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The Death of David Kelly
55 Plays2 years ago
By audience request, Josh and M look into the death of Dr. David Kelly, the UN weapons inspector who made the UK government look bad, then committed suicide in 2003. Or not, depending on who you listen to. Along the way, we discover a puzzling error in our own reporting of the event from years ago - an error we could have edited out to make ourselves look better, but we're above such deceptions. Or couldn't be bothered, one or the other.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
New Patrons and Conspiracies
00:00:05
Speaker
Man the hem. Fine. Queer the battle stations. We have a new patron.
00:00:11
Speaker
Two, in fact, but only one has decided to reveal they are part of the conspiracy against
Alexios and the Blue Mondays Mystery
00:00:16
Speaker
us. Watch out! Sex vampires deport. Oh, that Patrick Stewart. I'll get you one of these days. Yes. Alexios has been revealed as leader of the Transylvanian head of the mysterious Blue Mondays, a vital part of the development
Moon Trap, Bruce Campbell, and 'The Nanny' Sequel
00:00:30
Speaker
of... No, I'm not leaving that joke through. Oh, geez, it's one of those things from Moon Trap. Quick, get Bruce Campbell on it. Fine. Better seen what a conic along as well. And the guy from The Nanny. He was in the sequel, don't you know?
00:00:41
Speaker
I choose not to know, unlike the existence of Alexios, who we know everything about.
The Intriguing Details of Alexios
00:00:46
Speaker
Birthdays? Yes, plural. Address, lovers, favourite brand of cat food, and the three aardvarks. Didn't realise you could use aardvarks for that. Oh!
00:00:56
Speaker
There goes Space Sheriff Sean Connery. Our loss is there again anyway, Alexios. Now we know about your role in the conspiracy against us, it's time for you to do some more concerted research into us. What makes us tick?
Freemason Overlords and Alexios's Research
00:01:11
Speaker
Just how many Your Mother jokes do we really make? And are we really hiding a fanard in every bonus episode?
00:01:17
Speaker
Which is to say, there are quite a lot of bonus episodes to... enjoy. So get cracking. We know your Freemason overlords demanded. Meanwhile, we've got to get rid of this infestation of critters on board our podcast.
Critter Problems and Jason X Protocol
00:01:30
Speaker
Shall we invoke the Jason X protocol? Always. I'll go defrost to Cronenberg. The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Dent.
Meet the Hosts: Auckland and Zhuhai
00:01:50
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Here in Auckland, New Zealand, I'm Josh Addison in Zhuhai, China. We have associate professor of philosophy and history's greatest monster, in the Godzilla sense, Dr. M. R. Xtentith. It's true. I am mighty and tall and I tower over everyone, but in my heart I bring love and also you clear fire from my stomach.
00:02:13
Speaker
Nuclear fire, that's what it's all about. Probably shouldn't say that in current events in Ukraine, but anyway, we're not here to talk about it. That reference might date very badly. Within hours. Within hours, yes.
Chaos in Britain's Parliament Over Fracking
00:02:28
Speaker
I don't really follow it much because I don't care a lot and also don't really understand, but I understand the last 24 hours in Britain
00:02:36
Speaker
have been quite mad if my Twitter feed has been anything to go by to the extent that comedy shows, current events comedy shows, recording on that night were having a bit of a tough time of it given that things kept happening and getting more ridiculous with every happening.
00:02:54
Speaker
Unfortunately, my access to the outside world is somewhat constrained at the moment due to VPN-related hiccups. So I'm vaguely aware that the era of Liz Truss might be coming to an end, and vaguely aware that by the time this podcast comes out, the era of Liz Truss might well have ended by, you know, 24 hours or so.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yes, I just have no idea what's going on at this stage. I don't think the Tories have any idea what's going on at this stage. Last I heard they were thought they were being whipped to vote.
00:03:31
Speaker
against banning fracking, despite the fact that it's in the Tory manifesto that they should be pro-getting rid of fracking. But they weren't willing to vote to ban fracking because Labour were the ones who put forward the vote to ban fracking, and they weren't going to allow Labour to act as if they were the government, despite the fact that Tories would have voted in favour of banning fracking if their party had put forward the proposal.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yes, there was a massive, from what I gather, there was a lot of confusion around whether or not it was actually a wit to vote, and a whole bunch of MPs who got up to say they were supporting the vote, despite the fact that they didn't actually agree with it, then were suddenly like, wait, hang on, we don't have to vote for it, what the hell? And there was, there appears to have been actual, like, physical chaos at certain points.
00:04:21
Speaker
and the vote basically passed but I think the Chief Whip resigned halfway through and I really don't understand what was going on and probably can't quite frankly I don't believe a full understanding of what happened is actually possible
00:04:39
Speaker
Well, Josh, you have to remember the British are a savage people who have not yet actually embraced civilisation. So it's not unusual that in their so-called parliamentary process, they're still trying to iron out the kinks. Eventually, they'll understand how democracy works and they'll join the rest of the civilised world, eventually.
Transition to Main Topic: David Kelly Controversy
00:04:58
Speaker
Yes, well, now potential British savagery probably is a good segue, an appropriate thing to say given that the topic of this week's episode, which I think we should just get into. Did you have anything else to say at the start? Lassitude? That'll do. Let's chuck in a chime right about here.
00:05:26
Speaker
Yes, no, we are now.
