Updated
02/02/03
00:20

1st February 2003

by Simon Aronowitz

Considering how fast events have moved recently in the political world, never mind the day-to-day `news' that we are bombarded with, it is necessary to recap what actually happened last May and June. This will help explain why Lord Hutton's apparent clearing the Blair government of any wrongdoing is considered by so many to be a "white-wash."

There was already considerable disquiet about how the country had been led to attack Iraq, with many arguing that intelligence had been fabricated or unreasonably promoted in order to justify an invasion. 

Andrew Gilligan's controversial broadcast was made on May 29th 2003, the now infamous 6:07 am dispatch where he said that the source alleged that the government had "sexed up" the September dossier by including the 45 minute claim, knowing that it was probably wrong.

In subsequent broadcasts that morning, Gilligan's reporting was scripted and therefore much tighter, eliminating any reaching statements or veering away from putting words into his source's mouth. Gone was the accusation that the government had "sexed up" the report, now he was quoting his source as saying

"It was transformed in the week before it was published, to make it sexier. The classic example was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use within forty five minutes. That information was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes, because it wasn't reliable. Most things in the dossier were double source, but that was single source, and we believed that the source was wrong."

Click here for full transcript of report

Gilligan's subsequent article in the Mail on Sunday upped the stakes when he quoted his source as blaming Alastair Campbell for the embellishment of the intelligence information to provide an argument for going to war.

Gilligan's apparent revelation provided the ammunition that many had been seeking by way of concrete evidence that the government had sold the war on a lie. 

The item on the Today Programme did not, however, stand in isolation, pointing a finger at the Government. Many in the country were feeling misled into supporting the attack on Iraq and were making their feelings known and asking awkward questions.

The Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) was looking not only at the the journalism of the Today Programme in mid 2003, but also the false or misleading intelligence presented to the public to make the case for war.

Jack Straw was called to testify before the Committee over issues such as the bogus documents purporting to demonstrate Iraq's attempts to purchases uranium yellowcake from Niger.

The government was able to dance around this and almost everything else with the plausible deniability thesis that they hadn't known something or weren't passed information. In the case of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's trip to Africa and his subsequent report which detailed that the suggesting that Niger was selling any nuclear material to Iraq was patently false, Straw argued that the UK government had never received his report.

It is not difficult to consider that since the report was delivered to Dick Cheney, the US Vice President, and he was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq, he would not want to disseminate information which would poke a hole in his case for war.

No amount of dancing, however, could discredit the allegations made by Andrew Gilligan without first exposing the source of the allegations.

Clearly demonstrated by the evidence presented to the Hutton Inquiry, the government felt the need to `out' the source of Gilligan's story so that they could discredit the allegations presented. Blair himself chaired the meeting at Downing Street where the strategy was agreed upon.

Alastair Campbell noted in his diary that he wanted to "fuck Gilligan". (However, one has to doubt that he presented his real journal to the Inquiry - who keeps a typed journal in an A4 ring-binder on hole-punched paper? Only those who want to change their entries...)

The policy adopted ensured that David Kelly's name would be out in the open. The government was confident that it could kill the momentum of Gilligan's story by discrediting his claims of who his source was. The activities of 10 Downing Street were not to get at the truth, they were to obscure the truth. Whether the claims were accurate or not, the government simply sought to divulge that if Kelly was the source, by semantics and job descriptions he could not have been qualified to make the reported statements, and therefore his statements were irrelevant.

So it was not really surprising that when Kelly was eventually outed and called to testify before the FAC, he denied that he was Andrew Gilligan's source for the story. Evidently someone from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had been babysitting Dr Kelly, coaching him for his appearance, or perhaps even exerting pressure on him to alter his evidence in favour of the Blair Government. 

With the pace of the news at the time this all occurred, and the pace of news today, people forget what the cycle of spin was at the time of Kelly's testimony. The mood of the country, of the headlines, of the governmental spin was such that following Kelly's appearance at the Committee, Gilligan's story stood heavily discredited. It didn't matter if it was all still accurate, the spin was such that it was disregarded.

