Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (44 page)

One radical academic wary of falling into Griffin’s error was the great linguist and veteran campaigner Noam Chomsky. In constant e-mail contact with his public, Chomsky found himself under some pressure to join the Truth movement. In 2002, taxed with some of Gore Vidal’s “disturbing questions” and asked whether they didn’t add up to a government plot, Chomsky replied, “The world is full of unexplained data. Intelligence agencies and military forces are deluged with low-quality information which may, in retrospect, seem significant, but cannot seriously be evaluated . . . It would also be quite mad, in my opinion, for any government to try something like what [Vidal] suggested.”
⁵¹

8. MR. POOTER FORMS A THEORY

A
man of middle age and middle height with a receded chin and receding hairline, Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker is not a terribly arresting figure. He is distinguished neither in oratory nor dress sense, and his career before Parliament was almost exceptionally ordinary: he was a regional executive for a retail record chain, ran a wine shop, taught English as a second language, and was a local councilor in Sussex. It was the electoral train wreck involving the Conservative Party, rather than any obvious leadership qualities, that in 1997 allowed Mr. Baker to become the MP for Lewes, Sussex.

Having entered Parliament, however, Baker underwent an interesting transformation: he began to make himself un-ordinary. He did this by becoming one of the most prolific questioners in British parliamentary history. After three months in the job, Baker had asked more parliamentary written questions of ministers than his Conservative predecessor had in twenty-three years. By the end of ten years, it was estimated that he had asked eight thousand such questions, an average of more than two per day, including every weekend, holiday, and bank holiday. Now, answering a written question requires some minimal amount of civil-service time, and a cautious estimate puts the cost of each query in the region of £150. It is therefore reasonable to cost Mr. Baker’s super-interrogatory decade at a minimum of £1.2 million. Though it is bad manners in a democracy to dwell on the price of information, and offensive to speculate on its cost-effectiveness, it is perhaps reasonable to comment that had every non-governmental member chosen to behave in the same way as Mr. Baker, then the bill would have been over half a billion pounds.

Nevertheless, Baker’s questioning won him accolades. No matter that he was dull. “You sit up in the middle of what he is talking about,” said one parliamentary sketch writer, “stunned and amazed that anybody could be so boring.” But, he then added, “You underestimate him at your peril . . . He has a habit of being right. He sticks to his guns and I think his constituents are very lucky to have him.”
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In 2001, the
Spectator
magazine named him Inquisitor of the Year, and in 2002, Channel 4 News awarded him the title Opposition MP of the Year. His support for complete disclosure of MP’s allowances and expenditures won him fierce praise from those journalists who tend to see politics as something of a racket. “Is Norman Baker the greatest man in politics?” asked one, replying, “He is a deeply honest man of utter integrity who is determined that British voters should know the truth about how we are governed. Baker is neither flashy, smooth nor glamorous. He does not sit on the Front Benches.
^r
But he is, in his own way, the most admirable and heroic MP at Westminster.”
²

A less idealistic observer of the Baker technique might note a somewhat scatter-gun approach to the business of accountability. For example, in 2008 he asked how many people had been killed in a small earthquake on the Tibetan border, how much bottled water was consumed in Parliament, and what progress was being made in reducing aircraft noise pollution in the national parks. The previous year he was eager for Prime Minister Tony Blair (something of an obsession with Mr. Baker) to tell Parliament about his attendance at the Bilderberg conferences to discuss global economics and politics. Bilderberg, essentially an informal transatlantic elite networking group, is a favorite subject among those who believe that there is a global organization that attempts to run the affairs of the planet. Mr. Blair replied that he had not attended such a conference. In January 2007, Mr. Baker was asking the same question of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gordon Brown.
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Mr. Baker’s main preoccupation in the years 2006 and 2007 was elsewhere. Between March 2006 and June 2007, fifty-four of Mr. Baker’s parliamentary written questions were on the subject of a man whose death in July 2003 had created a scandal that had threatened to bring down the prime minister: government scientist Dr. David Kelly. For that period, Mr. Baker stood down from his responsibilities with the Liberal Democrat front bench in order to complete a book,
The Strange Death of David Kelly
, in which he claimed that Dr. Kelly’s death—presumed to have been suicide—was in fact murder.

