by Jon E. Lewis
Baker questions why the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, decided the inquiry should not be held under the usual rules, so that witnesses could not be subpoenaed, nor did they have to give evidence under oath, making the whole procedure less rigorous than a standard coroner inquest. Even more bizarrely, the Oxfordshire coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, pre-empted the findings of the inquiry by issuing a full death certificate on 18 August, while Hutton’s investigation was still in its early stages, in spite of rules stating that at most only an interim certificate should be issued while an inquest is in adjournment. Baker doesn’t think much of the appointed pathologist either, describing the medical evidence presented by him to the inquiry as “incomplete, inconsistent and inadequate”.
As for the conduct of the police force, the most puzzling fact that has come to light has been that Operation Mason, as it was named, began at 2.30 p.m. on 17 July, about nine hours before Dr Kelly’s family reported him missing and half an hour before he left his home to go for his walk. Quite how the police knew what was going to happen, they are not willing to divulge. Nor are they willing to say why they felt it necessary to erect a 45-foot-high (15.7m) antenna in the Kellys’ garden, or turn Mrs Kelly out of her home in the middle of the night for some considerable time while a search dog was put through the house. According to Baker, one of the most senior police officers in the country, on being consulted, was at a loss as to why either action would have been required.
Norman Baker reserves particular scepticism for the choice of Lord Hutton to head the inquiry and the part Tony Blair played in the decision. In spite of being on a jet somewhere between Washington and Tokyo when formally advised of Dr Kelly’s death, Blair decided on an inquiry and appointed Lord Brian Hutton as its head even before the journey was over. Parliament, perhaps rather conveniently, had adjourned for the summer, and the appointment was made on the advice of Lord Falconer and, Baker suspects, Peter Mandelson. The man they chose had no experience of chairing any other public inquiry but, during his distinguished career, plenty of history of upholding the views of the government of the day.
It was highly unlikely, therefore, that the Hutton Inquiry was going to answer such sticky questions as why a highly respected scientist chose to take his life in quite such an unconventional way, days after being embroiled in a political scandal that was potentially deeply damaging to the government. Kelly had been deeply upset by being thrust into the media spotlight and, no doubt, bewildered by the the MoD’s decision to leak his name to the press. However, he was also cheerful and joky with members of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee the day before his death, and had made plans to fly to Iraq the following week; one of his daughters was looking forward to her impending wedding day. Most importantly, perhaps, he was a practising member of the Baha’i faith, which forbids the act of suicide.
An email to a New York journalist, Judith Miller, on the morning of 17 July suggests that Dr Kelly realized that there was something worrying going on behind the soundbites and political posturing:
David, I heard from another member of your fan club that things went well for you today. Hope it’s true.
(Original message sent by Judith Miller, 16 July 00.30)
I will wait until the end of the week before judging – many dark actors playing games. Thanks for your support. I appreciate your friendship at this time.
(Dr Kelly’s reply, sent 17 July 11.18)
Conspiracy theorists believe Kelly had been labelled a loose cannon and as such a threat to the stability of the government. If Britain lost Blair, Europe lost an important ally in its struggle for greater political and economic union. Michael Shrimpton, a barrister and intelligence services expert who also acted for the Kelly Investigation Group, claimed he was told Kelly had been assassinated. Speaking in an interview with Canadian broadcaster Alex Jones in 2004 he said: “Within 48 hours of the murder I was contacted by a British Intelligence officer who told me [Kelly had] been murdered . . . now that source told me he’d done some digging and discovered that, he didn’t name names, but he discovered that it had been known in Whitehall prior to 17 July that David Kelly was going to be taken down.”
Shrimpton went on to explain that clever governments get the secret services of their allies to do their dirty work for them, and that Kelly’s death bore all the hallmarks of a job by the DGSE (Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure), the French equivalent of MI6. The tablets found in Kelly’s pocket would have been a cover; he would actually have been killed by a lethal injection of dextropropoxythene, the active ingredient of co-proxamol, and the muscle relaxant succinylcholine, “a favourite method” of murder by intelligence services, with his wrist clumsily cut to disguise the needle’s puncture mark. Shrimpton said the assassination team would most likely have been recruited from Iraqis living in Damascus, to disguise French involvement, and then its members killed after the event to ensure absolute secrecy.
There are others, such as UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel, who claim it was the Iraqis themselves who killed Dr Kelly in revenge for all the trouble he’d brought upon Saddam Hussein’s regime through his work. This seems far-fetched. Although Kelly had said he supported the invasion of Iraq, he had not been the author of the 45-minute claim which had precipitated military action. And he had only recently inspected trailers, claimed to be bio-weapons laboratories, and declared them to be no such thing. More hard-line conspiracy theorists maintain Dr Kelly’s death was yet another in a suspicious pattern of untimely deaths among the world’s leading microbiologists, who are being systematically bumped off for reasons that remain unclear.
