Dr. David Kelly
The death of Dr David Kelly refuses to go away. Two groups of medical experts have expressed doubts about the suicide verdict. The International Toxicology Advisory Group have queried the conclusion that Kelly swallowed at least 20 co-proxamol tablets, which contributed to his death; (1) and a group of surgeons wrote to The Guardian on28 September 2004, expressing doubts about the suicide verdict and commented that ‘the death scene on Harrowdon Hill had all the trappings of a suicide that is highly unlikely to have succeeded’. This conclusion was bolstered by the two paramedics who attended the scene who reported that there was very little blood either on Kelly’s body or on the surroundings. (2) In America, the British barrister Michael Shrimpton was interviewed on the Alec Jones radio programme (3) where he stated:
‘David [Kelly] was murdered on the 17th. On Saturday the 19th, within 48 hours of the murder, I was contacted by a British intelligence officer who told me he’d been murdered. That didn’t take me by surprise, I was suspicious of the suicide theory from the word go. 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 about in Whitehall prior to the 17th July that David Kelly was going to be taken down.’ (4)
Causus belli
In issue 90 of FT, the colour supplement of The Financial Times, of 29 January 2005, (5)there was an article, ‘War Stories’ by Carne Ross, who was, in his own words, ‘the British “expert” on Iraq for the UK delegation to the UN Security Council responsible for policy on both weapons inspections and sanctions against Iraq’ from 1998 to 2002. His account of the events leading up to war, with much fancy footwork and with nods to Thomas Kuhn’s ‘paradigm shift’ and Leo Strauss, tells us that basically we are wrong – it is a ‘fiction’ – to expect our civil servants and politicians ‘to observe the world without bias’; understanding is flawed; information is unconsciously selected to fit prejudices; and so forth. A bunch of honest coves made honest mistakes, editing the torrent of information they had to fit their existing beliefs. In other words, while all the intelligence on Iraq was wrong, no-one was to blame. And yet, in the midst of this, in a discussion of why Bush and Blair went to war, Ross offers this pregnant sentence:
‘It was well-known that Hussein had allocated all the massively lucrative post-sanctions contracts to French, Chinese, Russian and other no-US and non-UK companies (and it bothered the companies a lot, as they would tell us).’
Which is what Lt.-Col (US Army rtd.) Karen Kwiakowski offered as one of the reasons for the war.(6)
More ‘sexing up’
Another intelligence analyst involved in the Iraq weapons of mass destruction affair, has gone public. Rod Barton, who had been involved with the Iraq issue since 1991, and was an expert on Iraq’s WMDs, gave an interview to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) (7)and described the intense political pressure on the Iraq experts to come up with something to justify the war, even after the invasion was complete. During discussions of the report of the Iraq Survey Group this exchange took place with ABC’s Liz Jackson.
Liz Jackson: Back to the report: you told us about the things that you were told to leave out. Was there anything you were told to put in?
Rod Barton: Yes. Well, of course, there were interests in the capitals. We had these video conferences and the report was circulated in its draft form to the various capitals, and both Washington and London wanted other things put in, and to make it – I can only use these words – to make it sexier, and this came from the UK. They wanted to put in, or at least one individual there, wanted to put in what he called ‘nuggets’, and he’d selected something like eight or nine issues which he thought could –
Liz Jackson: Strengthen the –
Rod Barton: Yeah, sex-up the report. Basically what he wanted to do was put in things from the previous report which had been done in September 2003, David Kay’s report, pick out the eyes from that report, which implied that there was WMD up there, and put them into our report.
Liz Jackson: I think it’s public now that it was John Scarlett.
Rod Barton: It was John Scarlett, yes, who was the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Microwaving Iraq
William Thomas at < http://www.willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly/Microwaving_Iraq.htm> reported in January that the US military in Iraq is using electromagnetic radiation in attempts to pacify the population. His informant told him:
‘The “poppers’ are capable of using a combo of ULF, VLF, UHF and EHF wavelengths in any combination at the same time, sometimes using one as a carrier wave for the others,’ Hank explains, in a process called superheterodyning. The silent frequencies daily sweeping Fallujah and other trouble spots are the same Navy ‘freqs that drove whales nuts and made them go astray onto beaches.’
I have seen no supporting sources on this but this is hardly a surprise, is it?
Official post-mortems
In the US
The Report to the President of the United States, by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, published 31 March, all 618 pages of it, which concluded, most famously, that the US intelligence community was ‘dead wrong’, can be downloaded at: <www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/nation/nationalsecurity/wmd/wmd_report.pdf>
In the UK
The House of Commons Defence Committee reported on post-invasion events in Iraq and concluded, inter alia:
‘We also believe that the Coalition should have foreseen that its presence would be resented by some Iraqis, particularly Sunni Arabs and some Shia nationalist elements, and portrayed as cultural and economic imperialism.’ (Paragraph 36, emphasis added) (8)
In other words, difficult though this is to believe, the Anglo-American forces believed that Iraqis would welcome being bombed, invaded and having their country’s resources ripped off.