The Death of a Government Inspector

In the summer of 2003, the British press was dominated by the media firestorm that was the “Kelly Affair.” It began with a series of reports on BBC Radio 4’s combative and important
Today
program. Following the invasion of Iraq, it was becoming clear that stockpiles of supposedly extant Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were unlikely to be found. BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan suggested on
Today
that a dossier released by the government the previous September, which claimed that there was strong evidence of WMD in Iraq, had in part been published against the wishes of the intelligence community, and in the knowledge that sections of it were untrue or exaggerated.

The implication of Gilligan’s revelations—amplified by him in a newspaper the following weekend—was that the British government, far from having been mistaken about Iraqi weapons, had connived at the creation of false evidence for them. In this context, Gilligan’s assertion that his information came from a senior intelligence source—whose identity, naturally, he could not be expected to reveal—seemed disastrous for the prime minister and even more so for his controversial press secretary, Alastair Campbell, who had had some responsibility for the production of the dossier. Very publicly and very angrily, Campbell demanded that the BBC issue an apology and a retraction of its allegations, saying that the source, if it existed, could not be a senior intelligence officer, and that this fact, if revealed, would show Gilligan to be, at best, wrong.

But there were far more than just three players in this tragedy. Other journalists had been digging in the same field, and at least two parliamentary committees—jealous of their rights and prerogatives—were looking into the question of the dossiers. There was widespread, almost feverish, speculation about who Gilligan’s source might be. Then Dr. David Kelly, an employee of the Ministry of Defense but not an intelligence official, informed his superiors that he had spoken to Andrew Gilligan, but added that he had not said the things attributed by Gilligan to his source. It was probably inevitable that this would become public, and the government took no very stringent steps to ensure that it didn’t. The result was that a besieged Kelly, transformed overnight from private to public figure, found himself giving televised evidence to the parliamentary committees, and it was at one of these—on July 15—that some of his denials that he was Gilligan’s source for certain quotes were shown, though not immediately, to be misleading.

Two days later, in the mid-afternoon of July 17, Dr. Kelly told his wife at their home in a small Oxfordshire village that he was going out for a walk. Just before midnight, one of his adult daughters called the police to say her father was missing. His body was discovered at 9:20 the following morning in a small wood not far from his home. Pathologists attributed his death to the combination of three factors: the severing of his left ulnar artery, the ingestion of a large number of co-proxamol painkiller tablets, and an existing atherosclerosis—deterioration of the arteries. Tony Blair, informed of the news while in midair between Washington and Tokyo, announced the setting-up of an independent inquiry to look into the circumstances of Dr. Kelly’s death.

This inquiry, chaired by Lord Hutton, concluded in January 2004 that Dr. Kelly had committed suicide, and disappointed many in Britain by attributing most of the blame for the events leading up to his death to the BBC and not to the government. Subsequent controversy centered on this perceived injustice, rather than on the suicide verdict itself. Doubts about the latter were left to a small number of doctors in a letter-writing campaign coordinated by a British woman, Rowena Thursby. “During 2004,” she subsequently wrote, “I made contact with a Dr. C. Stephen Frost who had written a list of thirty-five questions about Dr. Kelly’s death on the
Independent
Internet forum. Working together, and liaising with the rest of the medicolegal team, we managed to get five letters published in the
Guardian
.”
⁴

The group, a collection of surgeons and specialists that included a retired orthopedic surgeon, a radiologist, a specialist in anesthesiology, a public health consultant, a vascular specialist, and a retired pathologist (none of whom had personally examined Dr. Kelly), cast doubt on the likelihood of Kelly having died as described by the original pathologists. Their intervention caused, according to Thursby, a “media storm.” “We were inundated with requests for radio and TV appearances . . . The
Evening Standard
ran a headline on the evening prior to the publication of the Hutton Report: ‘Was Kelly Murdered?’ ” Thursby herself did not sign the letters. This may have been wise, since she had an Internet pedigree of conspiracist thinking that suggested a general disposition toward a belief in plots rather than simple skepticism occasioned by specific doubts. “Beyond Belief ” she had titled one abortive attempt at a blog, which she subtitled “Freedom from the Known.” It continued:

