The Double Cross of Iraq And The Discordant Death of WMD Inspector, Dr David Kelly – The 17th Anniversary

Sheri Laizer, 1 July 2020 – An investigative report | Exclusive to iKurd.net

“If you go down to the woods today

You’re sure of a big surprise.
If you go down to the woods today

You’d better go in disguise!

For every bear that ever there was

Will gather there for certain,
Because today’s the day the
Teddy Bears have their picnic.
…
If you go down to the woods today,

You’d better not go alone!
It’s lovely down in the woods today,
But safer to stay at home”! 1

Was Dr David Kelly lured to his death in the Oxfordshire woods seventeen years ago – like a trusting child by a paedophile? Many believe so.

“They didn’t have to kill him!” (Senior UK intelligence operative)2.

The untimely death of the esteemed scientist, Dr David Kelly, occurred some hours between the evening of 17th July 2003 and the following morning. It was the 12th week of Bush and Blair’s illegal war on Iraq and the Occupation.

Online photograph of a smiling David Kelly at one of his daughter’s weddings (from a blog exposing flaws in the investigation into his death).3

Brief Background

Between 19 March and 1 May 2003. a bloody backlash had been unleashed by the invasion of Iraq. The death toll had already reached around 15,000 Iraqis – 30 percent of whom were civilians – some 4,300 unarmed people, not to mention foreign military personnel and sundry others – including Dr Kelly.4

Following the much more recent crushing of ISIS in Mosul the death toll had topped some 308,000 people.5 The US counter-onslaught destroyed much of the old city, but they were not reported as helping to rebuild.6

Lives and loves lost once gone are never recovered.

Add to this several thousand more fatalities resulting from the brutal quelling of the mass protests against corruption between October 2019 and COVID-19 lockdown q in mid March.

Many wonder what it was all for…

One may even ask why it still matters – but the truth matters and the truth has still not been told.

Why was WMD chef inspector, Hans Blix, not assassinated? Why was Dr Kelly not killed during his long years in Iraq? What did Dr Kelly know that others did not, to result in his nasty demise?

Was it a link between the WMD sold to Iraq and the UK’s experimental bio-chemical ’defence’ laboratory at Porton Down – where Kelly had also worked?

Why was Dr Kelly summoned to give account over which reporters he had spoken with in an oral grilling before the Foreign Affairs Committee after BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan queried Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’?

If Dr Kelly were still alive today, what repugnance would he harbour over the West’s double cross and destruction of Iraq? That sense of revulsion had already begun to take hold of him before he met his lonely end.

The Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) Hearing of 15 July 2003

“Dr Kelly: My background is that I am a scientist, I was once head of microbiology at Porton Down, but for the last decade I have been involved in advising both the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence on Iraq, its weapons of mass destruction and the United Nations’ inspection approach towards disarmament and monitoring…”8

BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan’s story on the ‘sexed-up’ dossier setting out the UK’s justification for going to war on Iraq had seriously chafed Whitehall where there had been panic.9 The same undercurrents were churning up the complicit British intelligence services and No. 10 Downing Street under the New Labour party leadership of Tony Blair.

Dr Kelly had been exposed as Gilligan’s most likely primary source by his own bosses in the Ministry of Defence.

Former spy turned Joint Intelligence Committee chief, John Scarlett, sought to admonish Dr. Kelly further to the televised FAC grilling on 15 July 2003 for his off the record chat with Gilligan. More of which, below…

Gilligan’s report claimed there was little – if any – likelihood of Iraq being able to attack the West in “45 minutes” but these were not Dr. Kelly’s exact words. As a scientific thinker and germ warfare expert, Gilligan’s story was fundamental journalistic spin.

The oral evidence taken from Dr Kelly (two days before his sudden death) contained nothing remarkable – certainly nothing of a threatening quality to the UK’s Iraq policy, arms industry or his own reputation.