The government's strategy had appeared to work. Much less weight was given to the facts than to the appearance that Gilligan's story was unsourced. The BBC was coming under fire and in trying to maintain the anonymity of its source, there was little it could do if Kelly denied that he was that same source.

Kelly gave further evidence the following day, on Wednesday 16th July, behind closed doors to the Intelligence and Security Committee where he went into more detail behind his "30%" dialogue. Kelly admitted that this was something he would have acknowledged to many, that in his view there was only a 30% chance that Iraq had actual WMD rather than the programmes to develop these weapons. When he testified before the FAC, the mention of this in Gilligan's report, was quickly glossed over.

Kelly testified to the FAC that it was the "30%" comment that was one of the things that apparently alerted him to the possibility that he was a source used in Gilligan's report, but he could not have been THE source that everyone was looking for, because he said that the controversial statements of sexing up the report and the insertion of  the "45 minute" claim were not made by him. The information which he gave more freely behind closed doors would have confirmed for some high up in the government that Kelly was a whistleblower, and may not remain quiet.

David Kelly left his home in Oxfordshire on Thursday 17th July 2003. His body was found the following morning approximately five miles from his house. 

Kelly himself acknowledged that his involvement with different UK governmental and international departments or agencies made it difficult for people to describe his professional role. This was key to the strategy seized upon by Downing Street to discredit Andrew Gilligan's story and therefore Kelly at the same time. The spin employed resulted in Kelly being painted as someone who was less than they made out to be, that he had inflated his own responsibility and was not qualified to make the statements apparently attributed to him. This effort continued after Kelly's death as the Prime Minister's spokesman referred to Kelly as a `Walter Mitty" type character on the eve of his funeral.

As Campbell and the MoD were struggling to denigrate the reputation of David Kelly, the facts behind his professional career were once again obscured. One vital part of his secret activities in particular may have been the real reason for his early demise.

Whilst Lord Hutton has not questioned the assertion that Dr Kelly took his own life, several others have. Notably, three doctors, in a letter to the Guardian newspaper, disputed whether Dr Kelly could have died in the manner described by the pathologist. Almost completely ignored by the media was the following incident as Lord Hutton delivered his conclusions, reported by the Scotsman:

"Rejecting Lord Hutton’s conclusion of suicide, criminal psychologist Patricia Rodrigues-Walsh caused a stir at the back of the room as she insisted the Government scientist had been killed."

The front page of the Evening Standard on Tuesday 27th January 2004 asked "Was Kelly Murdered?". Reporting on the letter to the Guardian, the Evening Standard was treading where other publication feared to. 

But this could not go on. The news organisations were all fed a fresh story on Tuesday evening which pushed the question of murder off the agenda completely. Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of Rupert Murdoch's `The Sun' newspaper had the scoop of the year; someone had leaked to him accurately the conclusions of the Hutton Report, embargoed until 12:30 the following day. Yet for some, the question of whether Kelly was in fact murdered remained the most important and unreported issue. 

As reported by the Daily Mail, a friend and professional colleague of Dr Kelly, Mai Pederson had a damaging story to tell. According to Pederson, a US Military translator and reputed `spook', Kelly had confided in her that he would never commit suicide, and also apparently communicated to her that he did not like to swallow medication pills. It was even revealed at the Inquiry that Kelly himself had predicted that he might be "found dead in the woods."

This alone would ring alarm bells for those following events closely. The testimony elicited at the Hutton Inquiry further gave cause for concern. Only a few hours before his death, Kelly had sent emails which indicated he planned to be active in the following, traveling to Iraq to continue his work and mentioned that there were "many dark actors playing games."

Simple comparison of different witness statements provides several mysteries which Hutton either failed to identify or address. Between the search team's locating Kelly's body on the morning of Friday 18th July and the arrival of DC Coe on the scene, according to the detail of Coe's statement the body had evidently been moved. 

Equally strange is that according to Coe, he was accompanied by only one plain-clothes police officer, yet according to Paul Chapman and Louise Holmes, the search team who found Kelly's body, Coe was accompanied by two police officers. 

