David Kelly is one of the first victims of the Iraq war, and I really don't give a rats ass about any government whitewash operation until they come clean with all the documents they've got.
Until then it should simply be classified as a murder.
Also, Dr. Kelly was right in every aspect of his criticism in the run-up to the war and he should be remembered as one of the very few voices of reason in England during that period.
The blood of this man is on the hands of Tony Blair.
I lost a lot of confidence in governments in general when the French authorities decided to blow up the Greenpeace boat and ended up killing a civilian.
Governments can and do operate clandestinely, the only real question is how much.
David Kelly's death came at a very good time for the British Government, he had already proven to be willing to go public with potentially very damning information.
My take on it was that he would have continued to make plain his findings until either the British participation in the Iraq war would have become untenable or there would have been a government crisis.
The interesting part is that after all the dust settled it all seemed to boil down to the exact definition of what it means when a report is 'sexed up', as vague a term as you could want to have for that purpose.
Apparently 'selecting evidence that is convenient whilst leaving out that which is inconvenient' is not enough.
If you read the article it isn't the suicide verdict that is sealed it is other evidence given tot he inquiry but not published.
So perhaps the name of the CIA/Mi5/RAC agents that reported there were weapons, the names of current Iraqi politicians that were working for CIA/MI5/RAC.
70 years is nothing - there are still cabinet meetings from the Napoleonic wars that are sealed.
There wasn't any doubt about the suicide verdict.
The issue was that the scope of the inquiry was limited to investigating a very specific claim - about what David Kelly said about the report.
It was not allowed to investigate the real question about the truth of the report and "who sexed it up"
In American terms it's like holding an investigation into JFK's death but only considering the cause of death and finding that it was a bullet that killed him.
So they cherry picked some evidence to support a suicide verdict and sealed everything else. The article says that even the evidence they cherry picked was highly dubious.
They also sealed the autopsy reports which have nothing to do with intelligence agencies and are highly relevant to the suicide verdict.
I know every government conjures some James Bond secret agent fantasies whenever they want to hide something, but it doesn't fly here.
Wikileaks isn't the answer to problems like this. If you have to rely on a dubiously ethical web site that tries to position itself outside the law, some pretty fundamental things have already gone wrong.
For a start, we have to ask why the legal power exists to seal records in this way, who has the authority to order such seals, and what kind of oversight exists to make independent determinations about whether such seals are in the public interest.
> For a start, we have to ask why the legal power exists to seal records in this way
That is exactly the key.
The fact that a government can put itself above any sort of public inquiry for 70 years is completely counter to what any respectable democracy should stand for.
If you have to rely on a dubiously ethical web site that tries to position itself outside the law, some pretty fundamental things have already gone wrong.
Correct. I pay Wikileaks to be explicitly unethical, for that very reason.
It's like someone said elsewhere in the thread: if governments have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear, right?
The problem with this argument is that sometimes people, governments, businesses or whoever else do have something to hide, and sometimes they are hiding those things for honest, legitimate reasons. But sites like Wikileaks don't tend to pay much attention to that.
Well it might be more useful for your argument if you discussed particular instances where wikileaks has published material that you consider hidden legitimately.
One obvious example was publishing the membership records of the BNP.
You and I might not share their political views, but violating the privacy/anonymity of members of any political party is not the way forward, particularly when such violation will inevitably lead to sanctions that are at best dubiously ethical themselves.
Unfortunately, somebody has to leak it first. People that have things to hide are really good at leak control.
The article says that they prevented an ordinary police inquest from taking place in order to have their "special" investigation. This means that the people that were doing the investigating were probably carefully selected. If there was a normal police inquest chances are there would be at least one honest cop or DA that would leak the stuff. But now it is doubtful.
To die from blood loss, you have to bleed out at least 40% of your total blood volume, which would be approximately 2 liters (normal blood volume is 4-5L). The paramedics reported very little blood at the Kelly scene. The knife, which was alleged to belonged to Kelly, had no fingerprints on it.
The book "The Sovereign Individual" (published at least 10 years ago) predicted that the UK, then the USA would transition into much less free countries as their economies started to unravel. The authors also wrote a book predicting the fall of the Berlin Wall a few years before that event happened.
I view the political BS and general war-mongering in both countries to be a cover for those in power not wanting to confront very serious economic problems. Something to distract people, etc.
This may be off topic, but I was working with David Kelly's brother when he found out his brother died. After watching the news, I then realized how well known and important his brother was.
Even though the story's interesting, I think it should have been flagged - there's plenty of places to discuss it online, and there's no way not to Redditize this kind of conversation. Already there's a comment here claiming the Baha'i (??) may be behind this..
> Already there's a comment here claiming the Baha'i (??) may be behind this..
You can file that one under 'it takes all kinds'...
Also anybody that would know even the most cursory facts about the Bahá'í would realize that that is not a very likely explanation.
I'm in the atheist camp and was quite surprised to see a scientist of Dr. Kelly's calibre associated with an obscure religion so I did some reading and I think I could see some of the motivations for his actions rooted in his faith.
It's an interesting faith in the sense that it has worldwide following and was founded in recent times.
The united nations actually figure quite prominently in the followers of this religion.
I've read allegations that David Kelly's rapid turn around from saying that there were WMDs present to arguing that there were none present was the result of blackmail over evidence of him being sexually involved with an aide.
Googling on "David Kelly blackmail" gives thousands of hits.
David Kelly is one of the first victims of the Iraq war, and I really don't give a rats ass about any government whitewash operation until they come clean with all the documents they've got.
Until then it should simply be classified as a murder.
Also, Dr. Kelly was right in every aspect of his criticism in the run-up to the war and he should be remembered as one of the very few voices of reason in England during that period.
The blood of this man is on the hands of Tony Blair.
more here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245599/David-Kelly-...