Under UNSCOM’s directives in 1991, it was Dr Kelly who had inspected two facilities just south of Bagdad: the Salman Pak facility near the famous arch of Ctesiphon, and a further site at Jurf al-Sakhar, near al-Musayyib, known as the Al Hakam complex – the latter said to have been a bio-weapons factory. The Ibn Al Atheer nuclear weapons facility was also located nearby. 10

By 1999 – four years before the invasion of Iraq – Dr. Kelly was providing assessments of Iraq’s ‘suspected germ warfare programme’ and was employed as a lecturer and trainer at UNMOVIC – UNSCOM’s successor, on it’s advanced bioweapons training courses. Between November 2000 to February 2003 Dr Kelly also helped train UNMOVIC’s weapons inspectors. He was highly regarded for his professionalism by the UN team.11

Dr Kelly’s background in briefing high-level ‘defence’ committees and intelligence agencies was nothing new and had been part of his previous mandate. He had a knighthood pending and had also been nominated for the Nobel Prize for his contribution to “ridding the world of WMD in Iraq.”

In the evidence that Dr Kelly gave to the FAC on 15 July 2003 (later published in full as part of Parliamentary disclosure) he had reminded his interrogators that, vis à vis Iraq and his role there since the first Gulf War: “The position had not changed as it was for (over) the past four years. Essentially, I was the senior adviser to the proliferation and arms control secretariat carrying out essentially the function I have since UNSCOM ceased to exist in 1999…”

Dr Kelly was then asked what his role had been in the preparation of the intelligence dossier that had made out the case for Tony Blair (in tandem with George Bush) to proceed to invade Iraq. He replied: “My involvement was writing an historical account of the UNSCOM inspections and providing input into Iraq’s concealment and deception.” (His proposals had been ignored and over-ridden).

Dr Kelly had responded to numerous further short questions as to when this involvement had taken place and whether – when working on his section of the dossier between May and June 2002 – he had enjoyed access to ‘secret intelligence material’.

He specified in response: “I always have access to such material, yes, but it did not form part of the contribution to those pieces that I wrote. That information was derived from my records as a UN inspector… The component that I wrote did not require intelligence information, let us get that straight. It was not the intelligence component of the dossier, it was the history of the inspections, the concealment and deception by Iraq, which is not intelligence information… It is not state secrets at all but I have an accurate record of who I have met and I will have to consult my diaries.”

A 29th question was fielded by then governing Labour Party MP, Andrew Mackinlay 12, demanding a specific list of Dr Kelly’s journalist contacts – to determine who he might have spoken to aside from Gilligan and who might be privy to sensitive information. Dr Kelly was given just 24 hours to put it together by the end of the working week on Friday.

The list was promptly provided in two drafts – the final draft just before he set off on his post-work stroll to clear his head around 14.20. His MOD boss, Wing Commander Clark, then booked Dr kelly’s return flight to Baghdad as part of his work with the Iraq Study Group – for just a week later.

Dr Kelly had also been asked at the AC hearing if he had had authorisation to speak with members of the press 13 and had replied unequivocally: “I think you have to look back at my history. I have been involved with the press for ten to 12 years, primarily as an UNSCOM inspector, and when I was a chief inspector, I had responsibility for dealing with the press. Since then I have been asked on many occasions by both the United Nations and by the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence to provide interviews both to British and international press. As a consequence of that, it is quite often follow-ups on clarification of issues with contact numbers, and so one responds to that.”

Dr Kelly had no cause to fear press interest such as to take his own life two days’ later. He had also recently passed his MOD medical examination and had been found fit to travel to Iraq in mid summer. No potentially fatal heart condition – as was later set forth in the faulty death certificate as one of three possible causes of death had been ascertained.)14

On receiving the second draft of Dr Kelly’s media contacts, Wing Commander Clark had then booked the scientist’s flight to Baghdad scheduled to depart in exactly one week’s time on 25 July 2003. By all subsequent accounts, Dr Kelly was looking forward to going back to Iraq, assuring several contacts by email and over the phone that the media hue and cry would probably soon ‘blow over’. Having been media spokesman for UNSCOM between 1991-1998 he would have understood how short a shelf life most headlines enjoy.

