Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
hours before Dr Kelly was reported missing and some time before he left home to go for his routine afternoon walk.
Just 18 and a half hours later, before a single policeman had set eyes on the body or had a chance to confirm Dr Kelly’s identity, the last entry was made in the file: ‘9.00am. 18.07.03. Body recovered.’
Thames Valley Police representatives have since claimed the Kelly file was only ever intended to cover the period of the incident itself and was timed and dated retrospectively. Sceptics, including Norman Baker MP, have pointed out that the ‘sexed-up dossier’ affair and Dr Kelly’s grilling by parliamentary committees and MoD officials were hardly going to be irrelevant to a possible verdict of suicide. As Baker says, any investigation that took 2.30pm on Thursday, 17 July as its starting point would be ‘woefully inadequate’.
In the face of continuing disquiet about the case, the UK’s Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, announced in August 2011 that there was no good reason to hold an inquest. But this is an issue that attracts the most unlikely conspiracy theorists and a group led by a retired surgeon, Dr David Halpin, was granted a hearing in December 2011 to establish whether there were grounds for Judicial Review of the Attorney General’s ruling. The legal process is likely to be long and expensive, but until the decision is taken to hold a proper coroner’s inquest, the secrets of the Operation Mason file, the missing fingerprints and the catalogue of mysteries surrounding Dr Kelly’s death will continue to feed mistrust and speculation.
1 In the Daily Mail, 20 October 2007: Norman Baker MP wrote: ‘It’s also strange that no mention was made at the Hutton Inquiry of whether there were any fingerprints on the knife. No one volunteered any information on this and no one was asked. ‘After some delay, Thames Valley Police finally told me earlier this year that no fingerprints were recovered from the knife. And yet we know from the evidence of forensic biologist Roy Green that the knife was blood-marked.’ Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article488670/ Click-Part-Two-Norman-Bakers-shocking-investigation. html#ixzz1MVQpSb3q Also the Daily Mail of 5 December 2010: ‘Fresh doubts have been raised over how Dr David Kelly died after police admitted no fingerprints were found on the packs of pills he supposedly overdosed on …. Three blister packs of the painkiller, each able to hold ten pills, were retrieved from Dr Kelly’s coat pocket when his body was found in woods near his home. ‘Only one tablet remained, leading his post mortem examination report to state he may have taken up to 29 pills. ‘Co-proxamol ingestion is listed as a cause of death on his death certificate. ‘But Thames Valley Police has now revealed that when it tested two of the blister packs for fingerprints there were “none recovered”. ‘The development is doubly significant because police have already said the knife which Dr Kelly is said to have used to cut his wrist did not have fingerprints on – nor did an open bottle of water found beside his body. ‘The lack of fingerprints on these items is particularly difficult to explain given that Dr Kelly was not wearing gloves when his body was recovered on 18 July 2003. No gloves were found at the scene.’ Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1335961/Dr-David-Kelly-No-fingerprints-pack-pills-supposedly-overdosed-on. html#ixzz1MVZLZvsL
BIG BROTHER IS TAKING LIBERTIES
In the first ten years after its launch in 1998, Google conquered the world. It put the internet to work. It changed forever the way people everywhere found the information they wanted. It gave us satellite images of places, street-level views of roads and buildings and instant rough and ready translations from any language to any other. Through its shrewd acquisition of the fledgling YouTube, it gave us video on demand. And, apart from its advertising platforms like AdWords and AdSense, it gave everything free of charge.
Google’s unofficial but widely publicised motto has always been ‘Don’t be evil’. But, for many people, the company seemed to be getting close to the edge a few years ago. It seemed Google was supping with the devil when it agreed to censor searches from China to please the Chinese government. Google executives argued that giving 1.3 billion Chinese access to almost all the riches and information of the internet was better for free speech and human rights than taking a high moral position and refusing to go into China at all.
For several years, Chinese internet users had to place their searches through elgooG (which works perfectly, as long as you type your question back to front, as ‘noitseuq’) or via the Google diversion service that took them to google.com.hk in Hong Kong. But after many Gmail accounts were hacked, presumably by the Chinese government, in early 2010, Google regained its virtue by announcing that it was no longer prepared to censor its results.
From its base in Mountain View, California, Google has built a global empire while maintaining a convincing image of creativity and helpfulness, largely by its actions, rather than its words. Yet it is far from the hippy-ish, pizza-and-pinball nerds corner that is sometimes portrayed. In recruiting staff, for example, it can be obsessively risk-averse. One brilliant young Cambridge entrepreneur and artificial intelligence expert, Ben Coppin, found himself turned down for a job with the company after the ninth interview, which must be some kind of record.
The main conspiracy accusations against Google tend to revolve around the sheer volume of information it holds about individuals and their preferences. People have been worried that Google may not be strong enough to fend off future US government demands for data and user information, particularly in the context of terrorism investigations, though its past record has been fairly impressive. Other high-tech companies like Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft have surrendered user records when put under heavy political and legal pressure, but Google has shown stubborn resistance so far.
For the true conspiracy theorists, though, the Google conspiracy is already here. They believe Google is already intimately involved with the CIA.
REASONS TO DOUBT
The ‘Don’t be evil’ touchstone has held up surprisingly well over more than 12 years of growth and commercial cut and thrust. Apart from the China issue, where Google was damned if it did and damned if it didn’t, it has been able to keep its hands unusually clean.
Even the 2010 wi-spy affair caused remarkably little damage to Google’s Teflon reputation. An international row blew up after revelations that Google’s little Street View camera cars had been hoovering up snippets of email traffic, passwords and other information from people’s wireless networks as they drove past homes in more than 30 countries. But the scandal never really caught fire. Though the company initially denied it had captured any ‘payload information’, it soon came back, very obviously embarrassed, and admitted that fragments of real content had been recorded. Senior managers confessed that a big mistake had been made, blamed a single programmer for inserting the relevant code into the software and vowed that they never did and never would do anything with the personal data that was collected.
Journalists and campaign groups had some fun at Google’s expense, especially when America’s Consumer Watchdog used similar equipment to go sniffing outside the home of Jane Harman, chair of the US Congress Homeland Security Committee’s Intelligence Subcommittee. Sure enough, Harman’s house had an unencrypted wireless network from which potentially sensitive information could easily be gathered. Government agencies in Germany, the UK, Ireland, Spain and South Korea have come down hard on Google for breaching privacy and data protection laws. Yet there seems to be a general acceptance that these offences were committed accidentally, rather than as part of an evil master plan.
Everybody at the company has repeatedly promised that identifiable personal information will never be abused or sold on. And, coming from Google, this is broadly regarded as credible. It may be the biggest player on the internet but it has invested more heavily than most in building consumer confidence and trust. As a result, it has raised the stakes and given hostages to fortune.
Any evidence of sharp