MP says Kelly's 2003 death not suicide

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20071112/tpl-uk-britain-kelly-39349ed_2.html

LONDON (Reuters) - A former U.N. weapons inspector, whose death caused one of the biggest crises of Tony Blair's premiership, did not commit suicide as official accounts state, an MP claims in a new book.

David Kelly was found dead in woods near his home in July 2003, just days after it was revealed that he was the source for a BBC report that said Blair's government had deliberately "sexed-up" intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

News of the death rocked Blair and his government, with critics saying Kelly's identity had been made public in order to discredit the BBC's story.

The Ministry of Defence had confirmed to reporters that Kelly was the BBC's source and the mild-mannered microbiologist was then subjected to a high-profile mauling by a parliamentary committee two days before his death.

Senior judge Lord Hutton carried out an independent inquiry into the circumstances and ruled in January 2004 that Kelly had slit his left wrist after taking painkillers during a walk near his home in Oxfordshire. snip

However, Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP who has spent a year investigating the case for his book "The Strange death of David Kelly", says he believes the scientist did not kill himself.

For a hero.

Here's the sequence:

Late May to late June, 2003: David Kelly starts whistleblowing, anonymously, to the BBC, about the "sexed up" pre-war intel, same period as the Scooter/Libby clandestine meetings about Wilson's whistleblowing; end of June, after being hunted throughout the government, Kelly gets mysteriously outed to his bosses.

First week of July: Kelly interrogated at a "safe house" and threatened with the Official Secrets Act.

July 6, 2003: Wilson publishes his op-ed.
July 7, 2003: Tony Blair is informed that Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things" (not had said--could say) (Hutton Report);

July 8+, 2003: Kelly is dragged before a parliamentary committee and forced to partially recant. Kelly gets outed to the press and sent home without protection, and apparently without surveillance.

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

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

July 22, 2003: The entire Brewster-Jennings WMD counter-proliferation network that Plame headed is outed (also by Novak), putting all of our covert agents/contacts at risk of getting killed, and disabling all projects.

This latter date is one that people tend to forget; they also tend to forget that the whole network was outed, not just Plame. And I think this time-line is just too, too coincidental to be ignored. Two top WMD experts destroyed in one week, and an entire network of WMD contacts. Plame outed; four days later, Kelly found dead, in the most unlikely suicide scenario I've ever read about.

I have no inside knowledge of what the connection might be, just speculation. Basically, I think that these two whistleblowing items--Kelly's and Wilson's--would likely have drowned in the war profiteering corporate news monopoly river of forgetfulness, had the Bushites and the Blairites just issued a few denials, and then royally ignored them, and taken their revenge quietly. Why all this...panic (is what it looks like to me)? And I don't think the panic could have been caused by fear of the news media, or the people--unless the matter at issue was far more serious then lying about the WMDs (which was pretty widely known anyway--from UN weapons inspectors, etc., and from the fact that the weapons hadn't been found).

And when you think of the risks they took--putting many top Bushites at risk of treason charges, incurring the ire of the CIA, and in England risking a nosy MP kicking over a murder, it all seems excessive, if it was merely about government lying. Words. Words can be spun--endlessly--and were.

My guess is that they were attempting to PLANT the WMDs in Iraq, perhaps traceable to other Bushite illicit weapons dealing (and who knows to what else?), their plot was foiled, and they were both furious at being foiled, and panicked that the whole thing was about to go, well, nuclear. A dirty rotten scheme to PLANT the weapons was far worse than lying. This scheme--if true--would likely have had the goal of cementing Bush's and Blair's political positions (with a justification for the war), and, instead, was threatening to bring them crashing down. Think of it from the Bushites' and Blairites' point of view AT THAT TIME. If this scheme is what was behind their actions, then Kelly's statements to the BBC and Wilson's oped must have looked like the tip of the iceberg. Wilson's was pointed at the Niger forgeries (part one of the plot--ground work for the phony weapons "find"); Kelly's was pointed at the "mushroom cloud" rhetoric (further ground work to the big "find"). If they were in fact guilty of cooking up the Niger forgeries, and other preliminary P.R. actions, to prep for the big "find," they would be panicked and in a rush to terrify, silence and eliminate anyone who knew, and would do foolish things like outing a whole CIA network.

The Bush/Blair BEHAVIOR fits this theory better than it does the commonly believed cause (op-eds, dissent--a war of words). Kelly's murder, rather than suicide, is important to this theory in that it points to the level of panic. Outing CIA agents is bad enough, but murdering an insider white guy? The theory doesn't hinge on that--it can survive Kelly having actually committed suicide (under their pressure)--but the likelihood that he was murdered cries out, "Why?" in a way no other action does. Why murder someone for merely accusing you of lying--and in the rather mild terms that Kelly used (exaggerating, "sexing up" the facts)? Murder screams that he knew something MORE. What could it have been? And how could it be connected across the sea, where something similar was going on, the same week, about...oh, yeah, a WMD counter-proliferation agent and her network.

I've looked pretty closely at the facts around Kelly's "suicide," and I agree with MP Brown. The evidence points strongly to murder, and Hutton's blatant exclusion of pertinent facts raises further suspicion. By whom, and for what reason, are still unknown. But it's well past time that the "coincidence" of dates (and themes, and potential motives), with the Plame outings, become part of the investigation.