The imminent Baghdad flight was one that Dr Kelly would not get to board. A body was found near the edge of a copse of trees on Harrowdown Hill on the morning of 18 July 2003. Not only would he have been back in the UK from Baghdad in time for his daughter’s wedding three months’ later but he had also told his former interpreter from Iraq, Mai Pederson, a Kuwait born CIA asset that he would visit her and Baha’i friends in Monterey soon after. The faith taught that: ‘Suicide is forbidden in the Cause. God Who is the Author of all life can alone take it away, and dispose of it in the way He deems best. Whoever commits suicide endangers his soul, and will suffer spiritually as a result in the other Worlds Beyond.”15

Looking back at Western arms supply to Iraq

Back in 1997, Palestinian author, journalist – and former arms intermediary – Said K. Aburish (uncle of George Galloway’s former wife and son of a well-known journalist) observed in his book, A Brutal Friendship – The West and the Arab Elite: “Because the West, despite proclamations of neutrality during the Iran-Iraq War, wanted Saddam to prevail, the British government looked the other way and did nothing to stop the transactions…The sale of ‘lethal weapons’ had to be approved by the government in a way which suggested special care was paid to where they went. But what this meant was subject to selective interpretation. When Iraq, the largest Arab purchaser of arms, tried to buy Jaguar fighter-bombers from British Aerospace and Lynx helicopters from Westland, all these elements came into play.”

A company with which Aburish was involved as an intermediary, Arab Resources Management (ARM) of Beirut, had been a player in many arms supply deals in the 1970s. This period is also detailed in Aburish’s earlier biography of Saddam Hussein (far closer to the truth than any of the Western policy-influenced biographies like that of John Simpson and Con Coughlin).

Aburish observed in 1997: “In the mid-70s I was involved in Iraqi negotiations to acquire British-made fighter and bomber aircraft, French-made helicopters and military electronic gear and the original design for a chemical warfare plant. Neither British Aerospace nor Westland Helicopters, Dassault or the supplier of the chemical plant design, Pfaulder Corporation of Rochester, New York, had anything to hide. They all acted with the full knowledge and blessing of their governments. …The period of Western support and encouragement for Saddam’s acquisition of arms, including unconventional weapons, was followed by the period of the Iran-Iraq War. Ostensibly neutral and pretending to embargo the sale of lethal weapons to both combatants, the West continued to supply Saddam with armaments. The exact number of Western corporations which operated within the the policies of their governments and supplied Saddam with lethal and other weapons is disputed but the figure was definitely over four hundred…combing this period with the one before…produces sixteen to eighteen years of connivance in arming Saddam and supplying him with Western technology… the continuing demonization of Saddam has too do with the fact that he is no longer a client… he has outlived his usefulness.”16

Later on in the book Aburish adds that “The approval was granted with the full government knowledge of the commissions and the corrupt nature of the deal.”17

UCLA’s Department of Epidemiology quoted AP’s staff writer, Matt Kelley, in a piece dated 1 October 2002, hence the direct citation worth at length to show what was becoming public knowledge before Dr Kelly’s demise: …”I don’t think it would be accurate to say the United States government deliberately provided seed stocks to the Iraqis’ biological weapons programs,” said Jonathan Tucker, a former U.N. biological weapons inspector…”But they did deliver samples that Iraq said had a legitimate public health purpose, which I think was naive to believe, even at the time.

“The disclosures put the United States in the uncomfortable position of possibly having provided the key ingredients of the weapons America is considering waging war to destroy, said Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. Byrd entered the documents into the Congressional Record this month.

“Byrd asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the germ transfers at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Byrd noted that Rumsfeld met Saddam in 1983, when Rumsfeld was President Reagan’s Middle East envoy.

“Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown?” Byrd asked Rumsfeld after reading parts of a Newsweek article on the transfers…

“Invoices included in the documents read like shopping lists for biological weapons programs. One 1986 shipment from the Virginia-based American Type Culture Collection included three strains of anthrax, six strains of the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and three strains of the bacteria that cause gas gangrene. Iraq later admitted to the United Nations that it had made weapons out of all three.

“The company sent the bacteria to the University of Baghdad, which U.N. inspectors concluded had been used as a front to acquire samples for Iraq’s biological weapons program.