I base my search on a suspicion—from books and information available on the Net—that the truth about political events is a world apart from what we are led to believe. For example: Were both world wars engineered? What about other wars—were they deliberately “arranged” for a purpose? Is there a plan for world government? If so, who is behind it? Was 9/11 the prime catalyst? This site hopes to peel back the veneer, and address the big questions:

Who is really behind the the [
sic
] terrorist atrocities? Where lies the true source of political power? What part do secret societies play in the politics today?
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That, however, is where the blog ends.

The Suicidal Type and Other Norms

In his book advancing the thesis that David Kelly was murdered, Norman Baker acknowledges the pioneering work of Ms. Thursby (“a remarkable woman”) and of the small group of doctors. Though he doesn’t say so, it seems likely that it was the
Guardian
letters that began Baker’s interest in the theory that Kelly might not have committed suicide. In origin, then, the involvement of the politician in the construction of a conspiracy theory concerning the death of a prototypical English citizen seems similar to that of Tam Dalyell MP in the Hilda Murrell case nearly a quarter of a century earlier.

There are other similarities, too, although Dalyell didn’t go as far as to expound his ideas at length in a book. It is Baker’s lengthy and, in its way, courageous, exposition that is so fascinating and revealing, because it demonstrates the techniques Baker used, not least on himself, to try and persuade skeptics that David Kelly had been the victim of a complex conspiracy. Above all, it becomes possible to track the method by which Baker makes the likely—that Kelly did indeed commit suicide—seem very unlikely, and the unlikely—that he was murdered with the connivance of the British government—seem not just likely but inevitable. Given the ratio of suicides (there were 4,300 suicides or undetermined deaths in England in 2003) to murders of Britons in Britain by external forces, this is no small achievement.

Baker’s starting credo is the following: “I am personally convinced beyond reasonable doubt, to apply that test,” he writes, “that it is nigh-on clinically impossible for Dr. Kelly to have died at his own hand in the manner described, and further that both his personality and other circumstantial evidence strongly militates against suicide.”
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According to Baker, Kelly was psychologically not the type of man to commit suicide—his inhibitions against self-slaughter were too great—and his behavior just before his disappearance gave little support to the idea that he might have been contemplating his own death.

The notion that Kelly was not the type does not result from any scrutiny, as far as the book goes, of suicide statistics, of major studies into the causes of suicide, or of the work of psychiatric or health professionals. It comes from the opinions of a small number of occasional colleagues and friends, including two cribbage players from the local pub, who expressed surprise at Kelly’s death, and from Baker’s own belief that there is a suicidal type. He does not enumerate the characteristics of this type; he merely asserts that Kelly didn’t fit it. In fact, as we will see, David Kelly had at least one characteristic that, in statistical terms, probably made him an enhanced suicide risk.

But what about the supposed inhibitions? One was that “Dr. Kelly was an adherent and relatively recent convert to the Bahai faith, which strongly outlaws suicide.”
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As an argument, this is irrelevant, and as a fact, it is—in relative terms—wrong. Irrelevant because there are, of course, adulterous Jews, thieving Catholics, and highly uncharitable Muslims. And suicide is often associated with deep depression, in which such external restrictions may well seem to belong to a different world. Wrong, because the Bahai strictures on suicide are, if anything, much less stern than those of other faiths. Jews, Muslims, and Catholics regard suicide as murder, and several religions famously deny the consolation of burial in the faith to those who kill themselves. The Bahai do, as Baker writes, “forbid” suicide, but also, as he neglects to mention, they say that a suicide “will be immersed in the ocean of pardon and forgiveness and will become the recipient of bounty and favor.”
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