiry wishes to release information into the public domain not yet seen and whose release is being opposed by the British Government. Of all the inquiries that have been held not one was ever given the terms of reference to examine openly the political machinery used in making the decision that took Britain to war with Iraq.

The war in Afghanistan was, by most measures, an even bigger enterprise. According to the Government, it has cost us £20 billion, though some observers believe it may be as high as £40 billion.

Britain’s engagement in Afghanistan cost the lives of 448 servicemen and women. That’s two and half times the number of fatalities in the Iraq War (179), and getting on for twice the number killed during the Falklands War (258).

Yet, the most extraordinary thing about our involvement in Afghanistan is that neither the political class nor the general public are noticeably worked up about it. Afghanistan has stirred far less debate and controversy than Iraq, and the end of our involvement has been greeted with a mixture of silence and boredom.

Unbelievably, too, there are few, if any, calls for an inquiry into a war which began in early 2006 with the hope expressed by the then Defence Secretary, John Reid, that our troops might soon return ‘without a shot being fired’.

Whilst we may have been duped into the Iraq War by Tony Blair, there were at least dossiers that argued for the case for war, albeit misleadingly, and debates were had in Parliament. In the case of Afghanistan, we shuffled blindfolded into hostilities with no clear plan, no exit strategy, and with virtually no discussion.

Instead of the silence or indifference, there remains an overwhelming case for the most robust analysis of how we drifted into what many analysts believe has been a futile war that has achieved very little.

Our involvement in Afghanistan began after the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001. The decision to topple the Taliban regime by President George W Bush – which he believed harboured Al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the outrages committed against America – was supported by Mr Blair, who said: ‘The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.’

It was not until the spring of 2006 that British troops were despatched in any numbers to bring order to Helmand. Here, the Taliban were strong and resurgent, but the magnitude of the task was massively underestimated by Mr Blair’s government.

The justification was, and remained, that British streets would be safer as a result of our direct intervention. This was always a very doubtful proposition. For one thing, Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have since strengthened enormously in other countries such as Yemen and Somalia. There have also been numerous planned attacks thwarted by our security and intelligence services, none of which have revealed any links to Afghanistan.

An inquiry on Afghanistan is needed so that Blair and Reid, and indeed David Cameron, who endlessly repeats the mantra that our servicemen have been dying to keep us safe, answer the clarion call as to where the evidence is to support this assertion?

These politicians should also be questioned about their failure to bring opium cultivation under control, which back in 2006 was offered by Tony Blair as a major reason for sending troops to Afghanistan. Production of the drug has soared, and hundreds of millions of pounds of aid has been wasted in uselessly attempting to curb it.

Members of Blair’s government, along with senior civil servants at the Ministry of Defence, should also be asked to explain why they sent young men and women to Afghanistan in Land Rovers that offered poor protection against hidden roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices. Dozens of troops have died in these vehicles which might otherwise have been saved if the politicians had bothered to give any prior thought to what they were doing. These are serious matters which should not be brushed aside.

Servicemen join up believing, even hoping, that someday they will be asked to fight. They have a right, though, to assume that their lives will be risked in a reasonable cause with an expectation of success, and that they will be given adequate weaponry and protection.

It seems incredible that there has been no proper official inquiry, although there have been parliamentary investigations which have lacked the clout or scope to be taken seriously.

The purpose of an inquiry is partly to try to make sure that mistakes are not repeated – that we do not go to war again on an agenda of shifting objectives, none of which is ever realised. And it’s partly to restore people’s faith in our political system as people have become inured to the idea of a government’s ineptitude and deviousness.

The British Government will declare a job well done in Helmand, yet people will look at rising opium production and know that the job was far from complete. Much of Helmand province, where our soldiers risked and gave their lives, is as lawless as it was eight years ago.

On Sunday, the Afghan presidential elections will be held. None of the candidates seems at all alluring. One is a Uzbek warlord once described by his running mate as a ‘known killer’.

Many doubt that the victor will be an improvement on the outgoing president, Hamid Karzai, who has presided over the world’s most corrupt government.

It was Karzai who recently suggested with mind-boggling ingratitude that the presence of British and other Western troops in his country had made things worse.

An official inquiry is the very least that should be offered to the memory of the soldiers who sacrificed their lives, and to their grieving families. Much blood and treasure has been squandered in an enterprise far more deluded than events which transpired in Iraq.

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