“The CDC, meanwhile, sent shipments of germs to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and other agencies involved in Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. It sent samples in 1986 of botulinum toxin and botulinum toxoid — used to make vaccines against botulinum toxin — directly to the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons complex at al-Muthanna, the records show…

“The CDC also sent samples of a strain of West Nile virus to an Iraqi microbiologist at a university in the southern city of Basra in 1985, the records show.18

Halabja: no disincentive to the UK to further finance Iraq

It must be recalled how after the chemical blitzing of Halabja in March 1988, rather than sanctioning the Iraqi government, conversely, PM Margaret Thatcher, increased trade loans to Saddam Hussein from “£175 million in 1987 (before Halabja i.e. March 1988) to £340 million thereafter.

David Lowry, former London based director of the European Proliferation Information centre (EPIC), to the Japan Times: “Five months after the Halabja massacre, Thatcher’s foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe, noted in a report to Thatcher that with the August 1988 Iran-Iraq peace deal agreed, “opportunities for sales of defense equipment to Iran and Iraq will be considerable.”

In the months running up to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and with his record of gas use publicly known, Thatcher’s government still sold Iraq three tons of sodium cyanide and sodium sulphide (used as nerve-gas antidotes), dual-use civilian-military equipment including Matrix Churchill machine tools, and plutonium, the key component explosive for nuclear warheads. (As the former director of the European Proliferation Information Center (EPIC), London,] I find this unconscionable.”19

Further use of chemical weapons by the Ba’ath regime along the Iraq-Turkish border in rural Kurdish villages continued into 1989.”20 The invasion of Kuwait was launched, however, because Kuwait was slant drilling for oil into Iraqi territory. Iraq renewed its historic territorial claims to Kuwait, carved off by Britain when drawing its “lines in the sand.

Bio-chemical weapons were not used in Kuwait or in any other subsequent theatre of war, political conflict, or civic unrest thereafter. They were not used to stop the US and UK from invading and seizing control of the country. Moreover, the military official held responsible was not directly Saddam Hussein but Ali Hassan al-Majid, his cousin, nicknamed by the Kurds “Chemical Ali” and the Chief of Staff, General Nizar al-Khazraji.

Ali Hassan al-Majid been given full authority for the Kurdish northern sector of the country, and Chief of Staff, General Nizar al-Khazraji recently published his memoirs and remains at liberty unscathed.21

These two officials were in charge of military operations overall for the Kurdish north.

Plans long set in motion to seize control of Iraq – and its oil and gas

Well before 9/11 after which event George Bush Jnr. deliberately sought to implicate Saddam Hussein, the Project for the New American Century had long obsessed with Saddam Hussein – and with Iraq’s oil: “In January 1998, PNAC published an open letter to the Clinton administration warning that “we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.” It urged a new strategy that “should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power…The White House inserted itself directly into an intelligence dissemination and vetting process that is typically handled by the agencies themselves. After 9/11, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney instituted a new system known as “Top Secret Codeword/Threat Matrix,” under which they demanded to personally review raw intelligence.” 22

According to CNN special reporter, Antonia Juhasz: “In 2000, Big Oil, including Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell, spent more money to get fellow oilmen Bush and Cheney into office than they had spent on any previous election. Just over a week into Bush’s first term, their efforts paid off when the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed, bringing the administration and the oil companies together to plot our collective energy future. In March, the task force reviewed lists and maps outlining Iraq’s entire oil productive capacity…Planning for a military invasion was soon under way. Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, said in 2004, “Already by February (2001), the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why (to invade Iraq), but the how and how quickly.”

In 2013, a decade later, she wrote, “Fed up with the firms, a leading coalition of Iraqi civil society groups and trade unions, including oil workers, declared on February 15 that international oil companies have “taken the place of foreign troops in compromising Iraqi sovereignty” and should “set a timetable for withdrawal.” Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with losers: the Iraqi people and all those who spilled and lost blood so that Big Oil could come out ahead.23

