Saturday, August 28, 2010

David Kelly, A Textbook Suicide? Mail and Independent

Hmmm.  What exactly is a textbook suicide, Dr. Nicholas Hunt?  The most common suicide in males would be associated with alcohol excess and a gun death.  Suicide attempts do frequently involve use of more than one drug in large quantities, but I have never seen someone try drugs and cutting an artery at the same time.  If Kelly died of blood loss, which seems very unlikely, the blood had to go somewhere, but it hasn't been found.

So if he didn't die from blood loss (you have about a gallon of blood per person, and roughly more than half needs to be lost before you die... we frequently see patients with more than half gone from gastrointestial blood loss and they almost always live) and the blood levels of drugs were way below fatal levels, what did cause Dr. Kelly's death?  If he died of a cardiac arrest due to blood loss, there needs to be evidence to support the diagnosis.

According to The Independent:
In his fascinating book The Strange Death of David Kelly, Norman Baker, now the transport minister, raises the interesting question of why Dr Hunt, relatively inexperienced at the time, should have been chosen to deal with what was a sensational case.
From the Mail we find the following:
Earlier this month, the Attorney General Dominic Grieve signalled that he is prepared to intevene, saying that those people who now want a new investigation into Kelly's death should not be dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
The truth is that Hutton failed to fulfil his remit to 'urgently examine the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly'.
Instead, his inquiry concentrated on the roles played by Mr Blair and his advisers, concluding that they had no reason to feel any guilt and that Downing Street had not 'sexed up' the case for the Iraq War (something that Kelly had secretly expressed fears about to BBC journalists, before his identity was outed by the Labour Government).
Only a tiny part of Hutton's 700-page report probed Kelly's death and the critical hours he was missing after taking an afternoon walk from his home in Southmoor.
Amazingly, the chief inspector of Thames Valley Police force, which conducted the search for Dr Kelly, was not called to give evidence. Nor was the Ministry Of Defence doctor who gave Kelly a clean bill of health during a rigorous medical check eight days before he died.
As a result of Hutton's failings, we still don't know the precise time and location of Dr Kelly's death - yet these basic facts are surely the most fundamental requirements of an inquiry into any violent or unexpected death.
Here, the Mail reveals the other vitally important questions that must now be answered . . . was he poisoned? 
For more detail about multiple issues raised by the Mail, go here

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