September 5, 2003. He was floundering around in the immediate aftermath of Kelly's death, the Plame outing and the failure to find WMDs in Iraq. One of the things he is wrong about is who first published Kelly's "dark actors" email. It was not Judith Miller. In fact, she suppressed it until after his FAMILY had released his emails. In her obit news article on Kelly in the NYT, a few days after he died, she fails to mention this newsworthy email or any of her close connections to Kelly.
O'Neill:
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/00000006DF05.htmI also think O'Neill gets caught up too much in the superficial politics of the moment--leftists saying Kelly was an antiwar hero, etc. This analysis misses the subtleties of the situation, and of the Kelly story. Kelly was pro-war. He was an old hand at Iraq and wanted Saddam ousted. And he went along with the exaggerations and lies that Bush/Blair were telling, to accomplish that purpose. He tried internally to get their intel docs to be more accurate. He and those he was working with (other scientists) failed at that, but then were silent about it until after the invasion. THEN, remarkably, Kelly started whistleblowing anonymously to the BBC, in late May 2003--a rather inexplicable action that seemed aimed to undermine the war policy that he had supported, and in particular to undermine the politicians, Blair/Bush, who were implementing it.
Why did he change his mind about this? That is the question.
I think a good and plausible answer to this question is that he stumbled upon the Bush junta plot to PLANT the WMDs in Iraq--and that was too much for Kelly. My sense of him is that he really did believe in his work of non-proliferation (as I think was the case also with Plame). And, as a scientist and a man, outright deceit--such as planting the weapons--was intolerable. There are other possibilities, such as that he was simply revolted by the level of Bush "shock and awe" violence--the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people--and the chaos and greed with which they conducted the war. He had friends in Iraq. He may have been privy to info WE were not getting right away--torture of Iraqis, CACI death squads. However, the startling coincidences in the Plame/Kelly time-lines, the REACTION of the Blairites to Kelly's rather mild statements to the BBC (they were totally freaked out about it), and other facts of those events, point to a much more specific cause of Kelly's whistleblowing, just as the events on this side of the pond point to a hidden trigger for the Plame/BJ outing, something deeper and more threatening than Wilson's dissent about the Niger allegations and publication of his article.
The Blairites and the Bushites were not just worried about dissent--is the upshot. Their behavior indicates more than a generalized fear of exposure of their lies, in a public policy debate in which they had all the advantage, with a fearful or lapdog corporate press. They were easily permitted to switch lies--from WMDs to 9/11 and democracy. What could have caused them to take the extraordinarily risky action of outing the entire CIA counter-proliferation project (Brewster-Jennings), and then either killing David Kelly or driving him to suicide?*
I just don't think that the publication of Wilson's article (which was likely expected) or the rather mild whistleblowing of Kelly to the BBC (which was likely unexpected) could have been the cause of all this? There is something more here. And a plot to plant WMDs in Iraq--that got foiled, and that was threatening to come to light--explains Bush/Blair's behavior, and everyone's behavior and fate during these events, much better than any other scenario.
David Kelly may not be an antiwar hero. But I think he is a democracy hero. He wanted people to know that something was not right. In my read on him--presuming the WMD-planting theory to be true--he did not feel free (or safe enough) to disclose this dreadfully deceitful plan. He had his job and his family (and his life!) to think of. He said at one point that he had promised his bosses he was not going to reveal "any state secrets." But SOMETHING was bothering him about those "state secrets"--something that had NOT been bothering him all that much before the invasion. And I think it's a good bet that it was something very specific--such as this posited plot to plant the weapons. It's also possible that he had something to do with foiling that plot, in which case he would be even more of a hero. (Can you imagine what the political landscape would look like now, if they had succeeded in deceiving the world about planted WMDs? We would have no chance at all of restoring democracy and accountability in our two countries.)
But Brendon O'Neill really takes a wrong turn in focusing on the politics of this matter. It is not merely a matter of left or right politics. It is much deeper than that. It is a matter of "what is the truth?"--both about Kelly's death (which was clearly whitewashed as a suicide*), and about the Plame outing. And it is ultimately a matter of the truth about the war, and the extent to which our governments deceived us about it, and why.
On Kelly's collaboration with Judith Miller. I suspect it was a case of her cultivating the contact--a top British WMD scientist--for her own purposes (and the purposes of the gov'ts she may have been spying for). Also, my feeling about Kelly is that he had genuine concerns about the spread of WMDs, and may have felt, like doctors do sometimes, that a little exaggeration doesn't hurt. It's possible that he was in deeper than that--and I've wondered if he could have been a UK/US spy on the UN weapons team that he was, at one time, a part of. But his embeddedness in the weapons or spy establishments would have been all the more reason for the Blairites (and the Bushites) to flip out at his whistleblowing. And it would make his whistleblowing all the more surprising, and all the more likely to have been inspired by something MORE than the gov't's pre-war "exaggerations" of the Iraq threat.
One thing more: I suspect that Miller--in her obit of Kelly--put words in his mouth (in the mouth of a dead man) in paragraphs 15-16. She has him saying--not in quotes--that the US troops were not looking hard enough for the WMDs in Iraq. This doesn't seem like the opinion of a man who had just been whistleblowing about the exaggerated threat. But it does serve Miller's interests.
And I wonder who she's speaking of, when she talks about Kelly's "fan club." (Donald Rumsfeld?)
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*(I think there may be a chance--a small one--that it WAS suicide, and that he was driven to it by either disillusionment with his gov't, or by threats against him or his family. But the Hutton report is clearly a whitewash of the facts. It ignored all sorts of evidence that this was not a suicide. No proper inquiry has ever been done. My feeling: 99% he was assassinated.)
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