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LONDON, July 18 — The body of a man believed to be the arms
expert at the center of a high-profile dispute over the validity of
government
weapons intelligence was found today near his home in Oxfordshire.
The weapons specialist's wife told the police shortly before midnight
that her husband, Dr. David Kelly, 59, had been missing since he left
his home Thursday afternoon saying he was going for a walk. The body
was discovered this morning on a woodland footpath five miles from
the Kelly residence in the village of Southmoor.
The acting superintendent of the Thames Valley police, Dave Purnell,
said that a formal identification would be made on Saturday, but he
added that the description of the body matched that of Dr. Kelly. Calling
the case an "unexplained death," Superintendent Purnell declined
to discuss possible causes or answer questions about whether there
were any suspicious circumstances.
An Oxford-educated, former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq
with a speciality in biological weapons, Dr. Kelly faced tough questioning
on Tuesday from the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Lawmakers especially wanted to know whether he was the source of an
accusation broadcast by the BBC that the government of Prime Minister
Tony Blair had doctored intelligence findings in its campaign to gain
public support for going to war in Iraq.
A soft-spoken civil servant in the Ministry of Defense accustomed
to working behind the scenes, Dr. Kelly was repeatedly pressed by committee
members to say whether he thought he was the "fall guy" in
a bitter dispute that has pitted the government against the BBC and
been front-page news in Britain during the last week.
The implication of the badgering questions was that the scientist had
been set up by Mr. Blair's powerful communications and security director,
Alastair Campbell, and the Ministry of Defense to counter damaging
reports by the BBC about possible government manipulation of intelligence.
Mr. Campbell, a fiercely loyal and combative aide to Mr. Blair, has
conducted a wide-ranging campaign against the BBC, the world's largest
public service broadcaster, asserting that it has let its vaunted standards
of impartiality lapse in the pursuit of what he has called "an
agenda against the war."
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Tom Mangold, a journalist for the British
news network ITV and a close friend of Dr. Kelly's, said that he spoke
this
morning to the scientist's wife, Janice, and that she had said that her
husband was "very, very angry about what had happened at the committee" on
Tuesday.
"
She didn't use the word `depressed,' " Mr. Mangold said, "but
she said he was very, very stressed and unhappy about what had happened
and this was really not the kind of world he wanted to live in."
The case that put Dr. Kelly in the public eye arose from a BBC report
on May 29 asserting that a high-ranking Downing Street official had "sexed
up" a government intelligence dossier by inserting a claim that
Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed
in 45
minutes.
The BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, who covers military affairs, said
the insertion had been made against the wishes of intelligence agencies.
The
weapons claim was the highlight of the dossier published by the government
to persuade a dubious British public of the need to take immediate
military action in Iraq.
Mr. Gilligan attributed his account to a senior weapons scientist with
whom he had met at a downtown London hotel. The reporter did not identify
the scientist or the high-ranking Downing Street official on the air,
but he later wrote in a newspaper article that the official who had "sexed
up" the dossier was Mr. Campbell.
Tell us the truth about the dossier
It is now clear we were dragged to war with Iraq under a pretence
Richard Norton-Taylor
Tuesday July 15, 2003
The Guardian
There cannot be anyone who now genuinely believes that Iraq posed a
threat to Britain or America when UK and US troops invaded the country.
Yet that is what we were told at the time: Saddam Hussein's weapons of
mass destructionprogramme was so dangerous that military force was the
only way to stop it.
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The charge now being laid at Tony Blair's
door is not that he knowingly lied to the Commons and the public - an
exaggeration
he can easily deny. It is that he dragged Britain into a war under what,
it is now clear, was a pretence.
That he still sticks to the claim in
his foreword to the September dossier that the threat from Iraq "is serious
and current" tells you as much about his judgment and prejudices
as his sincerity.
Spurred on by George Bush, his mind appeared to have been made up. Diplomatic
shenanigans at the UN were a sideshow, useful but not really necessary, certainly
not as far as the attorney-general's view of international law was concerned.
Blair might have told himself that it was inconceivable for Britain not
to go to war. But there still had to be a pretext. Thus the government
for months
applied
pressure on the intelligence agencies to come up with a dossier on Iraq's banned
weapons .
MI6, we now know, included the phrase "there is intelligence that Iraq has
sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa". When
the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency discovered the claim was based on
forged documents, Jack Straw insisted that MI6 had "separate" sources
to back up the claim. Yet he was honest enough to tell the Commons in early June
that, "until we investigate properly," ministers will not be in a position
to say whether that intelligence was "correct".
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, further undermined the government's
case last week when he told a Senate committee that America and Britain did
not invade "because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit
of weapons of mass murder". The US acted because it saw "existing evidence
in a new light, through the prism of our experience on September 11".
Ministers cannot now back away saying what they actually meant by WMD
were bits of old machinery or "programmes" found in documents.
The whole point of the dossier was to convince MPs to vote for war to
counter an urgent
threat
and for the public to support them. We have a right to know from an independent
inquiry whether we went to war on false pretences. The onus is now on the
government and their agents to show we did not.
Judith Miller - wmd & middle
east expert?
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