New Kelly Revelations
Can Sink Tony Blair
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Jan. 18—On Jan. 29, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will appear before the parliamentary Chilcot Commission, to account for his role in the March 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Among the thorniest issues on the table will be the death of Dr. David Kelly, the British scientist and weapons inspector who accused the Blair government of "sexing up" the Downing Street dossier that fueled the Iraq regime change, and who was found dead in the woods near his home on July 17, 2003. At the time of his mysterious death, which the Hutton Commission ruled was a suicide, Dr. Kelly was under personal attack from the Blair apparatus, for his role in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) exposés of the disinformation campaign, leading to the Iraq invasion.
At the same time that Dr. Kelly was exposing the role of Downing Street in the illegal Iraq invasion, the same BBC apparatus prominently featured, in two interviews aired shortly after the Iraq invasion, the American statesman Lyndon LaRouche, who called for the impeachment of then-Vice President Dick Cheney, for his own collusion with Blair in bringing about the Iraq War.
LaRouche, like Kelly, became an instant target of Downing Street dirty operations, which centered on spreading falsehoods which insinuated that LaRouche's associates were somehow involved in the death of a British student, Jeremiah Duggan, who commited suicide while attending a conference in Germany. Investigations subsequently confirmed that the same Downing Street apparatus that targeted Dr. Kelly was behind the "Get LaRouche" propaganda campaign. Among the leading figures in the Downing Street dirty tricks: Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications director; Phil Bassett, another Downing Street political aide; and Bassett's wife, Baroness Symons.
While no longer operating out of 10 Downing Street, the Blair crew has continued to spread lies against LaRouche, pressuring German officials, according to U.S. intelligence sources, to reopen the Duggan suicide investigation, despite the fact that the original investigation, and subsequent reviews, concluded that Duggan had taken his own life.
Kelly Probe Reopened
As EIR reported on Aug. 28, 2009 ("Coverup of Dr. Kelly's Death Unraveling"), on Aug. 1, 2009, Britain's Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, wrote to Sir John Chilcot, the head of the commission, probing Britain's role in the Iraq War, urging that he expand his probe to include a fresh investigation into the death of Dr. Kelly. Baroness Scotland based the request, in part, on new evidence that she had received from a U.S. Air Force officer, Mai Pederson, who had been a translator for the UN inspection team in Iraq, and had developed a close friendship with Kelly, who was a leading member of that team. Pederson reported, among other things, that, due to a severe right elbow injury, Kelly was incapable of committing suicide by slashing his left wrist, as the Hutton Commission had ruled he had done.
Just two weeks after the first public hearings by the Chilcot Commission in November 2009, a group of six prominent British doctors and medical experts initiated legal action, to reopen the inquest into Kelly's death, charging that it may have been murder. In early December, the six petitioners—Dr. Stephen Frost, Dr. Michael Powers QC, Martin Birnstingl, Dr. Christopher Burns-Cox, David Halpin, and Dr. Andrew Rouse—submitted a 13-page report to the court, charging that the cause of death findings were "highly unlikely" to have been the actual causes of Dr. Kelly's death, and that the Hutton Commission had never conducted an official inquest.
According to a Dec. 5, 2009 report in the Daily Telegraph, the doctors' report charged that "the Hutton inquiry lacked the powers of a full inquest because it did not hear evidence taken under oath, it did not have the power to subpoena witnesses and it did not have the power to summon a jury."
Indeed, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered the actual coroners inquest shut down, and instead empowered Lord Hutton to conduct the probe into Dr. Kelly's death. The Hutton findings were so transparently bogus that Liberal Democratic Party MP Norman Baker launched his own inquiry.
In a July 24, 2006 interview with the Daily Mail, Baker bluntly stated: "If it wasn't suicide, then clearly Dr Kelly was bumped off." In November 2007, Baker, who stepped down as an LDP frontbencher to devote a year to his own probe of the death of Dr. Kelly, published a book, The Strange Death of David Kelly, summarizing his findings. Those findings were buttressed two years later, when Mai Pederson came forward with her eyewitness evidence, refuting the Hutton findings.
Shut Blair's Boondoggle
While never directly accusing Blair and his Downing Street cohorts in the Kelly matter, Baker, now that he is back in the House of Commons, has continued to go after Blair's corruption.
On Jan. 15, the Daily Telegraph revealed that British taxpayers are providing £600,000 a year to finance Blair's so-called Middle East diplomacy, as the emissary of the Quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations). The revelation came as the result of Baker's parliamentary questions, and Baker minced no words in decrying the payouts as a waste of taxpayers' cash. "Everyone knows that the post of Middle East Envoy was created simply to pamper Tony Blair's ego and wasn't a serious appointment. How could the man who helped invade Iraq possibly be seen as an honest broker in the Middle East? After two years, he has barely set foot in the Palestinian territories, preferring it seems to hole up in his luxurious hotel suite."
Baker told the Telegraph, "What we didn't know, however, was that this pointless ego trip was to be heavily funded by the British taxpayer, at the whopping cost of over half a million a year. The fact that the Foreign Secretary has not even met Tony Blair for three months and that meetings only happen rarely in any case suggests that there is very little return for the taxpayer for the vast amounts of public money being committed. The British government should end their funding for this pointless post now."
