KELLY FAMILY ACCUSE HOON OF LIES AND HYPOCRISY

[dArKeR]

GEOFF Hoon was condemned as a liar, bully and hypocrite at the Hutton inquiry yesterday.

The Defence Secretary had denied there was a plot to name Dr David Kelly as a BBC mole.

But Jeremy Gompertz, the QC for the dead scientist's family, claimed former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell had proved Mr Hoon's denials were false.

"The hypocrisy of these denials has now been disclosed by some passages of Mr Campbell's diary," Mr Gompertz said. He accused Mr Hoon and No 10 of deliberately outing Dr Kelly as a BBC source.

They had used him as a pawn in their battle with the BBC over the corporation's claim that the Government dossier on Iraq's arms had been "sexed up".

Mr Campbell and Mr Hoon had also acted like "playground bullies" to try to nail BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, the inquiry heard.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13449193_method=full_siteid=50143_headline=-KELLY%2DFAMILY%2DACCUSE%2DHOON%2DOF%2DLIES%2DAND%2DHYPOCRISY-name_page.html

[emad]

1. But it's still not game/set/match to the Kelly camp....

Whatever way you look at it, something still smells bad. Something no one is talking about.
Yesterday's posts on the DU said one very important thing: despite all the reams of evidence, no a single word has been spoken about exactly WHAT Kelly was doing in the in-between years when he worked for Porton Down and various UK-spook labs. 12 years of nothing?
Second point: the enquiry closed with no one cross examining Blair.

Whyever they used Kelly as a pawn has yet to emerge. I don't think his family would want to out that, however bad it's looking for Blair & Co...

[rman]

2. 12 years of nothing

might explain why Kelly "could not handle the pressure".
but if he's been on the job then he probably was used to all kinds of pressure. and it isn't very likely he's been doing nothing.

[AP]

3. I'd like to know why he considered Judith Miller a good friend

and I'd like to know whether the CIA knew him when they assured their agent, a guy named Foster, that he shouldn't worry about the 45 minute claim, because they were going to blame the British.

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

6. Uranium from Niger, not 45-minute claim

from the transcript I believe you're referring to (& if not please correct me):

RAY MCGOVERN: Yes, he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that in discussions with a Mr. Joseph of the NSC, he suggested that since the agency didn’t vouch for the business about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger, that it ought not to be used in the President’s Sate of the Union address, and indeed they had managed to get it out of previous presidential speeches. So why did they want to put it back in there? Well, finally he was persuaded that well, let’s blame it on the British. Let’s say, according to a British report. And Foley said, I suppose that would be alright to blame it on the British. Now, they didn’t even say ‘according to a British report’. What the President said was ‘the British have learned’. That’s a lot different. We are pretty careful with words in the intelligence community, but that is what the President said, ‘the British have learned that Iraq was seeking uranium from an African country..
Now, Foley took the fall with that, along with Tenet, but it was really sort of Tenet saying ‘I confess, she did it’. Because Tenet doesn’t write these speeches. Condeleezza Rice is responsible for that. So what is Tenet was confessing? He’s confessing to being a lousy proofreader. He didn’t read the final draft, and there it was.

AMY GOODMAN: But Alan Foley said ‘we know this not to be true’. And they said well, why don’t we just leave that part out and say that the British say it’s true?

RAY MCGOVERN: We’ll use it anyway and we’ll pin it on the British report. I watched the speech. We all watched the speech. When the President says the British have learned something, the presumption is the President is telling the truth. But the President was not telling the truth and everyone knew that.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/17/1543215

The difference is important because the point I believe you've often made is that the whole hullabaloo over the 45-minute claim was a Bush set-up. The Niger claim was a mini-scandal before Gilligan's reports, but the Government line that -- & still is -- that our intelligence was not based on the forged documents, but on another source which cannot be revealed (there are problems with this in that the IAEA has not been informed of this intelligence which, we are supposed to do).

I've never understood why Blair couldn't do a mea culpa on the Niger claim, or the 45-minute claim (especially as we now know it refers to battlefield munitions). If he did, he would regain some semblance of credibility, but instead a growing number of people who supported the war on the basis that Saddam was a threat are turning on him.