DC Coe seemed to be ripe for a second round of questioning at the Hutton Inquiry, but it never happened. Coe should have been quizzed as to why the search team found "the body of a gentleman sitting up against a tree," as Chapman put it, yet according to Coe, the body was "laying on its back -- the body was laying on its back by a large tree, the head towards the trunk of the tree."

Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) Page of Thames Valley Police testified at the Hutton Inquiry that the police and the Inquiry had been contacted by a member of the public who had seen 

"three individuals dressed in dark or black clothing near the scene where Dr Kelly's body was found. I am speaking from memory, but I think the sighting was at somewhere between 8.30 and 9.30 in the morning, something like that."

When asked if he had followed up this sighting, Page replied

"Yes, we undertook some fairly extensive work. We got statements from all our officers who were at the scene and that was in excess of 50. We plotted their movements on a map and eventually were able to triangulate where the writer was talking about and identify three of our officers, so I am satisfied that I am aware of the identity of these three individuals."

However the time that Dr Kelly's body was found was not noted by anybody at the scene that morning and given in evidence to the Inquiry. Press reports give a time of 9:20, but provide no source for the information. The real time that  the body was found can therefore only be approximated from the evidence presented. This cavalier approach dismissed the serious concerns of a member of the public who obviously did not believe that they had seen police officers attending the scene but rather something more sinister. In any case, according to press reports, there should only have been a handful of people in the area at that time. The concerns of this individual should have been documented and then provided in full to the Inquiry for Lord Hutton to judge, since it is he who has pronounced that in his view, Kelly committed suicide.

One other interesting piece of evidence has not even been alluded to by the mainstream media or by Lord Hutton. It is listed on the Hutton Inquiry Website as

"TVP Tactical Support Major Incident Policy Book: Operation 'Mason' Between 1430 17.07.03 and 0930 18.07.03, DCI Alan Young - not for release - Police operational information" 

but the document is not available to the public. DCI Young was not even called to testify before the Hutton Inquiry, so there is no explanation for this evidence. Those who are aware of its existence have speculated as to its significance, pointing out that this tactical support for a major incident started at 14:30 on the afternoon that David Kelly disappeared, long before he was even reported missing. The lack of explanation only serves to deepen the mystery surrounding David Kelly's death.

Thames Valley Police did a good job at the Inquiry of obscuring vital information. ACC Page's revelation that Dr Kelly's dental records went missing from the surgery where he attended had drawn little press coverage. Remarkably, Page assured Hutton that there was nothing sinister in this:

"PAGE: The doctor -- the dentist, rather, expressed some concerns. Upon hearing of Dr Kelly's death on Friday 18th July, she was aware he was a patient and apparently the practice has a process whereby patients are contacted shortly before an appointment. She was aware that he was due an appointment shortly and she did not want to cause distress to Dr Kelly or his family, so she went to the filing cabinet to find his notes of his dental records and they were missing.

MR DINGEMANS: So what did the police do?

PAGE: We carried out a full examination of the surgery and, in particular, one window which the dentist was concerned may not have been secure. We found no trace of anything untoward either in the surgery or on the window.

MR DINGEMANS: Did you carry out any further investigations as a result of this?

PAGE: Yes, the dental records -- we had another call from the dentist to say that the dental records had reappeared on the Sunday in the place in the filing cabinet where they should have been. We forensically examined those and could find no evidence of extraneous fingerprints or whatever on that file. However, upon hearing about this, and again I stress because I am a police officer and probably inherently suspicious, because dental records are a means of identification it did prompt me to take the extra precaution of having DNA checks carried out to confirm that the body we had was the body of Dr Kelly, notwithstanding the fact that that had been identified by his family."

In a similar fashion to the supposedly eminently experienced Lord Hutton making his authoritative judgments on the issues surrounding Kelly's death, here we are forced to trust that Page is doing an honest and reliable job. Because he is a police officer, and "probably inherently suspicious", the fact that he found nothing untoward in the disappearance of Kelly's dental records should be taken at face value.

Page failed to explain where the dental records disappeared to for two days, only reassuring us that they returned without any evidence of who had taken them.

Given the above inconsistencies, we need to return to the Mai Pederson link to understand why Kelly was probably murdered.