David Kelly and the Dodgy Dossier
00:05:28
Speaker
This is an audience request, is it? It is, yes. So when we talked about doing our back to the conspiracy stuff, people are going, I'm not quite sure whether you've actually covered this in the past because there's an assumption by new listeners who haven't spent all the time going back through seven years with the podcast that there are probably topics we've talked about in the past that we don't feel the need to talk about
00:05:52
Speaker
again so when we talked about doing the back to the conspiracy episode someone said oh actually i'd love to hear more about the whole david kelly thing at which point i went i don't think we've actually done david kelly now josh you did point out we have mentioned
00:06:08
Speaker
David Kelly in news episodes. Although, as we'll also note, we didn't actually update people on what happened after we mentioned David Kelly in the news, which indicates that we probably should have done an update to an update at some point. But yes, we're going to talk about the death of David Kelly, who
00:06:26
Speaker
Arguably, it's the person who revealed how dodgy the dodgy dossier was to the world, and then, depending on who you talk to, mysteriously died soon thereafter. Yes. I mean, he did die, or at least... He definitely died. Well, is it that some people say he didn't?
00:06:45
Speaker
But most people agree he did die. He did die proximately to the revelation of the dodgy dossier. And people do find that kind of thing ever so slightly suspicious. Yes. So a bit of background. David Kelly was chief inspector of the UN Special Commission involved in the search for WMDs in Iraq. So if you were around
00:07:11
Speaker
In the early 2000s, you'll remember the post-9-11 war in Iraq. You'll remember it was the excuse they finally settled on, I think, was that they were worried that Iraq had been producing weapons of mass destruction, which they needed to get rid of. And so there's a big hunt for them. The name I remember at the time coming up always was Hans Blix. And I believe Kelly was working directly under Mr. Blix.
00:07:38
Speaker
Yeah, so I believe Kelly was the UK envoy, and Blix was kind of... Because it was a UN thing of the world. Yeah, was the actual UN delegate, whatever the formal name is, yeah.
00:07:52
Speaker
So he was involved in sort of defensive intelligence sort of stuff prior to that, but he was an expert in biological weapons or the sort of thing that they were looking for in Iraq anyway.
The Fallout: BBC Leak and Government Blame
00:08:13
Speaker
Well, he worked for an organisation called UMSCOM, which was a multinational disarmament body, or at least that's what it said on the term. Most people think that actually UMSCOM was a Western intelligence tool that was used to enforce sanctions, encourage regime change and provide the rationale for military involvement.
00:08:35
Speaker
intervention. So Kelly was working for an industry that was basically involved in putting sanctions on governments for inappropriate use of weaponry, of which Iraq of course in the first Gulf War had been pinged for its use of biological and chemical weapons that were considered by the West to be
00:08:58
Speaker
Inappropriate for Iraq to have despite the fact that the US and the UK had been providing Iraq with said weapons for quite some time. Yes.
00:09:07
Speaker
You're allowed to own them, but you can't display them or use them. That seems to be the west view on selling weapons of mass destruction. You can buy them from us, but it's illegal to buy them. We're allowed to sell them to you. You're not allowed to buy them from us. You're allowed to give us money. You can give us money. You just can't have the things that you're giving us money for. Yes.
00:09:30
Speaker
And we will physically transport the goods you're not allowed to have to your country. But if you take receipt of them, you've broken the rules, not us, it's you.
00:09:42
Speaker
Now, Dr. Kelly was no peace, Nick, was no hippie. He was fine with the original Operation Desert Fox, Iraq War I, First Blood, in 1998. And he had no specific problem with Operation Iraqi Freedom. What was the tagline for Rambo II? Was there one? Oh, it was First Blood Part II, wasn't it? That was really weird. Yeah, First Blood Part II. Yeah. Anyway.
00:10:08
Speaker
The Iraq War II, he did not at least publicly object to. And supposedly the famous dossier, he wasn't particularly opposed to the wording in that either. Apparently
00:10:29
Speaker
There were suggestions of mobile, mobile Iraqi bio-labs producing these biological weapons, which I think most people thought was just a ludicrous idea that couldn't possibly exist. But he supposedly told Susan Watts, the science editor for one of BBC's programmes, and she's going to come up again, that he was 90% certain they existed. Now, there's this business about being deported from Kuwait.
00:10:58
Speaker
the unexplained deportation. We don't know why, but apparently he was handcuffed, searched, had his belongings confiscated and then was deported from Kuwait for some reason.
00:11:12
Speaker
And this is the point in time where he starts talking off the record to journalists that actually the dossier has been sexed up and the things that the UK and the US claim are happening, like mobile bioweapons labs, actually
00:11:30
Speaker
They either don't exist or the evidence for their existence has been severely trumped up by people like him in the media. So in 2003, the BBC Today programme on Radio 4 basically put out a report that said the British government had sexed up, was the quote, the intelligence that it had presented to the public to justify Operation Iraqi Freedom.
00:11:58
Speaker
The government was obviously furious at this. They wanted to know where this information had come from. And basically, it was Andrew Gilligan was the BBC journalist who gave this report. And he eventually, I don't know, I don't think it was Gilligan himself, but Kelly was outed.
00:12:21
Speaker
as the source that he'd had an off-the-record conversation with Andrew Gilligan, and that's what Andrew Gilligan had based his report on. And so Kelly was identified basically as the person, as the individual who had made the government look very, very bad indeed.
00:12:40
Speaker
And not just identified by the government, altered by the government as the source. So essentially the government was going, look, Andrew Gilligan has been given bad information. This bad information has been given to him by Dr David Kelly. There were fewer whistleblower protections back in 2003. You don't think the UK has got great whistleblower protections even to this day. It's been debated in parliament up until recently as to whether those protections should be expanded.
