David Kelly – My view

So, let’s get this straight.
David Kelly was a man who has been on many visits to Iraq. He had seen countless horrors while he was there. The BBC describes him as a “gentle man with a core of steel.” “There was no give in that man,” said close colleague Scott Ritter in the same BBC article. He was hardened by many years in Iraq, one of the world’s toughest countries, as a high-profile inspector. Yes, he was under intense pressure when he revealed his conversation with Andrew Gilligan, but surely the man was not naive enough or inexperienced enough to buckle?
And then his death. It may well be a suicide. If it was, then there must be other extreme and underhand factors (such as the “dark actors” he described hours before his death) that drove this hardened man to end his successful life so suddenly. The ordeal may have been over within a couple of weeks, there was no reason to end it all now.
Imagine, for a moment, that it wasn’t suicide. If you wanted someone out of the way, you would trail them to a deserted area. Then, you would kill someone in a way that would look for all the world like the victim had done it himself. He slit one wrist – is there any precedent for a man dying after slitting just one wrist? Privately, many doctors agree that it is unlikely enough blood would be lost. And this happened in woods where no one could see him, and where there would be no sign of a struggle.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But Esther Rantzen was the first person to comment on it this morning on Radio 4. Have a listen to it here – skip to 37 minutes. She doesn’t say it directly, but implies a whole heap of suspicion in the medical community.
Important, pivotal people eliminated – it’s happened before, it’ll happen again. Will others have the courage to wonder?
Update: David Kelly’s colleague implies that we “don’t really know the reason he died yet, do we… we need to know what happened”. Listen here, 5 minutes in…