Don,
You have a suspicious nature. <vbg>
Have you considered a career as a prosecutor/district attorney?
I watched Dr. David Kelly's testimony before the UK Foreign Affairs Committee hearings that occurred last Tueday. C-SPAN re-played the session last night (early AM ET), and I have to say that I didn't find Dr. Kelly to be in any sense "depressed" or over-wrought. He was a quiet, thoughtful and seemingly unimpeachable witness to the fact that he had met with the BBC's Andrew Gilligan, but that he (Kelly) could not be considered the primary source of the accusation that 10 Downing Street had "sexed up" one of its dossiers. Kelly's role at the MoD was limited to biological weapons, and Gilligan's report went far beyond that aspect.
Here's the latest coverage from the NY Times:
nytimes.com
And the Guardian: politics.guardian.co.uk
The Mirror, mirroring our suspicions, has the apparent 'suicide' in single quotes in its headline:
mirror.co.uk
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One of the interesting serendipities of my last 24 hours is that in addition to learning of Dr. Kelly's suspicious demise, I've started to read what I thought was an intellectual's high falutin' tale of the gaming tables. The book is Jim McManus's "Positively Fifth Street", which describes a turn of the cards in no-limit Texas hold'em. What I didn't have any idea I'd be getting into, besides a sophisticated update of Hunter S. (Dr. Gonzo) Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", was an infamous murder case, involving one of the Binion brothers, his stripper paramour, her gangland paramour, heroin, Xanax, a faked suicide, a ton or two of silver dollars and ingots and a tabloid industry all a'twitter. Yes, to answer your question, Geraldo was breathless.
Just as with Dr. Kelly's untimely death, the Binion case started out being declared an "undetermined cause of death". Then it became officially known as a suicide. But a few weeks later, the the stripper's hairdresser volunteered that the stripper, in a conversation under the hair dryer, had predicted how Binion would die of a heroin overdose, and that she'd make $300,000 and get the mansion...... well, aftet Binion's death, the hairdresser thought that she had a client who was either a remarkable prophet, a woman with a plan, or a stark raving homocidal maniac. She left it to the D.A. to decide.
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Let's just add Dr. David Kelly to the file, shall we.....
Vince Foster, Cliff Baxter, Paul Wellstone.........
Ahh, the mysteries.
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Re: So, Dr. Kelly walked 5 miles to exercise and reduce stress because he was mad at someone else, then proceeded to plop down, take an overdose AND slash his wrist?
I found the mention of the pain killer bottle to be an odd aspect. Assuming for the moment that Dr. Kelly was a rational man on a mission, and one who foresaw that there would necessarily be a lag time between taking the pain reliever and its efficacy kicking in, why wouldn't he have taken the pain reliever before departing? Why take the medicine with? Of course, talking about a rational suicide is somewhat oxymoronic, I suppose. But no note, no indication from his correspondences and phone conversations during the day that he was suicidal. He was expressing more anger than depression, from all I can gather. Anger doesn't normally lead to suicide, from what I've read. (Hmmm, what would Columbo think?) And then the coup d'grace for the case against the government? They confiscated the computer for evidence. We all know how this works in the U.S., now don't we?
A good investigative journalist or prosecutor would now immediately begin to take a hard look at the chain of command in the Blair government. I was quite amazed and taken aback at the vociferous, belligerent and threatening way that Blair's communications guy, Alistair Campbell seemed to attack Andrew Gilligan. It seemed almost feral, and certainly shocking. Campbell was being accused, I think correctly, of lying in order to deceive the UK into a war. His bellicose reaction was the sort of thing I'd expect from a megalomaniac, a psychotic and a dissembler (your typical PR flak). If I were an investigator here, Campbell would be being investigated in front of a grand jury at this very moment. He's suspect #1. |