00:13:10
Speaker
She also pointed out that Aotearoa New Zealand has very bad whistleblower protections by law at this stage as well. So this is a problem across the globe. But he was outed and this caused David Kelly quite a lot of mental distress at the
00:13:26
Speaker
time because suddenly he was target number one of the government blaming all of the problems with the public's reception to the dossier on the words of someone who was quite clearly acting up, had an agenda, didn't really know what he was talking about. I mean Tony Blair was very disappointed with Dr David Kelly. He was very disappointed indeed. And for some reason sounded a lot like David Attenborough.
00:13:53
Speaker
Yes, here we are watching the UN weapons inspector telling lies to the public. No one knows why he's doing it, but I, Tony Blair, pretending to be David Attenborough, am of course above suspicion, because I am Tony Blair and everybody loves me. Which was true at the time, but it's no longer true now. So, with all of this weighing very heavily on his mind, here's what we know.
The Mysterious Disappearance and Death of Kelly
00:14:20
Speaker
On the 17th of July 2003, sometime shortly after three o'clock in the afternoon, Dr. Kelly went for a walk. Apparently one of the last people, his neighbour, was possibly the last person to see him alive as he walked out of the house.
00:14:40
Speaker
He didn't return that night. Obviously people started to become very worried for him. There was a search and the next morning his body was found lying sort of slumped against a tree on Harrow Downhill, which was about a mile from his house, so certainly walking distance.
00:14:59
Speaker
One of his wrists had been slit and there were packets of a drug called coproximol, which is a sort of a painkiller, I think, I'm not sure, on or about his person.
00:15:16
Speaker
So that's what we know. His death on the face of it appeared to be a suicide, but obviously we wouldn't be talking about it in a podcast about conspiracy theories if that was where the matter ended.
00:15:30
Speaker
No, because scepticism about the suicide line occurred very quickly. So Tony Blair, very publicly, very soon after the discovery of Dr Kelly's body, said, well, obviously suicide, very tragic matter, nothing to see here.
00:15:46
Speaker
And in part because David Kelly had revealed the dodginess of the dodgy dossier and the fact the government was being rather blase about the sudden death of the person who revealed the dodginess of the dodgy dossier, they started to ask questions. They wanted to know, for example, why no fingerprints were found on the knife that was apparently used to slit his wrist.
00:16:08
Speaker
They wanted to know how he was able to maintain the amount of painkillers he had ingested, why his blood and stomach contained only a non-toxic dose of the drug, why he was not spotted by a police helicopter with thermal imaging cameras which flew over the wood where his body was later found, whether he even intended to kill himself because he had left no suicide note behind and had even contacted his daughter that morning to arrange a meeting with her the next day,
00:16:38
Speaker
and why the evidence he had died on his back was ignored despite the fact his corpse was found sitting upright. So it seemed on the face of it there were some serious questions that need to be answered to justify the claim that oh it was a suicide despite the fact there are all these weird little inconsistencies.
00:17:00
Speaker
Yes, now where are these inconsistencies coming from? Were they things that people saw in the inquiry, which we will get to shortly, or are they like, for instance, the knife, the knife apparently was a knife that he owned, like it was it was his pocket knife that he always carried around with him.
00:17:19
Speaker
So it seems odd, you would expect there to be fingerprints on it, even if he has fingerprints on it, even if it wasn't. Well, people have this assumption about fingerprints on things. But forensic scientists who actually study fingerprinting point out that actually getting a full or even partial fingerprint on an object which is regularly used by a person is a lot more difficult
00:17:45
Speaker
than you would expect so normal wear and tear and use means that fingerprints get smudged or worn away all the time and fingerprints can actually just basically evaporate or disappear you need the right amount of pressure grease on the hand etc etc
00:18:01
Speaker
for a lasting print to be left behind. And we're kind of getting into here the problems in forensic science and the public's understanding of forensic science. In the same respect, we think that DNA is conclusive of a person doing things. Most people assume that fingerprints are left everywhere and are surprised to find out that actually fingerprints are not left as often as people think.
00:18:27
Speaker
So there's a bunch of stuff like that. So Kelly has kind of become a... I was going to say a canonical example, although I don't know what the canon is in this case, of a person being bumped off by the government.
Conspiracy Theories and Academic Silence
00:18:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so he's used as an example by both Alex Jones and David Ike. I did a short literature search to see whether people in the academic literature mentioned David Kelly. So I have somewhere within the vicinity of 500 academic articles in a database that can be easily word searched. And it turns out that I was able to find
00:19:09
Speaker
three references outside of philosophy and three references inside of philosophy and the philosophical references are two of them are just by Johar Reicher and the third is Johar writing with Lee Basham.
00:19:26
Speaker
So it's an interesting example by the sheer fact that not many people talk about it. It's not a common example in the literature at all, despite the fact that in the philosophical literature, the
00:19:41
Speaker
precursor to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is used all the time. The dodgy dossier is a major example that's used to explain why we should suspect conspiracies do happen at a governmental level, but David Kelly virtually never gets referenced at all.
00:19:59
Speaker
So it's a canonical example amongst a certain kind of conspiracy theorist. What's interesting, and admittedly I'm doing an English language search here, it's not a canonical example amongst conspiracy theory theorists, at least within the English-speaking world.
00:20:16
Speaker
So there have been a couple of works suggesting conspiracy in the case of Dr.
Books Challenge the Official Story
00:20:24
Speaker
Kelly's death. In 2007, Norman Baker, who was the Liberal Democrat MP for Lews at the time, he published a book called The Strange Death of Dr. Kelly, which claims death was a hit. In 2018, there was a book by Miles Goslett, a former Mail on Sunday journalist called An Inconvenient Death, How the Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Affair.
