mysterious death of microbiologist david kelly : Melbourne Indymedia

As the increasingly haggard British PM and Coalition of the Chilling club member Tony Blair arrived in Japan he faced increased media scrutiny of the purported reasons for invading Iraq.

The recent finding of the body of UK Government microbiologist Dr David Kelly, accused by some of being the mole who cast doubt on the authenticity of British intelligence on Iraq's alleged WMDs, adds to the death toll of at least 14 renowned microbiologists who have died in mysterious circumstances over the past 2 years.

Whichever way you choose to join the dots, Dr David Kelly, naive boffinish mole or patriotic fallguy, expect more lies and distractions from the elite club which bellows freedom as the most basic human rights are being systematically extinguished.

Subject: Did David Kelly sell Saddam any anthrax during the nineties?

We know at least one AMERICAN Firm supplied the great dictator with anthrax spores AFTER the first gulf war.AFTER most of the bodies now being exhumed were murdered by the beast of Baghdad.
Microbiology is a small world, a circle of eunuchs you might say.Let's go surfing...

http://www.unansweredquestions.net/timeline/AAanthrax.html

December 30, 2002

The Washington Post reports today that during the 1980s the US administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague. [The full Washington Post article is on the US - Iraq Complicity Page.]

The supply of such deadly items came during a time when the US was supporting Iraq's protracted war against Iran, the newspaper writes. It bases the information on a review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers.

"It was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now," Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA military analyst and author of "The Threatening Storm," which makes the case for war with Iraq, tells the newspaper. "My fellow [CIA] analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."
http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2002/123002a.htm

White House reported that for decades US gov't has experimented on its own citizens via secret releases of deadly radiation and other deadly chemicals.

http://www.geocities.com/knoxville_tn_epa/

Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE)
"Intentional" leaks of nuke radiation in urban areas of USA
White House report 1994
http://gwis.circ.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/radiation/

40 Years of Government Sponsored Ecological Terrorism
Intentional releases of anthrax-type germs in USA
http://www.gulfwarvets.com
Joyce Riley vonKleist, RN BSN
Captain, USAF, inactive reserve
gulfwarvets.com/greely.htm

Using Human Subjects for Medical Research [in USA]
Laboratory Science FaIl 1997
Cristie Sanford
gulfwarvets.com/cristie.htm

Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Testing on Humans [in USA]
(links to news articles)
gulfwarvets.com/nbc.htm

Disinformation in Media.

An example of the disinformation is an article in a news weekly during the mid nineties. It listed each of the supposed terrorist weapons and the cost of producing them. For $10-20,000, terrorists could supposedly kill hundreds of thousands of persons with botulism toxin, anthrax, nerve gas, etc. "60 Minutes" had an expert who said biological weapons could be produced in someone's back yard in a five gallon bucket. They said anthrax spores released from a boat on the Hudson River could kill four hundred thousand persons in New York City.

Anthrax is Trivial.

Here's the truth of the matter. Anthrax cannot be weaponized by terrorists, and it could probably never be used successfully as a military weapon. It has to be converted to spores suspended in the air, which is technically very difficult; and the lethality is nowheres near the terror that it is made out to be. It is not 100% lethal as often claimed. Wool sorters inhale anthrax spores in small quantities continually (150-700 per hour, or 510 per 8-hour shift), and only if they get a large dose does an infection get started.

Only US and Russia can Weaponize it.

To use anthrax as a weapon, it must be converted to a powder which can be inhaled. Only the US and Russian militaries have succeeded in doing that. Even Iraq uses anthrax in liquid form, which is totally ineffective.

Humans are Seldom Affected.

Anthrax is a livestock pathogen. There are anthrax spores in the ground in rural areas, because they survive for several decades. They normally have no effect upon humans, because a few anthrax spores cannot create an infection, and they do not come up from the ground in large quantities.

Cellular Limitations.

Anthrax is what's called a "gram positive" bacterium. This means it has the type of cell walls which are harmless, unlike the cell walls of "gram negative" bacteria, which attack tissue. Therefore, anthrax can only attack tissue by producing a special toxin which it excretes. One cell or spore does not produce enough toxin to start an infection.

