Reply #40: Some further "astonishing" facts about David Kelly's death...

[Peace Patriot]

David Kelly (top British WMD expert; UN weapons inspector) died in the same week that Valerie Plame (top CIA WMD agent) was outed. Here's the sequence:

Spring 2003: Judith Miller 'hunting' for WMDs in Iraq, harassing US commanders and expecting a 'big scoop'; Miller clandestine meetings with "Scooter" Libby.

Late May 2003: David Kelly whistleblows to the BBC about the 'sexing up' of the pre-war intel.

June 2003: Somebody turns Kelly into his bosses; he is interrogated at a 'safe house' and threatened with the Official Secrets Act. The Blairites out him to the press (circa early July).

July 6, 2003: Joe Wilson op-ed in the NYT challenging the Niger-Iraq nuke forgeries.

July 7, 2003: Tony Blair is informed (as a result of the 'safe house' interrogation) that David Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things" (if they made him testify to a Parliamentary defense committee). Note: "could say," not "had said." (Hutton report.)

Week of July 7-14: David Kelly is forced to testify, under visible duress; he is then sent home without protection and apparently without surveillance.

July 14, 2003: Valerie Plame is outed (by Robert Novak).

July 18, 2003: David Kelly is found dead, under highly suspicious circumstances; his office and computers are searched.

July 22, 2003: Plame's entire Brewster-Jennings network of WMD counter-proliferation agents/contacts around the world is additionally outed (also by Novak, in his publication of the name of her front company).

July 24, 2003: Judith Miller writes David Kelly's obituary article in the NYT, and fails to disclose her close connection to David Kelly or his last email to her, on the day he died, in which he expresses concern about "the many dark actors playing games." (The email was later released by his family. All of his other emails of that day, July 17, are upbeat and forward-looking.)

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Valerie Plame outed. Four days later, David Kelly murdered.

There is about a 1% chance, in my view, that he was driven to suicide, perhaps by threats to his family, but, having read all there is to read about this event, I am 99% sure that he was murdered. And the clincher, to me, is: Where was his surveillance as he bled to death all night, from a minor wound to his wrist, in an outdoor rural area near his home where he took his daily walk? Kelly was obviously considered a threat to the Blair government. They had been hunting for him within government for a month. They were obviously concerned about what he knew and what he "could say" (hadn't said already). There was a raging controversy about him. He had just been sent home without protection. And they weren't watching him? That is not believable. So if, in the 1% chance, that he did commit suicide, what were his watchers doing while he supposedly bled to death all night, outdoors? If they didn't want to reveal themselves, one anonymous phone call to 9/11 would have saved his life.

The reason his watchers did nothing may be that he didn't die at the spot where he was found. He was picked up sometime after he left his house, killed and then dropped back there, along the route of his daily walk. That is what the evidence that Hutton excluded from the inquiry indicates. Maybe his watchers did the deed. Maybe they vamoosed while somebody else did it. Maybe they didn't notice that he had been picked up along his walk. Maybe they did, and couldn't stop it (if they wanted to). It is impossible to know at this point. But it is simply not believable that David Kelly was not under surveillance that day.

The interweaving sequence of events in the US, regarding Plame, and in the UK, regarding Kelly, could, of course, be a coincidence. But it strains credulity that there isn't a connection: One top WMD expert outed and disabled, here, and another permanently disabled, in the UK, the same week? The connection could simply be paranoia in both governments about exposure of their lie about WMDs in Iraq. Perhaps Plame was not murdered--and was 'merely' outed--because she is CIA, and I don't imagine that the CIA abides others killing their agents without severe retaliation. In any case, her counter-proliferation network was destroyed (and some of those people--people watching the movement of WMDs in other countries--may very well have been killed). Another reason that Plame was merely outed, while Kelly was murdered, may have been that Plame, as CIA, is bound to secrecy, and Kelly was not, and was already a whistleblower.