00:20:46
Speaker
So there's been works on it in the past, given the conspiracy theories, and the theories range from it was just a hit, implying that he was sort of killed in the body staged where it was found, or it was not necessarily a straight hit, but he was interrogated and was accidentally killed during some sort of forceful interrogation, and then the body was staged to look like suicide.
00:21:15
Speaker
So, you mentioned before some people think he isn't actually dead? Yes, some people think that Janice Kelly, his wife, as well as his daughter. I can't remember if he's got more than one child or not, but basically the family colluded or conspired with the government and with Kelly himself.
00:21:35
Speaker
to remove himself from the table so essentially he didn't he didn't die they simply staged his death and that's why there are inconsistencies so sure it was his knife but there are no prints there because they had to clean the knife off before they put it in the hand of the person who was killed or whose corpse was used
00:21:55
Speaker
So there are some people who do think that actually he isn't dead, although those theories seem to have in themselves died away as time has gone by. Those theories are more popular back in 2003 and 2007. They seem less plausible now because you now have to ask what's Dr David Kelly been doing in the intervening almost 20 years?
00:22:21
Speaker
So those are the conspiracy theories, but there's one other which was. Oh, sorry, the natural causes, yes. For some reason, some people think he just died of natural causes.
00:22:32
Speaker
and then someone else staged it to look like a suicide because that's a that's a thing that happens. I mean this I've been trying to reason through why you might think he died of natural causes but you try to make it look like a suicide and the only argument I can think of is that you might go well look
00:22:54
Speaker
He was inadvertently killed by the government through stress. It wasn't a direct hit, but the government's treatment of Kelly after the revelation that he was briefing journalists about the dodginess of the dodgy dossier led to his deleterious mental health. He also had a heart condition and led to physiological damage, thus leading to his eventual death.
00:23:16
Speaker
that would be embarrassing for the government because they would inadvertently be responsible for his demise. So rather than allow the public to think the government stressed someone to death, make it look, and this is where I can't make sense of it, make it look instead as if the government embarrassed someone such that he committed suicide instead. So I cannot work this out. I can get halfway there, which is we want
00:23:41
Speaker
We don't want to be directly or indirectly responsible, so we want to make it seem as if he made the choice to die. But there still doesn't seem like a very good out for the government. Maybe if it's not the government, though. Maybe it's actually enemies of the government who wanted to make them look bad by suggesting that how to demand a suicide. Oh, OK. You could run it that way. But no, it seems like an odd angle to take.
00:24:10
Speaker
At which point, if you're going, well, if you're going to do that, you might as well make it look as if it was a hit. I mean, surely it's even worse for the government if foreign powers intimate that someone who died by suicide was actually assassinated instead. So, yeah, there are some people who do think he died of natural causes and that was covered up. I just can't really make sense of that particular claim. But maybe, maybe my mind is just too highly trained, magic fires. Well, it probably is.
00:24:39
Speaker
So yes, so those are the conspiracy theories, but of course they are in opposition to the official theory. So the official version comes from the Hutton inquiry. Now, this is apparently something to begin with because there was an inquiry into his death, not a coroner's inquest.
Hutton Inquiry's Verdict: Suicide or Not?
00:25:02
Speaker
which I don't actually know the difference, to be honest, but an inquest is what you'd normally get in case of a suspicious death, I gather, whereas an inquiry is what is, is at least formal or is it not specifically medically oriented? What's the difference? So I, I don't quite get the difference here other than a coronal inquest is normally done at the local level involving the judiciary and the police, and they're not always required. So they're quite often
00:25:31
Speaker
done when there's a suicide just to make sure that all boxes are checked but in this particular case the government pushed for an inquiry instead to look into the broader matter of the government's role in the death of Dr. Kelly and
00:25:51
Speaker
Thus, it's a different way of investigating the issue, and many people thought it was a less efficient way, because you're not necessarily doing what a coroner is doing, which is looking into how the death occurred. You're looking at the circumstances around the death, and maybe you don't look quite into the kind of the forensic detail you might expect from an actual coronal inquest.
00:26:16
Speaker
So at any rate, so the Hutton inquiry was named after the person carrying it out, Lord Hutton, formerly Lord Chief Justin of Northern Ireland.
00:26:27
Speaker
Now, I don't actually know how long it was in the end, but it concluded, or included as part of its conclusion, I am satisfied that Dr. Kelly took his own life by cutting his left wrist and that his death was hastened by his taking coproximal tablets. I am further satisfied that there was no involvement by a third person in Dr. Kelly's death. So there's your official version right there. It was just suicide and no one else involved.
00:26:54
Speaker
Now, as we'll see, not everyone agreed with Lord Hutton's findings. Especially since there was an embargo on the results. Yes, so this is where we come in. Well, this isn't where we come in. This is the one mention of Dr Kelly that we have made on this podcast previously. So back in episode 157,
00:27:23
Speaker
This was back when our number 7 scheme was a little bit, got a little bit mixed up. We had a news article where we mentioned the fact that Hutton had applied a 70-year embargo on the results of the inquest. Sorry, the not-inquest of the inquiry. Now, as it turns out, the report was published after all, and that's what we probably should have followed up on.