In the UK, among the key players advocating for war on Iraq were the Intelligence agencies and certain politicians with links to big business. Tony Blair, Lord Robertson, Iain Duncan, George Osborne, Nadhim Zahawi, Tony Hayward and others that all have blood for oil on their hands. Genel Energy is one of the oil companies most complicit in raking the proceeds of the bloody Iraq conflict, including by cutting Kurd oil with ISIS oil at the time. Hunt Oil linked with George Bush is another, active early on in Iraqi Kurdistan. See my other articles on this issue and a useful background book and articles by Greg Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire – Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq. As The Independent noted: “Muttitt was the source of the Independent’s front-page revelations on Tuesday that both BP and Shell had meetings with government officials in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq…As well as documenting just how highly oil figured in the thinking of those who led what is widely thought to have been an illegal invasion, Fuel on the Fire exposes the lengths to which the occupying powers went to prise the country’s oil production out of the control of the Iraqi government, and into the hands of international oil companies, against the wishes of the Iraqi people…”24

Another commentator observed how “A Judicial Watch page “contains links to declassified documents showing the United States Government’s interest in Iraqi and Middle East oil just prior to the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, and prior to 9/11. There’s two sections that bear special scrutiny. They are entitled Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts – Part 1 & 2, dated March of 2001, six months before the Twin Towers were attacked. These were obtained by a court order according to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and concern what was known as the “Cheney Energy Task Force.” These documents show those with an intense interest in this region tightly targeting oil and gas. The reader will find the “suitors” listed to benefit from Iraq’s wealth interesting compared to who actually benefits now.”25

Porton Down, WMD and what Dr Kelly knew

Dr Kelly will almost certainly have known about all this and he would also have known – in detail -which foreign companies and acquiescent governments had helped supply Ba’athist Iraq with the materials, components and plans for its bio-chemical weapons programme (CBW). His phone would also have been bugged because of his work and his knowledge.

Dr Kelly would, in addition, have known about the historic wartime collaboration of the government installation he had long served and Apartheid South Africa. This had led to South Africa developing an extremely comprehensive CBW programme, dubbed as Project Coast, comparable to that of the Soviet Union/Russia. South Africa had put the technology to extensive use against its enemies, thanks to Porton Down and the Anglo-American Corporation.26

At the time of the Hutton Inquiry in 2003, Porton Down was also under investigation for illegal testing and carrying out experiments on human and animal subjects with bio-chemicals. 27 The so-called Operation Antler would run from 1999-2006 but further scandals have broken since Dr Kelly’s death over continuing experiments with bio-chemicals carried out on as many as 4,000 animals in 2017.28

UNSCOM TO UNMOVIC – the ‘Gulf War’ of 1991 – the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Employed under the terms of UN resolutions on Iraq from UNSCOM to UNMOVIC, Dr Kelly would have been one of the few players that had continuity of knowledge. UNSCOM was formed under UN Resolution 687 on 3 April 1991 “To monitor and verify Iraq’s compliance with its undertaking not to use, develop, construct, or acquire chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons” and was to assist the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).29

The Iraqi government made the UNSCOM weapons inspectors leave Iraq on 16 December 1998 citing malpractice and verified CIA intelligence penetration, among other grounds 30. UNMOVIC was then created under UN Security Council Resolution 1284 as of 17 December 1999. But Iraq blocked UNMOVIC’s activities until 27 November 2002. The government finally allowed the return of the inspectors following UN Resolution 1441, which had found Iraq to be in breach of its obligations to verifiably disarm. UN Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix, had served as Chairman and all its employees were under the UN’s jurisdiction,31 including Dr Kelly. Blix had observed to CNN: “On March 19, 2003, Iraq was invaded by an “alliance of willing states” headed by the U.S. and UK. My U.N. inspection team and I had seen it coming — and I felt an emptiness when, three days before the invasion, an American official called me to “ask” that we withdraw from the country. While we were sad to be ushered out in the midst of a job entrusted to us by the U.N. Security Council — one that we were doing well — there was a certain relief in knowing we had all made it out safely. We had worried that our inspectors might be taken hostage, but as it turned out the Iraqis had been very helpful during our time there…So it was that a few hundred unarmed U.N. inspectors left Iraq, to be replaced by hundreds of thousands of soldiers who began an occupation that would have a horrendous cost in lives, suffering and resources.”32