Was it just paranoia--fear of exposure--gripping both governments?

This was a period when it was just beginning to be clear that the "hunt" for the non-existent WMDs in Iraq wasn't going to turn up anything--that the whole premise for the war was a lie. However, the "hunt" did continue for some months, with breathless reports of this "white substance" and that suspicious barn, from our corpo-fascist media, copying and pasting stories from the Pentagon. They kept up the hype. They kept up the expectation that WMDs would be found. Why did they do this, if they knew that no WMDs would be found? It was not until fall 2003 that they switched from "hunting" for the non-existent WMDs to "hunting" for "WMD related program activities." (I remember laughing at that at the time.) Why did they keep it up all summer, emphasizing their lie over and over again, making the failure to find any WMDs all the more emphasized?

I think more was at stake than bad press. (And how 'bad' was our warmongering press, anyway? The 'news' corps was putty in Cheney's and Rumsfeld's hands. The NYT touted their bullshit every day leading up to the invasion. Wilson's op-ed would have floated down the corpo-fascist media "river of forgetfulness" if they had left it alone. And they could have punished Wilson for his dissent in many other quiet ways, instead of their spectacular, not to mention dangerous, act of treason, by outing the CIA's top WMD agent.)

My thesis is that they had a plan in motion to plant WMDs in Iraq--very probably with a connection to Iran, to justify expanding the war, then and there, into Iran--that their plan was foiled, probably more than once (somebody stopped the movement of the WMDs somewhere along the line, in March just after the invasion, and possibly again in the summer), and that they suspected Plame, her network and Kelly. They weren't paranoid; they were furious. Their "grand scheme" for justifying the war, and probably for expanding the war to Iran, had been stopped.

Kelly had supported the war and didn't start whistleblowing until well after the invasion. Why did he act to undermine the justification for a war that he had supported, at that late date? Possibly his conscience just caught up with him. But when you look at the time-line--his death coming four days after Plame was outed--and also the Blairites' obvious worry about what he knew and hadn't yet said--it looks more like there was a precipitating event, that prompted Kelly to whistleblow. A plan of such deception--planting the weapons--would likely have offended him. He was a very good scientist and a very good weapons inspector, and was proud of his work. He had said that he supported the war because he thought Saddam Hussein should be toppled. But, in keeping silent about the 'sexed up' intel before the war, maybe he hadn't bargained for the massive slaughter of 100,000 innocents in the bombing of Baghdad, the torture of prisoners (he had friends in Iraq) and the massive deception of a phony WMD find, especially if it was aimed at Iran and a Mideast-wide war?

And it turns out that Valerie Plame's particular field of endeavor, as to WMD counter-proliferation, was Iran.

Iran continued to obsess Cheney and Rumsfeld for three more years, until Rumsfeld was ousted in 2006 (likely in a putsch by the US military brass, who balked at nuking Iran--and with possibly wider implications and involvement by major players like Daddy Bush and Leon Panetta, in view of the catastrophic potential of China and/or Russia coming into it, on Iran's side). But if you backtrack their obsession with Iran to 2003, it seems an obvious and rather easy expansion to the wider war that they wanted, by, for instance, planting evidence that Saddam's WMDs had been taken to Iran. I think this is a more plausible motivator for the outing of Plame and Brewster-Jennings and the murder of Kelly, than mere bad press. What was the danger to them anyway, of bad press? That the people of the US and the UK would rise up with pitchforks and cast them out? Right. No, I think the problem most likely was something very specific, that caused all this mayhem in the week of July 14-22, and the best candidate for that is a deceptive WMD plan to expand the war into Iran.

There IS still the possibility that it was paranoia. I'm thinking of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Telltale Heart." If you carry a weight of guilt, fears can build up to overwhelming proportions. However, the main perps of the war, and the likely perps of the Plame outings (and probable collateral deaths) and of Kelly's murder, have shown not one iota of remorse. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair--afraid of bad publicity?