Studies have apparently determined that, typically, ten thousand anthrax spores must be inhaled to start an infection. That number might be someone's guess, but it is in line with the biology of the disease. It is the number which the military uses, and only the military has significantly researched such questions. It uses gas chambers for animal tests.

Anthrax normally attacks the lungs, because it must lodge in vulnerable tissue. It can invade through other routes such as cuts or undercooked meat, but it only does so under third world conditions, and those routes are not relevant to biowarfare.

Livestock eat from the ground, so they have their faces in the ground where the spores are, and they can inhale ten thousand spores. How does anyone get ten thousand spores into the lungs of humans?

Technical Obstacles to Weaponizing.

The first requirement would be to aerosolize the spores. The spores would have to be converted to a dry powder, because a liquid would create globs which would fall to the ground rather than staying suspended in the air.

To create a powder, the spores would first have to be washed several times in an array of very large and expensive centrifuges. Then a drying apparatus would have to be used; and it would require spraying a mist into a vacuum, which is how powders are created from liquids. Otherwise, everything globs up into hard rocks.

How do workers clean the equipment without getting spores everywhere? A likely procedure would be to enclose the equipment in a pressure chamber and steam sterilize it for several days. Such an operation costs hundreds of millions of dollars, considering related facilities and development. Only countries do that, not radical groups, and not in five gallon buckets.

It won't stay in the Air.

Even in powder form, the spores would fall to the ground rapidly in the absence of wind. Anthrax is not adapted for airborne dissemination. It needs to stay on the ground until inhaled by livestock. So it would not stay in the air like mold spores but would fall out easily, about like flour. In the presence of wind, the spores would be carried away rapidly and would not stay in one place long enough for anyone to get more than a few inhaled.

Once the spores were on the ground, they would not affect humans significantly, because they would not come up from the ground in large enough quantities.

Foggers are Propaganda.

There is some talk about using liquids with fogging devices for dispersion of biological agents such as anthrax. It's not realistic. First, there is no mention of the purity that would be required to prevent globbing and plugging of nozzles. At least, a lot of expensive centrifuging would be required to remove debris.

Then agricultural spraying demonstrates that a mist drops rapidly to the ground. It does that because air can only hold a small amount of water, which causes sprays to precipitate.

Another problem is that spores would rapidly settle to the bottom of a liquid and form a gum due to sticky cell debris and their tendency to clump.

A chemical mist is different, because chemicals vaporize, while cells do not. Cells in a mist would clump together as the liquid vaporizes. To create free spores would require very clean material, high dilution, ultra fine mist and a vacuum for rapid evaporation. Foggers can't do the same thing.

For these reasons, anthrax would be difficult to use; and it could hardly kill more than a few hundred persons under the most ideal conditions, not the hundreds of thousands which are claimed. On top of that, antibiotics are effective for it during the early stage of the illness. It is not contagious for humans.

Glib Journalism is Unrealistic.

Innumerable journalists have been insisting that anthrax can be produced in a simple laboratory with little expertise. To the contrary, no countries but the U.S. and Russia can convert anthrax to a usable weapon. Iraq cannot.

Consider what the journalists fail to recognize. Growing a large quantity of anthrax would result in a fermenter full of slop which is extremely slimy and viscous with large amounts of debris and metabolic products mixed with the nutrient medium. That slop has to be washed and converted to a medium which will induce spores to form. Much research and knowledge would be required to get a reasonable yield of spores. Then the cells would have to be fragmented with something like a blender to get the spores out of the cells. Then much differential centrifugation would be required to separate the spores from the debris. Then spray drying of spores in a vacuum would be required.

Accomplishing all of that would require several Ph.Ds. and much developmental type research in addition to expensive equipment and a very large building. It isn't a matter of growing something in a kettle and pouring it into a rocket, as journalists and weapons inspectors seem to be assuming.

Grinding is Another Absurdity.

The latest contrivance is that terrorists might weaponize anthrax by drying a slurry and grinding it to particles 1-5 microns in size. (The bacteria are 1 by 3 microns.)

The first problem is that the gunk would dry like glue or get as hard as a rock.