Iraqi exiles – primary actors in the war on Iraq

Among the numerous false grounds advanced by interested parties for war were those advanced variously by Ahmed Chalabi and Iyad Allawi – among other Iraqi exiles – both Shi’a opponents of Saddam’s Ba’ath government living comfortably in exile and heavily supported by the West in advancing regime change strategies. The CIA had set up and funded the INC, led by Chalabi, to the tune of some US $39 million 33 before shifting its backing to the Iraqi National Accord (Wifaq) under Iyad Allawi after 2002.34 The role of the Rendon Group also requires recognition, having been tasked with influencing public opinion against Saddam Hussein for a budget of millions of dollars: ” The group also began offering information to British journalists, and many articles subsequently appeared in the UK press. Brooke said, “It was amazing how well it worked. It was like magic.”…35

Ahmad Chalabi had been amongst those specifically advancing the false claim that an Iraqi agent had made arrangements to obtain uranium from Niger – proven false after regime change. The defector known as Curveball, was also the brother of one of his assistants, and his claims were also a fraud as he later confessed in Germany.

At the FAC hearing, just four months into the discredited Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA36) interim government headed by Paul Bremer, Dr Kelly had replied to questioning, “The only knowledge I have about Niger and uranium is from the newspapers. At that stage, at the end of May, it was the time when Mr Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, had made the statement that the documents were forged.”

Oil for Food Programme – An Exercise in Corruption

The now notorious Oil-for-Food Programme (OFFP) established in 1995 had also by this time contributed to the deaths of thousands of Iraqis, in addition to the over-prolonged Western imposed sanctions (6.8.1990-22.5.2003). The OFFP programme financed part of the costs of UNSCOM from the sale of Iraqi oil, whilst huge backhanders and commissions went to the companies involved, the mediators and the elite of the Ba’ath regime.37 Under the terms of the UN resolution, Iraq was prohibited from selling its oil directly – its key economic asset – until UNSCOM ‘verified the destruction of its prohibited weapons.’

The British Establishment, including its secret service, knew exactly what WMD scientist, Dr David Kelly, knew from his years at Porton Down through to his employment with UNMOVIC – a period spanning the period of government under Margaret Thatcher (Tory PM between 1979-1990) to Tony Blair (New Labour PM 1997-2007).

But the government, Whitehall and the secret services did not want the media and the public to find out through any journalists that Dr Kelly might informally have spoken to. It was plausibly expedient to silence him after Gilligan’s disclosures. But some felt this to be going a step too far. 38

Looking back briefly on the issue, Seymour Hersh had exposed in The New Yorker on 24 March, 2003, in a piece headed “Who Lied to Whom? Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program? “Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq’s weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President’s claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration’s advocacy of preemptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace “a world in which states consider themselves subject to law” with “the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.” 39

Hersh had then gone on to highlight the coordinated timing of the US and British false intelligence exposures that justified going to war on Iraq 40

On the same day, in London, Tony Blair’s government made public the dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given. Two days’ later, Secretary of State, Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also falsely cited Iraq’s attempt to acquire uranium… The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.

Conversely, the American military’s use of depleted uranium shells in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and Occupation would cause thousands of birth defects and continues to have a serious impact today in locations like Fallujah – nearly 181,000 rounds were fired and 300 sites were left contaminated, including some fired from UK tanks 41 42). In the Gulf War, as many as 782,414 rounds containing DU were fired. The Iraqi government even went on to issue a special postage stamp of high value featuring the living victim of a birth defect from DU poisoning.

Dr Kelly was one of the experts that knew full well at the time this policy was advanced that Iraq’s uranium acquisition allegation, and other such claims, were incorrect.

