Dr. David Kelly - Cause of Death
Crazy Miranda | 23.07.2003 13:20 | Analysis | Repression
Contrary to some headlines that I've seen, the police have *not* confirmed that Dr. Kelly's death was a suicide; they confirmed that he apparently died from a slit wrist. And quite right too - determining the cause of death is a matter for the coroner's inquest. While the circumstances in which the body was found suggest suicide, there are other circumstances that the coroner will hopefully be examining.
Hopefully the coroner will, at the very least, establish:
a) whether the knife found at the scene in the copse belonged to Dr. Kelly, and
b) whether the prescription painkillers found at the scene had been prescribed to him.
We have seen footage of a softly-spoken man, giving measured responses to a Parliamentary Select Committee; and we have been invited to draw the conclusion that the way he has been treated by Parliament, the press and the MoD has upset him so much that he saw no alternative to taking his own life. It is important to remember, however, that his refreshingly-gentle tone of voice belied his positions as a senior UN arms inspector and as the head of microbiology at Porton Down. It seems questionable that the man whom Saddam Hussein, his chief scientists and their minders couldn't intimidate, would kill himself because a few British politicians have been mean to him.
It is also implausible that Dr. Kelly was made suicidal by press coverage. Kelly, says Tom Mangold, "spoke to lots of journalists, not for self-aggrandisement, but because he wanted them to report WMDs properly".
Mangold also says "Suicide just wasn’t David. He could handle the worst that the world could throw at anyone. He fought the Iraqi intelligence services and won. This was a man who discovered that Iraq had imported 32 tonnes of bio-growth material. He wrote the book on bio-weapons. It’s a hard field and he wasn’t a fragile man".
It's hard to see who might gain from his death; it appears to have increased the heat on the Government, the BBC and that miserable parliamentary select committee. But it appears that a lot of senior western microbiologists died in odd circumstances in the months after 9/11; this rather long chronicles them.
http://www.memphisflyer.com/MFSearch/full_results.asp?xt_from=1&aID=2521
a) whether the knife found at the scene in the copse belonged to Dr. Kelly, and
b) whether the prescription painkillers found at the scene had been prescribed to him.
We have seen footage of a softly-spoken man, giving measured responses to a Parliamentary Select Committee; and we have been invited to draw the conclusion that the way he has been treated by Parliament, the press and the MoD has upset him so much that he saw no alternative to taking his own life. It is important to remember, however, that his refreshingly-gentle tone of voice belied his positions as a senior UN arms inspector and as the head of microbiology at Porton Down. It seems questionable that the man whom Saddam Hussein, his chief scientists and their minders couldn't intimidate, would kill himself because a few British politicians have been mean to him.
It is also implausible that Dr. Kelly was made suicidal by press coverage. Kelly, says Tom Mangold, "spoke to lots of journalists, not for self-aggrandisement, but because he wanted them to report WMDs properly".
Mangold also says "Suicide just wasn’t David. He could handle the worst that the world could throw at anyone. He fought the Iraqi intelligence services and won. This was a man who discovered that Iraq had imported 32 tonnes of bio-growth material. He wrote the book on bio-weapons. It’s a hard field and he wasn’t a fragile man".
It's hard to see who might gain from his death; it appears to have increased the heat on the Government, the BBC and that miserable parliamentary select committee. But it appears that a lot of senior western microbiologists died in odd circumstances in the months after 9/11; this rather long chronicles them.
http://www.memphisflyer.com/MFSearch/full_results.asp?xt_from=1&aID=2521
Crazy Miranda
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