Joseph Dormer
“Dr Kelly’s death…is an absolutely terrible tragedy…”
Mon Aug 4 12:55:52 2003
64.140.158.105

No 10 denies Kelly slur
Matthew Tempest and agencies
Monday August 4, 2003
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1012125,00.html

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Kelly and dark media games
Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 11:33:53 +0100
From: "josephdormer" josephdormer@whsmithnet.co.uk
To: apfn@apfn.org

If you consider the bare facts of Kelly’s death and ignore the wildly presumptuous claims of the media, it is pretty clear in which direction they point, and it is not that of suicide. Dr Kelly’s email to a journalist sent only hours before his death, with its chilling warning of ‘dark actors playing dark games’, is not only indicative of murder, but also reveals that Kelly was well aware of the danger he was in. What is extraordinary, though, is that the whole of the press and the broadcast media interpreted these words – ‘dark actors playing dark games’ – as signifying threats to deprive Kelly of his pension, or something similar. Now ‘dark’ simply is not an appropriate term to describe disciplinary action of this kind, no matter how harsh; it is a term used to denote something that is evil and covert, and it is barely conceivable that the articulate and semantically precise Dr Kelly would have used these words in so careless a manner.

Equally extraordinary is the stark fact that, despite the paucity of evidence to support the hypothesis that Kelly had taken his own life, none of the broadcast media or news media suggested that it might be anything other than suicide. Without a single exception the whole of the media, as a single voice, did its upmost to imply – even when it did not explicitly state - that Kelly had been so stressed by recent events that he had taken his own life. No one suggested the obvious: that if you know you are in grave danger from ‘dark forces’, you are going to be..well, stressed. No one dared to suggest that Kelly might – just possibly – have been murdered. That itself is strange when you think of the media’s usual appetite for sensationalism. But what is most extraordinary of all is that even before details of how he had died had been released by the police, the media was doing its best to plant in the mind of the public the idea that Kelly had committed suicide!

Let us start with the BBC. On 18 July at 19.54, after a body ‘matching the description of Dr David Kelly’ has been found but before police had released details of the manner in which he had died, the BBC News website updated a report which ended with the following quotation from an MP:

“He is not used to the media glare, he is not to the spotlight he has been put under.”

thus ensuring that the reader was left with the impression that this courageous and principled man, who had endured years of confrontation and harassment as a UN weapons inspector, couldn’t handle the stress of being in the public eye and therefore had probably killed himself.:

This is what SKY NEWS had to say after Kelly went missing:

“The disappearance of Kelly has raised concern over the way he was treated by MPs…We ask you [the public] to say if you think Dr Kelly was put under too much pressure.”

Here’s what the Prime Minister said, again before the police had released details of slashed wrists (quoted by Sky News):

“Dr Kelly’s death…is an absolutely terrible tragedy…”

Now ‘tragedy’ is hardly an appropriate term to describe murder; it is however a perfectly apt term to describe a suicide.

Here’s what the Edinburgh Evening News had to say, again on 18 July, after a body had been found but before there was any information released about the manner of death:

“Whitehall insiders said the possible suicide of Kelly would make Cambell’s future…impossible.”

The Telegraph not only presumed that Kelly had taken his own life but presumed to know what had led him to do so, in a piece entitled: “The Wages of Spin is Death”

The Guardian too (18 July), before Kelly’s body had been found, did its best to imply that Kelly had committed suicide :

“[Recent events] would put personal pressure on him…the man has been treated in a way that is absolutely inexcusable”. ..[and in another report in the same issue]… “Andrew Gilligan will be feeling worried, frightened and pretty sickened by the news that…Dr Kelly may have taken his own life”.

When a post-mortem concluded that the cause of death was ‘haemorrhaging from a wound to his left wrist’, nobody acknowledged the obvious: that evidence for suicide and evidence for murder made to look like suicide is identical. Nobody pointed out, either, how odd it was that Kelly, a microbiologist who must have had known of dozens of painless methods of killing oneself, should have chosen one that guaranteed an unpleasant and lingering death. From that point onward, presumption became fact and all media discussion revolved round what led Kelly to take his own life and who drove him to it.

It is a measure of the persuasive power of the media that everyone – with the exception of a very few impervious to its influence – now believes unquestioningly that Kelly committed suicide.

Neither the press nor the broadcast media are free in the sense of having no constraints on what information they disseminate. The D-notice system ensures that the media does not publish ‘sensitive’ government information, and while is not legally binding, failure to comply can be costly in many ways. Above and beyond the D-Notice, however, is the absolute authority of the Home Office to issue edicts circumscribing what information can and cannot be publicized, and this extends not only to newspaper and broadcast media but to publishing firms as well.

Joseph Dormer
------------------------------------------------------------------
British authorities say they believe a body found this morning in Oxfordshire is that of
Dr. David Kelly, a WMD expert who broke the story of how the Blair dossier on Iraq had
been doctored. How convenient for this apparent murder to have occurred during the very
48 hour period that Tony Blair is well removed from the scene of the crime, eh?
MORE ON THE DEATH OF DR. KELLY, APFN INFO AND LINKS:
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/dkelly.htm
 



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