So far as the lies about the invasion were concerned, Irish commentator, Danny Morrison, dryly observed at the time: “George Bush’s government doesn’t give a damn. It overlooks human rights violations by its allies when it suits it. Its invasion and occupation of Iraq has no UN mandate. Its policy on sanctions prior to the war killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi infants. It shoots down Iraqi civilians on their own streets with impunity. It drops clusters of ‘freedom’ bombs on playgrounds, fires ‘freedom’ missiles into busy markets and enslaves the people of Iraq and, with them, the terrified people of the USA with a language of lies and deceit. It is an evil administration. Truly, George Bush is a weapon of mass destruction.”43

“Dark actors playing games” – intimations to friends of a “death in the woods”

Hawkish US reporter, Judith Miller, coincidentally a member of the Atlantic Council 44, is said to have received the last known email written by Dr. David Kelly before he set out for his final walk He had even taken his car and house keys with him. As usual, inside the pocket of the Barbour jacket that he wore was one of his collection of scouting knives – this blunt instrument a memento and not as officially claimed later, the weapon with which a microbiologist of more than 30 years’ experience and a bad right arm slashed his wrists…45

Former Liberal. Democrat MP, Norman Baker, was so disturbed by the suspicious nature of the death of Dr. Kelly that he took time off from his job to undertake research to publish a book (2008) on his findings. In the Daily Mail Baker observed how a confidential ex-security contact revealed he had met a former colleague from MI6 at a wedding who warned him to be careful when using his phone or computer and to let the matter of David Kelly drop. He did not do so and met the contact again two weeks later: “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…46

Former British Ambassador to the conference on disarmament in Geneva, David Broucher, had apparently shocked the whitewash that was the Hutton Inquiry by telling Lord Hutton in session that Dr Kelly had told him “if we go to war with Iraq I will probably be found dead in the woods.” This was later distorted into being an allusion to his probable intention to commit suicide. Tying this assertion in with Dr. Kelly’s email to Judith Miller just hours before he disappeared from sight, signifies that it is unreliable to interpret that utterance as a prior intention to kill himself: Dr Kelly had been accustomed to standing up to the Iraqi military in order to do his job as a weapon’s inspector. He was not a weak character.

As reported in the Mail on Sunday in August 2008, that has always followed the story, his former interpreter turned close friend, Mai Pederson, informed British police officers that were sent to to interview her after Kelly’s death that he had a physical difficulty in swallowing pills – a condition known as dysphagia – and that he cannot possibly have swallowed up to 29 pills from three blister packs found beside his body along with his knife and a bottle of water.

Pederson said she disputed Lord Hutton’s finding of suicide because Dr Kelly had fractured his right elbow in a riding accident in 1991 and since then could not perform basis tasks with his right arm involving normal strength, including carrying a briefcase, opening a door, or cutting a steak with it, as she had witnessed. He could not therefore have slashed his wrists: “David would have had to have been a contortionist to kill himself the way they claim… the knife he always carried had a folding blade and I remember him telling me he couldn’t sharpen it because his right hand didn’t have the strength to hold a sharpener…I don’t understand why the British Government isn’t thoroughly investigating this. Logically, he cannot have committed suicide.”47 Hutton did not call her to give evidence at the Inquiry along with several other key commentators.

Mai Pederson also told the Mail on Sunday that Dr Kelly had shared how his mother had committed suicide and confided: “Good God no, I couldn’t imagine ever doing that? I would never do it.” Pederson said Kelly was not depressed at the time as his wife had claimed.48 (His wife and family later appointed the same law firm to act for them as acted for Tony Blair.)

Dr. Kelly was even less likely to have killed himself in the manner pronounced by the Hutton Inquiry because he had been bereft over his mother’s suicide before his 21st birthday in 1964 and would not have wished to inflict similar suffering on his own family – and especially not at a time when one of his three daughters was about to get married. His daughter, Rachel, with whom he had arranged an appointment for later on the evening of his ‘disappearance’ had driven around the area searching for him on routes he was known to walk and this just three hours after he had left home. What if she had found her father dead? Would he really have put his family through such a shock and the subsequent ordeal? His daughter, Sian, who had also arrived at her parents’ house that evening was present when together they finally decided to call the police at 11.40 pm. By 1.00 a.m. a search helicopter was called out. Despite heat-seeking equipment it did not find a still warm body positioned against a tree just over a mile away.

An 85 foot high phone signals mast was then mysteriously erected but there had been no problem reaching Kelly by mobile phone earlier that afternoon such as to warrant it and he had taken his phone with him. (Tony Blair was in the air about to land in Japan.)