The second problem is that bacteria do not tolerate grinding. They are as fragile as egg shells. Grinding is how they are broken apart for biochemical tests. Even if only 1% were broken, the result would be a sticky gum, not a powder; and nearly all would be broken before getting 5 micron particles.

The US military does use a procedure which is sometimes called grinding. But it is a very gentle procedure, about like removing lumps from flour, not trying to break up something as hard as a rock.

Journalists keep mentioning how many anthrax spores can be gotten onto the head of a pin. It's not a question of how many can be gotten onto the head of a pin but how many can be gotten into someone's lungs.

Planes cannot Dust a City.

A scenario which is often mentioned is that someone might use a plane to dust a large city with anthrax during the night. It's unrealistic. First, no one in buildings without external ventilation would be harmed by anthrax. The few spores that entered such buildings would settle on surfaces, and few would enter the air, and even fewer would be inhaled. At most, someone might inhale a few dozen spores per hour. That's not the ten thousand that are needed.

Secondly, anthrax spores would not diffuse uniformly through the air like a gas. They will either drop too fast or blow away. A few dozen persons might be killed, but that's not the terror that is being hyped in the media. And more than anything, nobody is producing the spores in powder form but the U.S. and Russia.

Journalists seem to assume that an anthrax cell anywhere will kill someone someplace. Putting words alongside each other on a page is not the same thing as getting cells into humans on the ground. There are millions of square miles of space on the ground which do not show up with the words.

Out in the open, tons would be required, not grams.

Iraq did not Weaponize Anthrax.

Saddam Hussein is said to have produced anthrax. If so, the reason is because it is stable and easy to handle, not because it is effective when used. Iraq is unsophisticated to a point of ineptness in its approach to biological weapons.

It is said that Iraq uses anthrax in liquid form and puts it in missiles in liquid form. You would have to drink liquid anthrax for it to do any harm. It would be more effective to attack a city with used motor oil than with liquid anthrax. Therefore, Iraq poses no anthrax threat.

In fact, military and UN inspectors only found two Iraqi warheads with anthrax in them (in liquid form). If Iraq had anthrax in an effective form, it would have had it in hundreds of warheads, as they did with nerve gas. So Iraq knew its anthrax was useless.

For about a billion dollars, Iraq could probably get enough experts together to develop anthrax as a weapon. But the reason why it doesn't is that researchers already know that anthrax would be next to worthless after it was developed.

The Whole Concept is Flawed.

Biological warfare is a flawed concept. The only route usually considered is airborne, because bombs and missiles create the delivery system. There is no disease in existence which is propagated in that manner. Even the airborne diseases require close contact with the source. The reason is because wind disperses the agents too thinly, and gravity brings them down too rapidly. Increasing the quantities massively will get a few persons, but only a few.

And then, very few of the diseases which are mentioned as biowarfare agents are suitable for airborne dissemination. Brucellosis is not. It is disseminated through body fluids. Plague is not. It is carried by insects from the blood of one animal to another. The insects do not pick it up from the ground.

Motives Taylor the Truth at every Level.

Biowarfare is promoted through a combination of ignorance and propaganda. The researchers, who should know better and often do, are getting paid to produce the agents, so they do not want to admit the futility of it. The nonresearchers cannot realistically evaluate the claims, and they have propaganda motives. They want to militarize society, and scare tactics go a long ways in that direction.

The point here is not that large countries cannot make a lot of persons miserable with biological weapons. It's that the small countries and terrorists cannot do so on their own; and it cannot be done on a large scale and in some magical way as described in the media.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recent Events.

Numerous persons have asked me how I interpret the anthrax attacks after 9-11. I think the incident verifies the points that I made. About a dozen persons were stricken by anthrax instead of the millions which authorities were predicting upon a terrorist attack. It shows that anthrax is almost impossible to use effectively.

The terrorists may have succeeded in creating a lot of fear, but for casualties, guns would have been more effective.

The incident does not show that terrorists can weaponize anthrax. The weaponized powder came from the US weapons labs, as demonstrated by a chemical which was on it. See News Article.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Laboratory Strains are Worthless.