What the Butler saw
On 23 March there were many articles in the British media describing how the government was going to implement the recommendations of the Butler Report. On 31 March Dr Brian Jones, recently retired from the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), and one of the WMD sceptics among the British intelligence analysts, wrote to The Guardian. He noted that the government hoped the (then forthcoming) election would obscure the fact that the government had largely ignored Lord Butler’s recommendations (while paying them lip-service) and concluded:
‘With its breathtaking arrogance, characteristic insensitivity and selective advance briefing, there is more than a wisp of spin about this attempted interment of the Butler review. Nothing significant has changed. No lessons have been learned.’
The politics of Iraqi oil
On 17 March 2005 Greg Palast reported on BBC’s Newsnight on the politics of oil in Iraq. Roughly summarised, he discovered that while the neo-cons wanted to privatise the Iraqi oil fields and pump them out – apparently in the hope of breaking the OPEC cartel and so reducing world oil prices – the big American oil companies blocked this in favour of a state-controlled oil company. Palast quoted the former head of Shell:
‘Many neo conservatives are people who have certain ideological beliefs about markets, about democracy, about this, that and the other. International oil companies, without exception, are very pragmatic commercial organizations. They don’t have a theology.’ (9)
And, we might add, they don’t want oil prices lowering.
Iraqi farmers forced to buy American seeds?
Before he left Iraq, US military administrator Paul Bremer signed an order on intellectual property, ‘Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety’, which was enacted shortly before the formal hand over of sovereignty last year. The Iraqi Patent and Industrial Designs Laws and Regulations (No. 65 of 1970) were amended.
‘As a result, it is now illegal for Iraqi farmers to save up seeds from their latest harvest and use them for planting or crossbreeding in the next year’s crop….. The preamble to Bremer’s Order 81 states that one of its goals is to ensure ‘that economic change as necessary to benefit the people of Iraq occurs in a manner acceptable to the people of Iraq’. But in paragraph 66 of the order, Iraqi wheat growers are expressly prohibited from saving their seeds for the next season: ‘Farmers shall be prohibited from reusing seeds of protected varieties’, the order says. These ‘protected’ seeds include an increasing number of varieties that have been developed by indigenous farmers through manual selection over centuries, but have since been patented by international companies. Seeds that are distinguished from other known, registered varieties can be claimed as intellectual property by anyone, worldwide. Such seeds are by default considered to be ‘protected varieties’, and Iraqi farmers using them are required to destroy their entire seed stock at the end of a harvest.’ (10)
Since the Americans in Iraq are more or less permanently confined to their bases by the Iraqi opposition, it is difficult to imagine this law ever being enforced. Nonetheless this is what global empire-building looks like: buy our seeds or else. (In the British empire the injunctions were different: ‘buy our opium’ and ‘buy our cotton’ or else.)
Notes
[1] Jeremy Laurence, ‘Inquiry into Dr David Kelly’s death was flawed, say experts’, The Independent 17 September 2004
[2] ‘Kelly death paramedics query verdict’, The Observer, 12 December 2004
[3] Text at <www.prisonplanet.com/022404shrimpton.html>
[4] Shrimpton’s entry in the Bar directory is a bizarre picture of spookery and paranoia. He tells us that he has his chambers and electronic communications ‘swept’; that ‘dead letterbox protocols may be put in place and instructions from overseas lawyers are accepted for non-litigious work’; that ‘Chambers specialises in counter-terrorist and counter-intelligence work, including assassination deconstruction’; that ‘Wetwork specialists will not be advised on assassination methods and assassination work is strictly limited to post-assassination counter-intelligence and investigative assistance’; and that ‘advice on assassination methods and procedures will only be given on a sanitised basis.’ Dr. Chris Tame commented to me that were someone offering all these spooky services they surely wouldn’t be advertising that fact. <www.bardirectory.org/Chambers/ChambersDetail.asp?Chamber ID=188>
[5] Incidentally, the FT magazine is now edited by John Lloyd, another one who has made the lucrative journey from left to right.
[6] See Lobster 47 p. 10.
[7] <www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2005/s1302767.htm> See also Colin Brown, ‘WMD expert reopens row about “sexed-up” dossier’, The Independent 16 February 2005.
[8] <www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmdfence/65/6503.htm>
[9] The text of the programme is at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4354269.stm>
At the Davos meeting in January the chief executive of BP, Lord John Browne, attacked the spread of what he called ‘pseudo-markets’ in the public sector. < http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,11268, 1400527,00.html>
[10] Christopher Findlay, ‘Iraqi farmers forced to sow modified grain’, <www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?ID=1073>