However weird the theories, Kelly’s death was not properly investigated. The glaring omissions and conflicts of evidence; the choice of an inquiry, headed by a judge rather than a coroner, with terms drawn up at the outset by the government; the continuing unease of expert doctors and political figures, willing to risk their own reputations to publicize their misgivings – all this suggests there is far more to this event than the government is willing to be open about. Given that the present government would still have much to lose should it be revealed that Kelly’s death was unlawful, it is likely to be a long time before all the factors surrounding this case reach the light of day.
WMD whistle-blower Dr David Kelly was murdered: ALERT LEVEL 9
Further Reading
www.thehutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/evidence.htm
www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3076869.stm
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,,1021802.00.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,,1779197,00.html
www.prisonplanet.com/021204medicalevidence.html
www.prisonplanet.com/022504shrimptontranscript.html
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code+CH020070226&articleId+4944
www.normanbaker.org.uk/concerns/kellymail.htm
www.guardian.co.uk/hutton/story/0,13822,1372077,00.html
JOHN F. KENNEDY
More than 40 years on, the images still loop:
Kennedy in the back of the open-top Lincoln, next to Jackie, all smiles and waves in the sun . . .
Kennedy, his head slumped sideways . . .
Jackie leaning over to her husband . . .
Jackie trying to climb up the back of the car . . .
A blur of speeding cars and motorbike outriders . . .
Lyndon B. Johnson inside Air Force One taking the oath of presidency, Jackie statue-like by his side . . .
Elected to the White House in 1960 aged 46, Democrat John F. Kennedy was supposedly the bringer of a fresh new dawn. Handsome, charismatic and liberal, JFK promised hope for an entire generation. That hope was snuffed out at 12.30 p.m. on 22 November 1963 in Dealey Plaza, Dallas.
Kennedy had chosen to visit Dallas to boost the Democratic cause in Texas, a marginal state, and to generate funds for the upcoming November 1964 presidential election. Both Kennedy and his staff had expressed concerns about security because, only a mo
nth earlier, US Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson had been jostled and spat upon during a visit to Dallas. Nevertheless, the route the president’s motorcade would take through Dallas was published in Dallas newspapers on the eve of the visit, 21 November 1963. The next day, a little before 12.30 p.m. CST, his Lincoln limousine entered Dealey Plaza and slowly approached the Texas School Book Depository. It then turned 120 degrees left, directly in front of the Depository, just 65 feet (20m) away.
As the presidential Lincoln passed the Depository and continued down Elm Street, shots were fired at Kennedy, who was waving to the crowds on his right. One shot entered his upper back, penetrated his neck, and exited his throat. He raised his clenched fists up to his neck and leaned to his left as Jacqueline Kennedy put her arms around him. Texas Governor John Connally, sitting with his wife in front of the Kennedys in the limousine, was hit in the back and yelled out, “Oh, no, no, no . . . My God, they’re going to kill us all!”
The final shot occurred as the presidential limo passed in front of the John Neely Bryan pergola. As the shot sounded, President Kennedy’s head exploded, covering the interior of the Lincoln with blood and tissue.
Secret Service agent Clint Hill was riding on the running board of the car behind the limousine. After the first shot struck the president, Hill jumped off and ran to overtake it. By then the president had been hit in the head and Mrs Kennedy was climbing on to the boot of the car. Hill jumped on the back of the limousine, pushed Mrs Kennedy back into her seat, and clung to the car as it sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital. At 1.00 p.m. President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead by hospital staff, although he was certainly dead before he reached the hospital.
Meanwhile, back in Dealey Plaza, the first witnesses were talking to police. Howard Brennan, across from the Texas School Book Depository, distinctly heard gunshots from that building. So did Harold Norman, James Jarman Jr and Bonnie Ray Williams, employees of the Depository who had watched the motorcade from a window at the south-east corner of the fifth floor; they heard three shots from directly over their heads. (Of the eye and ear witnesses who would eventually give testimony as to the direction from which the fatal shots came, 56 [53.8 per cent] believed they came from the direction of the Depository, 35 [33.7 per cent] thought they came from a “grassy knoll” on the north side of the Plaza, and 8 [7.7 per cent] thought the shots came from other locations. Only 5 [4.8 per cent] thought they heard shots from two separate locations.) A police search of the Book Depository revealed that one employee, Lee Harvey Oswald, was missing, having left the building immediately after the shooting. After 80 minutes of frantic manhunt Oswald was spotted on a sidewalk by Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit, who on approaching Oswald was shot dead. One hour later Oswald was cornered in a movie house and arrested. The next day he was charged with the murders of Kennedy and Tippit. He denied shooting anyone and claimed he’d been set up as a “patsy”.
On 24 November at 11.21 a.m., as Oswald was being transferred from Dallas Police Headquarters to the county jail, a local strip-club owner, Jack Ruby, stepped out of the crowd and fatally gunned him down. Ruby was convicted of Oswald’s murder in 1964, but the conviction was overturned. Ruby died in jail awaiting retrial.