00:27:48
Speaker
yes so there was outcry about a 70-year embargo where we were told what the conclusion was nothing to see here and people are going well that that seems a bit convenient for the government especially when we can't see the reasoning so i believe
00:28:04
Speaker
interested members of the public open bracket people who thought there was something very suspicious about the death of David Kelly and the government was covering it up closed brackets and the media who may or may not believe that there was a cover-up all protested saying this embargo is
00:28:22
Speaker
it's not appropriate we need to know the reasoning behind this finding and so the government actually relented and will publish the report nonetheless and indeed what happened afterwards was the Attorney General of the time Dominick Grave was then
00:28:40
Speaker
urged to look into the report to make his own finding and he reviewed the case and the discrepancies alleged by people say like Norman Baker and the various campaigns that claimed that the inquiry itself was inappropriate and there were still unanswered questions about the death of Dr David Kelly and he still found in favour of the suicide hypothesis.
00:29:04
Speaker
Because I guess when you look at it and how plausible the suicide versus something other than suicide aspect is, a lot of it comes down to how you tell the story, I guess, of his life immediately prior to his death.
00:29:25
Speaker
Because if you describe it in certain ways, it does sound like a hit could be more plausible. And yet if you talk about it in other ways, it does actually sound like that tragically this was a man headed for suicide. In one case, it depends on how worried you think Kelly was that he might go to prison as a whistleblower. If you think that wasn't much of a concern of his,
00:29:50
Speaker
then it does start to look more like more like a hit and the Hutton inquiry more like a cover up. Yes. So as you say, the way we tell the story affects the plausibility of the kind of story we want to tell. So if you tell the story about, look, here's this guy, he revealed the dodgy, it was the the the dossier was dodgy, not the dodgy was dossier. It's a completely different, totally different fish. Totally different.
00:30:20
Speaker
If you tell it that way, you can go, well, it's actually kind of weird that A, he dies soon after. B, the Prime Minister immediately says, oh, to suicide. There's nothing to see here. C, rather than having a chronal inquest, they hold an inquiry. That inquiry does not deliver its results.
00:30:41
Speaker
for over a decade. So it's a long-standing question of, so when's the Hutton inquiry coming out? Oh, soon. So it's the Duke Nukem of inquiries. We're releasing it.
00:30:56
Speaker
in the next financial year. It'd be done when it's done. And it was done when it's done, but it was done in 2017, which is a long time after. I mean, that's almost one and a half decades after the event. Suddenly you get the official explanation.
00:31:12
Speaker
I don't quite, yeah, I was actually looking at that because the article that we linked to in our 2017 episode was from 2010. I'm not quite sure, given that this was five years ago now, I don't quite know why we were talking about it at that particular time. So possibly there'd been something else or I don't know. But it was many years, might not have been as many as 14 years. Yeah, and what I was saying,
00:31:42
Speaker
a decade and a half or something, that can't be right. But I'm assuming that when we talked about in 2017, I'm wondering with a somehow, because 2017 is actually the point in time where they cremated the body, I think. I think 2017 is actually the cremation of Dr. David Kelly. So I think somehow the news story came up in 2017, and we reported on it
00:32:09
Speaker
Well, out of date? I think we did something wrong there, George. I think we might have messed up. I think in 2017 we probably got a little bit confused. But it doesn't matter. We could have doubled down. If you hadn't pointed out the discrepancies in the dates here, we could have just run roughshod over this entire thing or edited around this to make sure that we didn't actually commit that error in any way, shape or form.
00:32:35
Speaker
We could responsibly own up to our mistake and correct the record now, given that we have the opportunity. But we've also now compounded the error in this episode. So we're admitting we made a mistake then. We've also made a mistake now. Mistakes, Josh, have been made. Mistakes have been made. And that's fine.
00:32:54
Speaker
Well, I mean, not really, but what can we do about it? What can we do about it now? You could cover this up. I could. You could cover this up. I could make that choice and no one could stop me. And now of course the audience is thinking,
00:33:36
Speaker
Is this a
00:33:41
Speaker
No, no, no, we definitely weren't doing that. We were just making mistakes just like we made mistakes in this episode. That's what we did. Now, anyway, back to the inquiry. So some of the people who questioned the results of the inquiry were not actually forensic pathologists.
Medical Experts Debate Suicide Plausibility
00:34:00
Speaker
So there were claims like
00:34:02
Speaker
His wounds and the amount of blood loss he suffered wouldn't have been sufficient to cause his death. As well as the slitting of the wrist and the ingesting of many pills, he also had a heart condition. So part of the claim was that those things combined, that yes, in another person possibly those things might not have been fatal, but to someone with a heart condition that amount of blood loss would have been fatal.
00:34:30
Speaker
things like that. And some of the people making these claims weren't actually forensic pathologists. No, they were, they were, so they were medical experts. So people point out the people who were opposing the Hutton inquiry findings were people like surgeons and clinical pharmacists. So they were raising legitimate issues of, well, you know, I don't think a cut of that type
00:34:58
Speaker
is deep enough for the kind of blood loss you require for someone to die. And pharmacist is going, well, I don't think the dose of this drug is sufficient to, of course, the kind of effect we're looking for. But as the Hutton inquiry report indicated, and Dominic Greve's findings about these things, it turns out that
00:35:21
Speaker
Actually, the presidents of the British Association of Forensic Medicine and the Forensic Science Society were saying, look, yes, it's true. As isolated cases, you might go, this is reason for doubt. But the thing about forensic pathology is you're looking at the whole system and the whole body.
00:35:39
Speaker
It turns out for someone like David Kelly, who had a heart condition, had thinned arteries, had taken this amount of medication and cut his wrist in this particular way, in this particular case that is sufficient for that to be a successful suicide.
