Britain
Blighty
Conspiracy theories
Conspiracy theories and David Kelly
Aug 13th 2010, 14:29 by T.C. | LONDON
DAVID KELLY was a husband, a father and one of the world's foremost experts on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. He advised the British government on the matter, particularly in connection with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. He was also one of the main sources for a claim by Andrew Gilligan, then a BBC reporter, that Tony Blair's government had rewritten publicly-released intelligence to make it "sexier", in the hope of justifying the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003. After Gilligan made his claim, Kelly was quickly identified as the source of the leak. A few days after a stressful appearance before a Parliamentary committe investigating Mr Gilligan's allegations, he was found dead in the woods near his Oxfordshire home.
The official account (given in the Hutton Report) was of suicide. Dr Kelly had cut one of his wrists and swallowed over two dozen painkillers, the reaction of an intensely private man to his sudden and unwanted elevation to star witness for anti-war campaigners. His death is in the news again after a group of doctors wrote to the Times newspaper, claiming that the suicide verdict is unsafe and demanding a proper inquest. That is only right and proper: this was a man, after all, who felt so hounded by his employer that he seemingly resorted to taking his own life. But I find the tone of the coverage particularly interesting. The Times carries a short analysis piece (behind Rupert Murdoch's new paywall) which baldly and seriously poses the question of whether Dr Kelly was murdered by agents of the state.
Did someone rid Tony Blair's Government of this turbulent weapons inspector? David Kelly was the most experienced Briton involved in UN inspections in Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
[...]
There remain serious questions. Why did Dr Kelly predict that if Iraq was invaded, "I will probably be found dead in the woods?"
The article goes on to list other problems with the official account: there were no fingerprints on the knife used to cut Dr Kelly's wrist, for instance, and Dr Kelly apparently suffered from an aversion to medicine that might have made swallowing that many pills tricky. To be clear, I am not questioning the medical expertise of the doctors, who doubt that the wound to Dr Kelly's wrist was big enough to be fatal. But I am dubious about the jump from questioning the evidence to assuming the existence of death squads in the employ of the prime minister.
British governments of the past 50 years have got up to all sorts of nasty business: conspiring with Israel and France to invade Egpyt and seize the Suez Canal, for instance, or evicting locals from Diego Garcia to make way for an American military base, waging the infamous "dirty war" in Northern Ireland, and selling guns and fighter jets to some of the world's most oppressive governments. They have proved themselves perfectly capable of foot-dragging and coverups after some disaster or other, such as the shooting dead of civil-rights marchers in Northern Ireland on Bloody Sunday.
But the idea that someone in power, with malice aforethought, authorised the cold-blooded murder of a British citizen whose only misdemeanour was speaking to a journalist feels different. That is the sort of thing that blood-soaked dictators in far-away lands get up to, not the rulers of modern democracies mostly governed by the rule of law. We already have a plausible account of the reasons behind the outing of Dr Kelly, namely that the government thought it would be a good way to "fuck Gilligan" and discredit his intensely embarassing story (which later, of course, proved to be almost entirely true).
We've long known that deference is dead, and that people are no longer willing to trust those in authority just by virtue of their position. But this feels like more than healthy scepticism to me. It is one thing to assume that this or that official, or even the government as a whole, might be incompetent, blinded by ideology, paralysed by indecision or riven by personal conflict. It is a wholly different kettle of fish to assume that it is actively malevolent.
Most weirdly of all, this belief—this idea that the previous British government was perfectly prepared to assassinate its own citizens when the circumstances called for it—seems to have had remarkably few consequences. One poll for a BBC documentary on the subject suggests that 22% of people do not think Kelly killed himself. Where are these people? Why aren't they rioting in the streets? Do they seriously believe what they profess to believe, or do such thoughts just form an entertainingly dark and conspiratorial distraction from ordinary, humdrum life? And how do we reconcile the seeming indifference to David Kelly's supposedly state-sanctioned slaying with the protests and furor that rightly accompanied the death of Ian Tomlinson, the protestor shoved to the ground by a policeman at the time of the G20 protests in 2009?
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