[AP]

8. That's it. Thanks.

There's also the interesting part where these guys talk about who did the forgery. They say it could have been Israel, but it was too sloppy, but then again, Israel might have made it sloppy so that people would say "it wasn't Israel because it was too sloppy."

I think the CIA or Israel or whomever forged it and they made it sloppy to make Blair look bad.

I think Blair was between a rock and a hard place on Iraq. He did advise against going in, but there was no chance the US wasn't going in, so he had to look after Europe's interests, right. So the US wants to sabotage him, and everything that has happened since has been part of the sabotage.

I think Blair is just hanging by his nails to see if a Democrat whom he can work with gets eleceted. If that happens, they are going to barnstorm for 18 months before the next British election and try to make right everything that's wrong (no doubt fighting some VERY intense covert and overt opposition).

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

7. (oops, it double posted)

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

4. some incoherent thoughts on this

Mai Pederson still remains an interesting element to the Kelly story -- was she part of the spooks the CIA infiltrated into the weapons inspectors in 1998? Why did she & Kelly share three mailing address' in the states?

Why was Kelly a suspect (pre Gilligan story) in leaking a UK EYES ONLY MI6 document about Iraq's non-existent links to al-Qaeda to Gilligan? How could he possibly have access to intelligence about terrorism if he was only cleared for intelligence relating to WMD?

Were his phones bugged (he reported problems with his home line in May (before he spoke to Gilligan)? (If so, was this in relation to the above?)

Did he meet with David Broucher in Feb 2003? Who gave him authorization to communicate with Iraqi scientists & ministers re weapons inspection. If he only met with Broucher in 2002 (well before inspections) was Broucher inventing what Kelly said -- & if so, for what purpose?

In his first interview with Hatfield, Howard & Wells he was asked why Gilligan thought he was in intelligence. Kelly replied that the UN thought he was with intelligence & Gilligan might have got that impression depending "on who he asks". Why did the UN think Kelly was a spook? Did he have anything to do with the inspectors being pulled out in 1998?

Mi5's T3-Division was tasked with investigating the Gilligan story & the leak of a Campbell memo. The report we've seen indicates that this was purely an analytical job (ie looking at memo distribution/ comparing the facts in Gilligan's report with what could have been known ... ) -- T3 is "protective security" under T-Branch which is domestic counterterrorism --- now I'm not as familiar with Mi5's current setup (the most recent study I've read being Mark Urban's "UK EYES ALPHA", but it seems like an odd division to task with a rather routine job.

Why did Kelly's dental records go missing for 48 hours?

Did Kelly make a phone call to a national newspaper on his walk as some papers claimed at the time? If so, is it true that Mi5 were called in to investigate possible leaks?

Did Mi5 take control of his computers & other documents? If so, why, when there were police on the scene with top-security clearance?

Why did some papers report that Kelly's body was found "face down" in the initial stories? (see http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1001008,00.html )

Did Kelly's body move from being slumped against the tree to having his head resting against the tree between the volunteers finding him & the police arriving on the scene? If so, how?

***

There's probably more, but these are the main unanswered questions I've got personally in relation to Kelly. There are quite possibly very innocent answers to the lot of them, but I've got a very suspicious mind!

But regardless, I think that David Kelly's death will be the Hilda Murrell or the next 20 years!!

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. What 12 years?

Do you mean before he started doing inspections work? He was doing such things as decontaminating Gruinard Island from anthrax. Did you expect the inquiry to look at his entire life? Is his pre-1990 employment at all relevant?

They hoped to 'use' Kelly to discredit Gilligan's story. That's obvious, and has been talked about at length, in the inquiry. Or are you saying that 'they' first persuaded Kelly to talk to Gilligan, so that they could then attack the BBC? Have you any evidence for that at all?

[T_i_B]

9. Hoon's been made the scapegoat here

Hoon should go, but the lies and corruption stem from further up the tree than Geoff (buf)Hoon.

If Tony Blair has any honour he will resign with Hoon and let the Labour party be itself for the first time since the death of John Smith.

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

10. "The Deal" (tmrw Channel 4)

couldn't have come at a better time!!!