00:36:00
Speaker
Now people also point to the fact that he left no suicide note or anything, no indication that that was his plan, and also point out that he had planned to meet his daughter later. But all of that's consistent also with it being a more, a more spur-of-the-moment decision now. Yeah, because people for some reason assume that if you're going to commit suicide, you always leave a note or
00:36:22
Speaker
you usually leave a note. And once again, that assumption is actually not borne out by the empirical research. Lots of people commit suicide leaving no notes whatsoever. Lots of people commit suicide having made plans for the rest of the day. There are a whole bunch of assumptions operating here as to how we think the world works that don't necessarily match how people who deal with these things on a day by day basis understand the world to work.
00:36:52
Speaker
Now, when we were talking about how the story you tell about him colors what you think may have actually happened, another story you can run is if you emphasize his state of distress at the time.
00:37:08
Speaker
then suicide does perhaps start to look more plausible. His family had talked about the stress that had been caused to him by being outed by the government, how he was afraid his job could have been at stake, possibly even his freedom.
Family Insights and Stress Factors
00:37:26
Speaker
Now there's the detail that apparently
00:37:29
Speaker
On the day of his disappearance, he seemed relatively, if not upbeat, then not downbeat earlier in the day, but then received a phone call later on, which apparently changed his demeanor quite a bit. There's something to do with the fact, I think his wife was recovering from a recent illness or injury.
00:37:54
Speaker
So she was sort of in bed a lot of the time so didn't know, just heard the phone call and didn't know what had taken place. But then apparently his mood soured quite drastically after that. One person suggested that maybe it was sort of a sympathetic person from the Ministry of Defence ringing to let him know that he was about to get thrown on the coals once again when
00:38:15
Speaker
He had gone on the radar. If you recall, we mentioned Susan Watts, the BBC editor. She had made statements that he had said stuff to her. He had apparently publicly denied that he had said these things. And yet she was about to come out with proof that he had that he had actually said the things he had denied saying. And so there was a suggestion that maybe this phone call was saying, hey, just to let you know, Susan Watts has got proof that you said that you did actually say those things and that that
00:38:45
Speaker
Maybe that was the last straw. We don't know. But you can tell a story that makes suicide look less plausible, and you can tell a story that makes suicide look more plausible, basically. Yes, so as you were pointing out, there was, depending on the story you tell, a strong possibility that David Kelly would not just be outed as the source for the information at the dodgy dot.
00:39:08
Speaker
dossier but would have lied to the government about him being the source of the contents of the dodgy dossier. So you would have been outed both as a whistleblower and a liar and you might be able to get away with one in the public world but being outed as a liar at the same time would be problematic for people trying to work out what to believe.
00:39:34
Speaker
So there's the case of the cremation, he says. So 2017 definitely is the year when his body was exhumed and cremated. This was according to the wish of his family. Apparently his grave had become a bit of a magnet for conspiracy theorists, apparently.
00:39:51
Speaker
There was a group, the Justice for Kelly campaign group, and they'd put placards and notes by his grave, presumably saying this man was killed by the government or something, and they'd held vigils there. This was referred to as desecration of his grave.
00:40:08
Speaker
Which, depending on how you define desecration, just means treating something not as sacred as you should. So I guess that's it. Yeah, it's one of those words which has a lot of baggage. Yeah. What fascinated me about this when I was reading up about it was
00:40:27
Speaker
This paragraph here from a Guardian, our article, the license of the exclamation was granted by the Chancellor of the Diocese of Oxford. A spokesman said, there is a presumption that Christian burial is permanent and that remains should not be portable. Therefore, a faculty for exclamation is only granted in exceptional circumstances. The body of Dr. David Kelly was exhumed at the request of his family,
00:40:52
Speaker
which seems to be if you put a body in the ground you have to have very good reason if you want to move it because the church might go no sorry no once it's down there it stays down there which seems like a it does seem like a strange restriction of no you you can't just do what if you like with your family's remains you have to get the permission of the church if you want to you know change graves which on one level seems
00:41:18
Speaker
slightly efficient and on another level we can kind of understand how people would be moving graves all the time. This grave is a terrible view. I need to move too, you know, a more self-facing view, maybe nearer the cliff. So yes, that's where things stand now, I think.
00:41:38
Speaker
On the balance of evidence, it does seem to look like Dr Kelly's death was indeed a suicide, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there's no conspiracy here.
Coerced Suicide Theory
00:41:48
Speaker
And this this reminds me a lot of the more recent discussions around the death of Jeffrey Epstein, because people would sort of say that would speak as though there are only two possibilities, either he killed himself or he was murdered. But
00:42:03
Speaker
There are positions in between. It could be that, you know, a death like that could be suicide. It could be straight murder. A third person comes in and commits a murder and then stages it to look like a suicide. But then it can be that sort of...
00:42:20
Speaker
sort of murder where you don't actually kill someone but you either drive them to suicide by making their life so horrible or even possibly drop hints and sort of encourage that maybe take someone that may be taking the honourable way out would be preferable to what's going to come in the future.
00:42:42
Speaker
Ah, mon ami, if I could interrupt ever so slightly. You are talking here about the case of Nemesis, the famous final case of a acute Poi Wo, where Poi Wo tracks down a murderer who does not directly murder people, but encourages people to commit the suicide. As the thing about Nemesis, it being the last acute Poi Wo story, Poi Wo kills the murderer to stop further murders from being committed. Well, I'd better get him on the case then, I think.
00:43:10
Speaker
No, no, no. Pooh is dead. I am speaking to you from beyond the grave. Oh, nice. I am now a vampire, don't you know? Ah, ah, ah. Pooh, he sucks the blood out of his victims. The little gray cells, they are filled with blood.