According to Miles Goslett in his important new book on the Kelly Affair, the Hutton Inquiry, was launched by Tony Blair, via his old friend, Lord Falconer, designating Lord Brian Hutton to lead it 49 even before Dr Kelly’s body was formally identified,– in itself a cause for suspicion over both the timing and the cause of death.

Several independent doctors later voluntarily prepared a 12-page dossier demanding an inquest and disputing the medical findings. They were rebuffed in that demand. 50

Richard Norton-Taylor observed in the Guardian some months on in September 2003, “There is a dark cabal around Tony Blair” – perhaps the same ‘dark actors’ that Dr Kelly referred to in his email? He observed, “What has already emerged – but been largely ignored – from the Hutton inquiry is the existence of a dark, almost Jacobean, cabal at the core of the Blair administration…It is a group of powerful, unelected people few would have heard of were it not for the evidence given to Hutton: Sir David Manning, the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser; Sir David Omand, his security coordinator; and John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee 51…Manning was widely respected as a high-flying diplomat and ambassador to NATO. Scarlett was MI6 station chief in Moscow responsible at one time for handling the KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky. Omand was praised as director of GCHQ and top civil servant at the Home Office. Then they were brought to the centre of power in Downing Street to be seduced by the smell of high-octane politics, and threw away their professional independence.

“Above all, they allowed themselves to be embraced by Campbell and opened the door to the tainting of intelligence by politics. You could hear it in their calculating treatment of Kelly who, in Scarlett’s chilling words, should have been subjected to a “security style interview”…52

It seems that he was…

Postscript

The paedophile network within the justice system and government at home and abroad

Gordon Thomas, author of One Hundred Years of MI5 and MI6, has revealed that his friend, Dr Kelly was working on a book exploring the links between state policy and war. Thomas noted: “He told me he had warned Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction. I advised him that as he had signed the Official Secrets Act, life could get ­difficult for him. I gained the impression that he was prepared to take the flak as he wanted his story to come out. He had also had several discussions with a publisher in Oxford and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the Official Secrets Act. [12]”53”

Following his disappearance and before his body was identified, his computers were all seized from his home by special police operatives.

Gordon Thomas had also observed: “The mandarins were anxious over what further harm Dr Kelly could do…John Scarlett had taken his share of the calls as chairman of the JIC for the past two years and contributor to the dossier (poised to take over as head of MI6).

“After her husband had not returned, Jan (Janice Kelly, Dr. Kelly’s wife) found a Thames Valley police officer and three men in dark suits on her doorstep asking to “recover” Dr Kelly’s computers despite there being no news of his whereabouts. The men were tech. experts from MI5’s Tech Assessment Unit.” 54

Several other sources have also gone on to claim that someone, or persons, from the world’s most organised paedophile network were present at Dr Kelly’s ‘murder’.

The network is known to include judges, prosecutors, lawyers, politicians – all the way to No. 10 and Westminster –55, teachers, social workers and public figures in the media. Allegations have also been made about Lord (Brian) Hutton having had a paedophile past when Chief Justice in Northern Ireland.56

The international network extends to members of the Dutch Royal Family, a former Dutch Attorney General 57, Dutch judges and prosecutors liaising with their counterparts across the globe.

The Hutton Inquiry effectively blocked a Coroner’s Inquest when Lord Hutton had no coronial experience.58 So why did Tony Blair appoint him to lead a premature inquiry into the death of a civil servant linked with the war on Iraq that had such profound implications?

Commentators argue strongly that this was because Hutton was known to be a ‘safe figure’ for the Establishment. The paedophile reference can have been admitted into records to keep him on his toes. 59

Despite his role in the Kelly Affair and the ‘dodgy dossier, John Scarlett was given a knighthood in the Queen’s New Year Honours’ list‘ in 2007.60 At Blair’s behest, he had also gone on to become head of MI6.

Labour cabinet minister, Clare Short, who had resigned after the war started, said: “Those words show that John Scarlett was in on the deception from the beginning and was being duplicitous deliberately.” 61

The Butler Review later found the September 2002 re-edited dossier for war on Iraq to be “flawed.”

That review is similarly tainted.

All too late for the quarter million dead in Iraq – and WMD inspector, Dr David Kelly.