Bureaucrats keep talking about someone stealing laboratory cultures of anthrax. Bioweapons cannot be created from laboratory strains of microbes. Microbes undergo rapid attenuation under laboratory conditions, because repeated transfers on culture media results in rapid genetic drift, as adaptation to laboratory conditions occurs. Virulence is rapidly diminished. The lost genes cannot be recovered. Therefore, serious bioweapons researchers would always start with wild type strains. Anyone who starts with a laboratory strain is not going to be effective.

Testing and controlling virulence requires an animal laboratory with about a hundred employees. It's not something that can be done in a five gallon bucket.
http://nov55.com/athr.html

...Blix and Butler might want to check their life cover.

A headline in The Independent on Saturday called Kelly ``a casualty of war.'' The Daily Telegraph said ``Death of the dossier fall guy,'' while the Daily Mail ran photos of Blair, Cambpell and Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon under the headline, ``Proud of Yourselves?''

Opposition Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith urged Blair to return to London. ``There are very many questions that will need to be asked over the coming days,'' Duncan Smith said. The death was a sensational development in a controversy threatening the government's credibility.

Labor lawmaker Glenda Jackson, a vehement critic of the war in Iraq, called for Blair to resign. ``I don't see how the government is going to be able to function adequately,'' she said Saturday in a radio interview. "

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2924644,00.html

It might be better if we all just fall inline you know..."We have always been at war with Oceania bin laden."

Oh and if Andrew Wilkie is reading this ... RUN Andy RUN!

snip>

In 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik defected from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) to Great Britain while on a trip to Paris. He had been the top scientist in the FSU's bioweapons program, which is heavily dependent upon DNA sequencing. Pasechnik's death was reported in the New York Times as having occurred on Nov. 23.

The Times obituary indicated that the announcement of Pasechnik's death was made in the United States by Dr. Christopher Davis of Virginia, who stated that the cause of death was a stroke. Davis was the member of British intelligence who de-briefed Dr. Pasechnik at the time of his defection. Davis says he left the intelligence service in 1996, but when asked why a former member of British intelligence would be the person announcing the death of Pasechnik to the US media, he replied that it had come about during a conversation with a reporter he had had a long relationship with. The reporter Davis named is not the author of the Times' obituary, and Davis declined to say which branch of British intelligence he served in. No reports of Pasechnik's death appeared in Britain for more than a month, until Dec. 29, when his obituary appeared in the London Telegraph, which did not include a date of death.

the guardian orbituary >

Kelly was the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific officer and senior adviser to the proliferation and arms control secretariat, and to the Foreign Office's non-proliferation department. The senior adviser on biological weapons to the UN biological weapons inspections teams (Unscom) from 1994 to 1999, he was also, in the opinion of his peers, pre-eminent in his field, not only in this country, but in the world.

After the eviction of the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1991, the UN invited Kelly to join Unscom to force Saddam into compliance with the peace agreements. Kelly made 36 visits to Iraq, and, from New York, continued his work into the late 1990s. What made him the obvious candidate for such work was his earlier, and continuing, experience in Russia. In autumn 1989, he had been called in to assist MI6 in debriefing Vladimir Pasechnik, a leading Soviet biochemist and defector.

Interesting transcript of tv doco screened in 1998 featuring reporter Tom Mangold, also a good friend of David Kelly ... Kelly is interviewed in this program about his work in russia

That is an interesting transcript from which the scariest part Kelly says was the smallpox centre in Siberia he saw...Subject: Biopreparat

NARRATOR: And so the first Western inspections were launched. This satellite picture appears to show an ordinary apartment block in St. Petersburg, but it was hiding something far more elaborate. This amateur video was shot during the actual inspection by an American and British team. The team discovered that this was actually a biological warfare facility used for testing the dissemination of plague bacteria.

British inspector Dave Kelly often found himself challenging the Russian explanations.

Dr. DAVID KELLY, U.K. Ministry of Defense: [British video] I am not accusing you. I am stating there is capability here that can be used for that purpose.

INTERVIEWER: How elaborate was the Russian deception that you ran into?