00:43:23
Speaker
Excellent. But yes, I mean, as with Epstein, so with Kelly. We don't have to say it was, we have more options than he simply committed suicide or he was killed by a government hitman.
Government Involvement Speculations
00:43:38
Speaker
The government could be, you could run a line that the government could be responsible for his death and his death happening at his own hand, if you see what I mean.
00:43:48
Speaker
Indeed, I mean, there are versions of this where that phone call he got from the Ministry of Defence or someone saying, well, look, things are going to get pretty bad for you, David. But, you know, if you were to take the easy way out, I mean, we can ensure that your name doesn't get dragged through the mud any further. Your family is not going to be affected by things. We're not saying that you should. I'm just saying that, you know, you could make the problem disappear, David. You could make it disappear.
00:44:17
Speaker
And yes, you can imagine us and that is something you might end up going.
00:44:23
Speaker
rather having an inquest looking at the phone calls that occurred that day. Let's have a long-ranging inquiry that takes around about five years to to fulfil and then put an embargo upon the results so that no one ever finds out about what was happening with phone calls from the Ministry of Defence or at least by the time the results do come out no one's going to be able to double check exactly who he was talking to and for what reason. I think to finish things off
00:44:53
Speaker
This did remind me of a couple of other suspicious suicides that I've been hearing about recently. I keep banging on about the Behind the Bastards episode because I've been going through its back catalogue, basically, and it's a very interesting podcast. The recent episodes are about MKUltra, and as part of that, it talks about the death of Frank Olsen, who was a man who basically
Parallels with Frank Olsen's Death
00:45:14
Speaker
Apparently, it was involved in MKUltra and objected strongly to the way they were treating people. And then was at a meeting, if you know anything about MKUltra, eventually it kind of degenerates into CIA people just dosing everyone with acid.
00:45:29
Speaker
anyone who happened to be near them to kind of just see what would happen. Olsen and a bunch of other people were at a meeting where everyone was doped with acid. His demeanor changed quite markedly over the next couple of days and then a short while later he died from falling out of the room of a hotel that he was staying in. That one looks a hell of a lot more dodgy.
00:45:52
Speaker
uh you know in comparison with this sort of thing there's someone who really seemed to have no motive for suicide whatsoever is then put in a stressful situation and then was apparently there was another agent sort of present in the hotel room or something as well something like that you have a much harder time
00:46:08
Speaker
telling a story of it, of it being not involving the government. The other one that just occurred to me now is there was also, I've also been reading about the death of Gary Webb.
Gary Webb's Death and Conspiracy Skepticism
00:46:22
Speaker
Gary Webb was a journalist. Ah yes, yes, yes. The good old Gary Webb story. Gary Webb was a journalist who basically broke the Iran-Contra affair, essentially. He wrote the story called Dark Alliance and... In three parts.
00:46:37
Speaker
Yep, which basically blew the lid off around Contra. Now he got a hell of a lot of grief for this, in part because he didn't work for a major newspaper. And so the big American newspapers at the time were actually, more than anything, were angry at him for having scooped them.
00:46:59
Speaker
And so they devoted a hell of a lot of time and resource to basically destroying him and his reporting. And unfortunately, because he wasn't working with the major newspaper and possibly didn't have the level of editorial insight that he might have at a major one, his piece, while broadly right, while quite true, did have some sort of relatively basic areas of fact, which they sort of pounced on.
00:47:27
Speaker
and try to discredit him completely. Now he was found dead in his home in 2004 with two gunshot wounds to the head and some people immediately were like how do you how do you shoot yourself shoot yourself twice in the head but apparently the coroner's like well you know that that can happen if the first shot
00:47:47
Speaker
it's possible to shoot yourself non fatally if you if you get the angle wrong and then either because you know you've just shot yourself in the head and and you're determined to to finish the job you fire again or you just jerk and fire again or you know who knows what it isn't actually as um as unlikely as it sounds it's one of the things that sounds impossible and then you go actually it is physically possible after all
00:48:15
Speaker
In this particular case, his life had largely been ruined. He had been dragged through the mud by powerful organizations.
00:48:29
Speaker
It's weird that the major newspapers were essentially defending the CIA in this case against this one dude, but his wife apparently has said that she doesn't believe it could have been anything but suicide. Like she knew how incredibly depressed he had been and how this had been weighing on him. But the thing that gets me is, there's a movie about Gary Webb and his dear, I think he's played by Jeremy Renner?
00:48:54
Speaker
I think and the movie talks about talks about him and then finishes with uh it's called Kill the Messenger that's right Kill the Messenger and he is played by yes Jeremy Renner um so there's an epilogue to the film that says in 2004 he was found dead in his apartment shot twice in the head his death was ruled a suicide
00:49:18
Speaker
which triggered me a little bit, because that phrase, the death was ruled a suicide, is almost a cliche of conspiracy theories. Because there's an ellipsis at the end, which says death was ruled a suicide. But we all know it wasn't.
00:49:36
Speaker
The fact that they say it was ruled not his death was a suicide, simply the powers that be say his death was a suicide. And that shows up all the time. The Clinton body count is a great one for that.
00:49:53
Speaker
They, you know, list all these people tangentially connected to the Clintons or affairs involving the Clintons. And any time there's a suicide, it's always their death was ruled a suicide, which is a true fact. It's definitely true. And but it's a fact stated in such a way as to imply basically the opposite of what they're saying. And so indeed, Dr. Kelly's death was ruled a suicide by the Hutton inquiry and also by
00:50:22
Speaker
the Attorney General after that. But as we say, it doesn't mean there isn't conspiracy theory and conspiracies involved, but to say his death was ruled a suicide while waggling your eyebrows and going dot, dot, dot afterwards, I think is disingenuous. Yes, it is one of those, as you say, it's one of those things where there is this implication at the end.