In addition to Pederson's assertion that Kelly "Did not kill himself", her professional background demands close scrutiny. As Chris Marsden of the World Socialist Web Site reports, Pederson had converted Kelly to the Baha'i faith and that 

"Pederson’s first husband is Cameron DeHart, a former US Special Forces combat controller. Her second ex-husband, US Airforce Sergeant James Pederson, has told friends that she was a ‘spook’ trained to cultivate anyone who might be able to help her in her intelligence work.

He is on record as explaining that he was not surprised that she became a friend of David Kelly. “Part of her military training was to cultivate anyone who might be able to help her in her intelligence work.

“It may well have been why she zeroed in on Dr Kelly. She undoubtedly viewed him as a potential intelligence source. The two things that obsessed her were the military and the Baha’i faith.”"

Marsden went on to detail that

"After the couple separated Mai Pederson became a language instructor at the Defense Language Institute, a spy school the US Air Force runs in Monterey, California. She also appears to have worked at the Pentagon’s internal staff directory."

The article further states that

"Not long after they struck up a relationship Kelly began to appear at Baha’i meetings in Monterey, accompanied by Pederson.

When it appeared that she would be called to give evidence to Hutton the Mail reported, “Pederson appeared to be in hiding, with US officials at the Maxwell Gunter US Air Force base in Alabama, where Sgt Pederson was now stationed, refusing to comment on the inquiry.”

It is important to note that both the Defense Language Institute in Monterey and Maxwell Gunter Air Force Base in Alabama are military installations that Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on September 11th, and other fellow hijackers were reported to have attended.

This is where is gets interesting. Reading between the lines, Pederson alleges that Kelly was murdered. Whilst Janice Kelly, the wife of the late Dr Kelly remains silent, save her decision to sue the MoD, only Pederson had broken cover to accuse the government of effectively lying about the manner of Kelly's death. Whistleblowers often emerge to cover their own backs, but now Pederson seems to be avoiding any publicity by having the protection of the US armed forces bestowed upon her.

Kelly's professional output would surely have been available to the US government through official channels, so why would Pederson want to cultivate him as an intelligence source? To what extent did Kelly work for the Anglo-American Intelligence Establishment? Equally important in view of her places of work, what exactly was Pederson's purview in the intelligence arena?

Is it possible that in true 1984 fashion, Kelly may have been introduced to an Islamic sect so that at some point in the future, the spectre of being labeled a collaborator with `terrorists' could be held over him? His professional background as a microbiologist and an expert in biological and chemical weapons was well known. Through his contacts with Pederson, did Kelly have knowledge of covert US intelligence operations, past, present or future?

Pederson provides a link between both Dr Kelly's public and private lives, and the documented activities of US and other nation's intelligence assets in the build-up to and aftermath of what is now known as "9/11".

Could it be that once it was clear to the government that Dr Kelly was not keeping quiet, his silence had to be assured by the only method remaining: his murder?

Some point out that the spin war erupted again once the BBC announced on Sunday 20th July 2003 that Dr Kelly was the source for both Andrew Gilligan's and Susan Watts' reports on the BBC, and that therefore the government benefited little from his death. On the contrary, one of the government's only critics to break ranks was permanently silenced and, whilst Kelly's death sparked fresh controversy,  the discussion focused not on what Kelly in fact had to say, but rather whether the incident was handled properly.

The Hutton Inquiry and its Report have demonstrated that much effort has been put into making the BBC the scapegoat of the whole investigation. Little attention has been paid to the initial allegations whilst the government has enjoyed hiding behind a judicial whitewash that purportedly gives Blair and his entourage a clean bill of health.

Recent polls indicate that the majority of the public in the UK now believe that the Hutton Report was a whitewash, despite the government's protestations that it has done nothing wrong and its pointing to Hutton's apparent vindication of all involved, bar the BBC and the MoD for one small matter. This is the crunch point.

Are we just a nation of the great unwashed, not worthy of understanding the complex processes used in government? Or are we a nation of conspiracy theorists, justified in believing that the Hutton Inquiry has been nothing more than a diversion? Either way, Hutton's Report has only provided more ammunition for those who charge our Prime Minister and our government with being a bunch of liars.