Dead UK expert believed Iraq WMD posed threat

Peach- God bless you as you are earnest and a true believer and most likely a very good person. THough you, me, and JG and the usual cast of characters who show up on these threads disagree on some things we all will be voting for Bush this coming November and most likely agree much more than disagree on just about everything else. I don't think we need to stoop to calling each other Holocaust deniers. I am hardly one to talk as I have got very personal on these threads (but I am working on it:)

Let's assume Christianity--being the least hedonistic and animalistic religion--judges what is honorable. Then this man committed a mortal sin by suicide.

Dr. Kelly was a Ba'hai, a religion which does permit suicide for the protection of honour. Having seen coverage of the Select Committee's questioning of him, and understanding partially how the Blair government manipulates anything and everything to its own ends, I can well imagine that his state of mind was disturbed. This would mean that the he quite possibly did not have a full understanding of his actions, and therefore was not guilty of mortal sin. I am not, however, in the right position to judge him, I will leave that up to God.

From "BIOWEAPONS:British Expert Leaves Impressive Arms Control Legacy," by Richard Stone, Science Magazine, 2003 :

(snip)

In the early 1990s, searching for evidence of an offensive bioweapons effort in Iraq, Kelly and U.S. colleague Richard Spertzel noticed something suspicious: A few years earlier, Iraq had gone on a buying spree, importing 39 tons of bacterial growth media. Officials produced documents claiming that the agar was for hospitals to diagnose infections. But when the inspectors compared Iraqi imports with those into neighboring countries Iran and Syria, figuring they should be similar, "it was clear that Iraq's imports were way too high," Kelly said in an interview with Science shortly before his death. In addition, the agar's bulk packaging did not correspond with its intended use. The inspectors accused Iraqi officials of forging the documents and importing the agar for the production of anthrax and other strains, forcing them in 1995 to acknowledge for the first time that Iraq had pursued a clandestine offensive bioweapons program.

(snip)... Kelly also was a key player in efforts in the early 1990s to ferret out the extent of the Soviet Union's offensive bioweapons efforts. After key details of the program emerged from two defectors in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and a grudging Russia signed a trilateral agreement in 1992 that called for inspections at facilities suspected of being engaged in recent bioweapons activities. The initiative unraveled in the mid-1990s due to Russia's reluctance to come clean on its past activities and refusal to permit inspections of military labs. Kelly, the only expert to have taken part in all the trilateral site visits, had warned recently that Russia has yet to demonstrate convincingly that it has abandoned its offensive bioweapons program.

JULY 20, 2003 : (GILLIGAN'S STORY ON UK DOSSIER'S '45 MINUTES' CONTROVERSY WAS BASED NOT ON QUOTES KELLY ACTUALLY MADE BUT WAS BASED ON WHAT GILLIGAN INFERRED) The BBC’s statement... stressed that it was still standing by the accuracy of the notes made by Mr Gilligan from the encounters with Dr Kelly. These notes were said to have been made on a Palm Pilot, an electronic diary. The clear implication is that the BBC believes the scientist was lying in his evidence to MPs. However, it is significant that Mr Gilligan has been wobbling on some key elements of his story. Was the 45-minute claim “inserted” into the dossier by Downing Street, or merely given “undue prominence” as the BBC has often claimed since?
In his own cross-examination by the Foreign Affairs Committee last week, Mr Gilligan is understood to have suggested that his claim that Mr Campbell inserted this information was based only on an “inference” from the conversation with his source. - "Statement shows BBC may have ‘sexed up’ its coverage," by Tom Baldwin, London Times, July 21, 2003

AUGUST 13, 2003 : (DR KELLY INVESTIGATION/ BBC MEDIA SCANDAL : WATTS ) During the inquiry ... into the suicide of Dr. Kelly, Ms. Watts blew Mr. Gilligan's tendentious report out of the water. Ms. Watts released a tape of her last conversation with Dr. Kelly, who makes clear that he is not in a position to assert that Mr. Campbell inserted anything into the intelligence report. Ms. Watts said of her conversations with Dr. Kelly, "He didn't say to me that the dossier was transformed in the last week and he certainly didn't say that the 45-minute claim was inserted either by Alastair Campbell or by anyone else in government. In fact, he denied specifically that Alastair Campbell was involved in the conversation on May 30 . . . he was very clear to me that the claim was in the original intelligence."
Ms. Watts testified ... that the BBC seemed primarily interested in corroborating Mr. Gilligan's account rather than in the merits of her own reports: "I felt under some considerable pressure to reveal my source. I also felt the purpose of that was to help corroborate the Andrew Gilligan allegations and not for any proper news purpose." And, "I was most concerned that there was an attempt to mold [her reports] so that they were corroborative which I felt was misguided and false." - "The BBC's Sexed-up Report," WSJ.com, Thursday, August 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

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