00:50:52
Speaker
And sometimes you might go with, say, the Gary Wibbs story. You'll go...
00:50:59
Speaker
I mean, there might be something to it. I mean, it is possible to shoot yourself in the head twice, but it's not particularly likely. It's one of those things that's in the realm of possibility, but it's a highly likely situation. And given what he has exposed, you might go, well, there are forces within the security apparatus of the American state that may have wanted him to disappear. So you can kind of see why people do the
00:51:26
Speaker
Their death was wrought a suicide gambit, because they're going, it's possible it wasn't. But it is also overused to a very large extent, and the Clinton body count is a great example of that. I mean, it's the same respect we're seeing now with COVID-19 conspiracy theories.
00:51:44
Speaker
where people go, and this person, you know, they had their vaccination, and then they died. And then you go, so how long was it between the vaccination and death? Oh, I mean, one and a half years. Well, it's definitely the vaccination that killed them, not the heavy drinking and smoking they engaged in. No, it's a vaccination-related death. OK, so yes, I mean, it's true. Soon there's going to be almost every death that's going to be associated with the vaccination, because a lot of people have been vaccinated and a lot of...
00:52:13
Speaker
And I will state, for the record, 100% of people who have been vaccinated will die eventually. So there's going to be a 100% death rate associated with vaccinated people in the next 100 years.
00:52:31
Speaker
which is chilling when you think about it. I actually almost have a bit of a problem with this idea that there is that sort of suspicion, oh, the government might want to get rid of these people, so it's plausible that they'd bump them off because
00:52:46
Speaker
I can understand the government, or whatever powers that be, having a motive to dispose of someone where there's a danger of them making the government look bad or something. But after the damage has already been done,
00:53:04
Speaker
I don't really see what would be achieved. Gary Webb's story had been published. Kelly's, you know, people knew that Kelly's had already blabbed and it was known he'd been blabbed. And there doesn't seem to be a lot that could have been gained by silencing him after the fact unless you think they're petty enough that they're just indulging in revenge.
00:53:26
Speaker
or you think there's more that could come out. So, for example, so the argument you're putting forward is the kind of argument that David Aranovich runs around Norman Baker's claims about the death of David Kelly in Aranovich's books, Voodoo History. And he argues that look, Kelly had already revealed everything he knew, he'd already embarrassed the government. As you say, there's no point
00:53:51
Speaker
killing someone when they've already done the damage. But people like Baker, and I think to a lesser extent, Goslett, go, but he had more information. I mean, when you actually look at the things that David Kelly was involved in, and it's actually in the notes, it's pointed out that he'd actually been involved in some
00:54:12
Speaker
fairly dodgy cover-ups during his professional career. So it was really only after the deportation from Kuwait where he decided that in this particular case, he wasn't going to adhere to the official line. He was going to reveal to journalists that actually this particular sanction regime that's been put against Iraq due to the development of weapons of mass destruction is based on a tissue of lies.
00:54:40
Speaker
But he'd been involved in other dodgy cover-ups or cover-up adjacent activities in the past. And so you might be concerned if you're, say, a member of MI5 or a member of the Cabinet that Kelly's revealed this thing we've done, which is wrong.
00:54:59
Speaker
there's some valence to the fact he could review other stuff as well. If he's established a precedent as a leaker, then what else is he going to leaker? So I don't know. Anyway, we're sort of into speculation now, which probably means we've said all everything constructive that we need to say. Oh yes, I see. So I found a bit. So Kelly worked at Paul?
00:55:20
Speaker
Portland Downs and he had been involved in Operation Dark Harvest. Where do people get these names from? Oh, we're going to call our operation Operation Dark Harvest and that was Britain's tacit cooperation with the apartheid regime in South Africa in their biological weapons.
00:55:45
Speaker
He'd been at least tangentially involved in biological weapon material export to Baghdad. There were things that he had been involved in he could have leaked. Yeah, so yes, I don't know. We don't. As with basically everything we get to in the end, we'll never really know 100% for sure.
00:56:07
Speaker
And if we've reached that point, I guess we've reached the point of the end of this episode. So we have now, Josh, what's coming up in the bonus episode this week?
00:56:17
Speaker
I have not a goddamn clue. We'll come up with something, I'm sure. Because as mentioned at the top of the episode due to VPN-related woes, I've basically been exiled from the rest of the internet. So my usual harvesting of stories has basically been curtailed by a lack of internet access. Seems the only sites I can routinely access are computer gaming sites.
00:56:42
Speaker
And there's not much conspiratorial going on there at all, although there's a lot of chatter about what may or may not have happened with the voice acting for Bayonetta 3. Bayonetta 3, yes. Yes, so we'll come up with something. I'm sure it'll be really interesting and I'm sure you really, really want to hear it. And if you do, then you'll need to be one of our patrons. You can become one by going to patreon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and sign yourself up.
00:57:10
Speaker
But if that wasn't enough to entice you, this idea that we're probably just going to make some shit up off the top of our heads to fill 20 minutes or so, if that's not enough for you, well, no pleasing everybody, I guess. You're one of our listeners, and that's just fine. So, indeed, thank you for listening to the end of this very episode, and now is the end of this very episode, which I will signal in a traditional manner by saying goodbye.
00:57:38
Speaker
Goodbye, Lessitude.
00:58:09
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.