A week after Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Baines Johnson (“LBJ”) set up a commission under Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the killing. The Warren Commission published its findings in September 1964. According to the Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald had shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, where an Italian Mannlicher–Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle had been found with his fingerprints on it. A bullet on Governor Connally’s stretcher matched this rifle. Oswald, a misfit with Marxist leanings, had been instrumental in setting up the New Orleans branch of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He had, concluded the Commission, “an overriding hostility to his environment . . . [a] hatred for American society” and had sought “a place in history”. The Commission “could not find any persuasive evidence of a domestic or foreign conspiracy involving any other person(s), group(s), or country(ies), and [believed] that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone”.
In a US still traumatized by the event, the Warren Commission report was initially met with a sense of relief and acceptance. The mood, however, gradually passed to unease and then outright distrust, as it became clear that LBJ had embargoed huge swathes of the report for 30 years. Moreover, the bits and pieces of the report that had been released contained as many questions as they did answers. Why hadn’t the Commission interviewed Ruby, especially as he had informed them he would “come clean”? Then there was the matter of the murder weapon: could a bolt-action relic of the Second World War really deliver three accurate shots, at this range, in 6–7 seconds?
With the manifest inadequacy of the official investigation into Kennedy’s death, numerous independent investigations tried to get at the truth. Among the keenest-eyed readers of the Warren Report’s selected extracts was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who spotted a passing reference to one Clay Bertrand, whom Garrison identified as homosexual New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw. In 1969 Garrison prosecuted Shaw for conspiring to murder the president; unfortunately for Garrison, two of his key witnesses, David Ferrie and Guy Bannister, died in suspicious circumstances before they could testify. (Aside from Oswald, Ruby, Ferrie and Bannister, anything up to 40 witnesses in the JFK case have mysteriously died or been murdered.) Shaw was acquitted after less than an hour of deliberation by the jury, yet Garrison’s quest was not in vain; Ferrie would later be identified as a possible co-conspirator by the 1976 House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Also, Garrison forced the first public showing of the 486-frame, 8mm movie shot by Abraham Zapruder of Kennedy’s killing, which shows a backwards blast of brains and blood from Kennedy’s head. On the Zapruder film, it looks as though the president has been shot from in front; Oswald was high up, to the President’s right, at the time of the shooting. If the fatal bullet came from the front, there must have been another gunman. In its 1979 report, the HSCA concluded that there was “a high probability that two gunmen” fired at Kennedy, and that he was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”. In evidence, the HSCA heard a Dictabelt recording from a Dallas police motorcyclist’s radio, on which four gunshots could be heard, one more than Oswald supposedly fired. Among the other evidence supporting the two-gunmen theory was the testimony of Dr McClelland, a physician in the Portland emergency room, that the back right-hand part of President Kennedy’s head had been blown out. Top rifle experts of the FBI could not make the Mannlicher rifle used by Oswald fire two shots in the 2.3-second timeframe that Oswald allegedly fired off his first two rounds. Neither could Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, the senior instructor for the US Marine Corps Sniper Instructor School at Quantico, Virginia. “We reconstructed the whole thing,” said Hathcock, “the angle, the range, the moving target, the time limit, the obstacles, everything. I don’t know how many times we tried it, but we couldn’t duplicate what the Warren Commission said Oswald did. Now if I can’t do it, how in the world could a guy who was a non-qual on the rifle range and later only qualified ‘marksman’ do it?”
Disregarding the truly lunatic theories that John F. Kennedy was murdered by Martin Bormann (who, like Elvis Presley, never dies) or time-travelling aliens, the finger of suspicion points at four main potential culprits:
The Communists
Early JFK conspiracy theories centred on the USSR and its stooges. Kennedy had, of course, gone toe-to-toe with the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Plot and Counterplot Edward J. Epstein suggested that Dallas was payback time by a smarting Moscow. Oswald, who had once defected to the USSR but returned to the US, was according to this hypothesis a KGB agent. A variant is that the Communist leader of Cuba, Fidel Castro, organized the assassination. As LBJ neatly put it: “Kennedy was trying to kill Castro. Castro got him first.” The strongest evidence in support of the Castro th
eory is that Oswald contacted the Cuban embassy in Mexico City in September 1963; but whether this was on his own initiative or at the instigation of the Cuban Intelligence Service, G-2, is unknown.
Against the Communist and/or Castro hypothesis is that both Cuba and the USSR were in rapprochement with Kennedy at the time of his assassination. During its investigation, HSCA visited Cuba and interviewed Castro about Cuban complicity in Kennedy’s assassination. He replied:
That [the Cuban Government might have been involved in Kennedy’s death] was insane. From the ideological point of view it was insane. And from the political point of view, it was a tremendous insanity. I am going to tell you here that nobody, nobody ever had the idea of such things. What would it do? We just tried to defend our folks here, within our territory. Anyone who subscribed to that idea would have been judged insane . . . absolutely sick. Never, in 20 years of revolution, I never heard anyone suggest nor even speculate about a measure of that sort, because who could think of the idea of organizing the death of the President of the United States? That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country, which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years, in every possible sense. Since the United States is much more powerful than we are, what could we gain from a war with the United States? The United States would lose nothing. The destruction would have been here.
Obviously Castro might have been lying to HSCA, but his point is good: why give the US a 22-carat pretext to invade Cuba by assassinating its leader?