David Kelly: when states do [and do not] kill
Posted on Monday 23 August, 2010
Filed Under Iraq, New Labour
WHEN a man leaves his home carrying a boxful of powerful painkillers, a bottle of water and a pruning knife, the assumption has to be that he harbours an obvious intention to kill himself.
When he is known to be in a depressed frame of mind and when there is a history of suicide in the family, then there is a presupposition that he is capable of doing just that.
So the onus is on anyone who argues that the death of David Kelly stems from anything other than the obviously tragic spectacle of a broken and shabbily-treated man taking his own life to provide some rational grounds for this counterintuitive contention. The conspiracy theorists’ case strikes me as somewhat insubstantial.
What effectively is being suggested here is that Dr Kelly was somehow ‘taken out’ – I think that’s the spy thriller jargon – by forces associated in some way with the British state. The inevitable subtext is that the case represents just one more drop of blood on the blood-soaked hands of that well-known war criminal Tony Bliar.
Let’s not rule out the thesis a priori. That states of all stripes sometimes get rid of people that they would prefer to see out of the way is something established beyond dispute.
Chilean intelligence operatives were convicted of the execution of Orlando Letelier, their country’s Allende-era ambassador to the US, by means of a car bomb in Washington in 1976.
Back in 1978 the Bulgarians used a rather upmarket Swaine Adeney Brigg umbrella to inject a ricin-poisoned dart into the leg of dissident Georgi Markov, with fatal consequences. Three decades later, thallium killed Alexander Litvinenko, a longstanding critic of Russia’s president Putin.
The car crash that injured Morgan Tsvangirai – and killed his unfortunate wife – seems a heck of a coincidence, coming as it did just two days after he was sworn in as prime minister of Zimbabwe.
Israel’s secret services are entirely open in their operation of such a policy, and there is little doubt that they knocked off Mahmoud al Mabouh. And so on and so forth.
That’s just off the top of my head. Plainly governments do do this stuff, all the time. But it does not follow from that proposition that Kelly joins the roll call.
I cannot immediately think of a single verified instance of proven official complicity of the UK secret services in such tactics, at least in recent decades. Doubtless I will be corrected in the comments boxes if any such cases have slipped my mind.
In any case, what purpose could the clandestine killing of David Kelly have served? Anything that he did or did not tell Andrew Gilligan, Susan Watts or Nick Rufford was already out there in the open. The cat was well and truly out of the bag.
That just leaves the claim that the injuries inflicted on one of Kelly’s wrists were insufficient to have caused death. Doctors have offered entirely credible explanations for the former point, centred on the discovery that two of Kelly’s main coronary arteries were 70%-80% narrower than normal, on account of heart disease unsurprising in an out-of-condition 59-year-old.
This is not to argue that the British state respects the sanctity of human life without reservation, of course. The obvious examples of it not doing so include Bloody Sunday, the 1988 Death on the Rock shootings in Gibraltar, and Jean Charles de Menezes.
The Stevens inquiries also established collusion between the security forces and Loyalist paramilitaries that led to the death of a number of prominent Republicans. But these murders came with official blessing rather than direct instigation.
Always remember that we are British, old chap. Despite the impression generated by those James Bond films, cloak and dagger is not our style. We prefer to leave the underhand covert ops to Johnny Foreigner. In short, when our state kills, it’s all in the open and people damn well know about it.
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“I cannot immediately think of a verified instance of proven official complicity of the UK secret services in such tactics, at least in recent decades.”
IRA shoot to kill? Pro republican lawyers?
British agents being present during torture in the ‘war on terror’.
From what I know of the Kelly case questions need to be answered, if only to nullify the conspiracy theories. Then we can focus on the task of bringing to justice those in ‘our’ state that were resposnible for the mass murder in Iraq and Afghanistan.
WHEN a man leaves his home carrying a boxful of powerful painkillers, a bottle of water and a pruning knife, the assumption has to be that he harbours an obvious intention to kill himself.
Or he’s a really clumsy gardener.
Blair could be regarded as ultimately responsible for the shabby treatment that led Kelly to kill himself. Is that any less disgusting than sending someone out to kill him?
Watched The Ghost Writer last night. Now we know, Cherie Blair is a CIA agent! It explains a lot.
“Is that any less disgusting than sending someone out to kill him?”
Yes.
I got the impression from Norman Baker’s book that it was not the British, but some other, possibly allied, outfit that might have done it. If, indeed, it was done.
Honestly,Dean. You don’t even read the posts properly, do you? I specifically mention Death on the Rock and (by implication) Pat Finucane.
My argument is that this are not cloak and dagger hits in the sense that Kelly would have been, had he been a state victim.
I did read the entire post I just thought the IRA examples should be included under the heading “official complicity of the UK secret services in such tactics”, which you said “I cannot immediately think of a verified instance of”.
I think the disgraceful grilling he got from the Commons Select Committee was probably the tipping point. The anguish on the poor mans face said it all.
I just think that a lot of this speculation is politically motivated(!!). I’m sure there is a word for it in spy manuals, ‘black propaganda’ or something.
It also remins me of the Hilda Murrell Affair. Even when someone is caught and convicted, some people still persist in insisting that there is more to it than that.
So why did this intelligent man select the most difficult option he could find to commit suicide? We are told that he took 29 coproxamol tablets – there was evidence of the constituents of coproxamol in his body, absolutely no irrefutable evidence that he swallowed all 29 tablets. Kelly was known to have the greatest difficulty in swallowing any tablets. He took an old blunt gardening knife to cut his wrist – wasn’t there a nice sharp kitchen knife in the family home. Then he cuts the hard to get at ulnar artery rather than the easier radial artery, all this by a man who had a weakness in his right arm that made even cutting steak difficult!
So why didn’t he hang himself from one of the trees on Harrowdown Hill? Or he could have extended his walk by another ten minutes or so and laid himself flat in the River Thames to drown (that part of the river is quiet and away from human habitation).
How come when he set off on his last walk that he was able to have a perfectly normal conversation with a neighbour he met? How come that the police turfed Mrs Kelly out of her house on the night Dr Kelly didn’t return so that they could do a search? Why did DC Coe blatantly lie about the number of people with him when the body was found? We know that one of the men was DC Shields. Why hasn’t Coe named the third man?
These are just a few of the matters that need looking at by an inquest. Can anyone tell me that suicide has been proved “beyond all reasonable doubt”?