DAVID KELLY: I think it was quite elaborate. First and foremost, they had in place a system whereby they had an apparently civilian program embedded in civilian industry which was contributing directly to the military program of Russia. Having done that, they provided false accounts of their work within the civilian program and were deliberately misleading about that program. It was obviously a deception that had been well considered and well planned in advance. It was not something that was undertaken on the spur of the moment.
FROM...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plague/etc/script.html

NARRATOR: And the lies continued at the huge complex of laboratories called Vector in western Siberia. Here the inspectors would make the most frightening discovery of all.

INTERVIEWER: What lies behind the mystery of the buildings 6 and 6A?

CHRISTOPHER DAVIS: Well, to this day I believe- I think, even though other people have been to these establishments and seen things, the group, our little group is the only one from the outside ever to go into those buildings.

INTERVIEWER: What did you see when you went there?

CHRISTOPHER DAVIS: On the day when you go there, of course, you're not going to- you're not to find anything because they know you're going. They've had plenty of advance warning, and everything is squeaky clean. And you see test chambers, you see laboratories, you see sophisticated telemetric control of these chambers, the proper kind of health and safety in place for dealing with things as dangerous as this.

Dr. DAVID KELLY, U.K. Ministry of Defense: The explanations that they provided were not particularly forthcoming. The visit to the explosive dissemination chamber was a very tense situation indeed.

INTERVIEWER: Why?

DAVID KELLY: Basically, they did not wish to provide a true account of their activities within that chamber, and they could not really justify the work that they were doing. They stated that it was, in fact, to investigate the spread of monkey pox. Monkey pox, of course, is quite closely related to smallpox, and our assessment was that, indeed, they were working with smallpox.

NARRATOR: Smallpox, the deadliest of all plagues. It is a dreadful way to die. Once the virus takes hold, it produces a high fever, and then the distinctive and very painful pustules. Next the body tissue breaks down. The victim's immune system is overwhelmed, and the patient dies. There is now no immunity against this disease.

During the 1970s, the United Nations conducted a decade-long program to eradicate smallpox, chasing the virus around the globe, vaccinating millions. Eventually, they succeeded in containing this incredibly infectious killer.

KEN ALIBEK: Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. And you know, just immediately after, this government, the Soviet Union government, realized that nobody would have defense in the future against this agent just because it was declared that there was no necessity to vaccinate people anymore.

In 1990, Vector developed industrial technique to manufacture this virus for manufacturing biological weapons. It's a completely new technique to obtain huge amounts of this virus.

INTERVIEWER: And that is for use as a biological weapon.

KEN ALIBEK: Of course.
AND

December 14, 2001: Dead microbiologist: Nguyen Van Set, 44, dies in an airlock filled with nitrogen in his lab in Geelong, Australia. The lab had just been written up in the journal Nature for its work in genetic manipulation and DNA sequencing. Scientists there had created a virulent form of mousepox. "They realized that if similar genetic manipulation was carried out on smallpox, an unstoppable killer could be unleashed," according to Nature. [Sydney Morning Herald, 12/12/01, Globe and Mail, 5/4/02]
l
http://www.unansweredquestions.net/timeline/AAanthrax.html

The death of Dr. Kelly contains a highly visible aspect which bothers me. Dr Kelly had just become extremely high profile from his interrogation by British officials - his death in a tight timeline from his interrogation and connected with such a significant event of portence of gov't lies and cover-up. Incredibly strange circumstances meant this is automatically going to attract major world attention.

We don't know for certain if Dr Kelly took his own life ... initial cursory examination of associated facts, ie. his retirement within a year and his strong character, disposes towards a less than solid basis for concluding his suicide.

If suicide is inconclusive ... the resultant media outcome and attention had to be well considered from his death, to such an extent to prove an embarrassing distraction from other current events - To what purpose? If on the other hand suicide is conclusive - What would be known by Dr Kelly of such horrendous ramifications for his drastic action of suicide?

There is a significant event "buried alive" behind this death - which far from being trapped by Dr Kelly's death may be revealed if obstacles can be overcome.

Sad it is, non-WMD producing people everywhere have lost an ally.

Why did it take 24 hours to identify his body if he died by knife &/or drug?

Maybe some-one thought they were doing Blair a favour, but he doesn't look pleased. Blair may go down the same gurgler Bush jnr is heading for, but its just rearranging the deck chairs unless we can stop similar puppets assuming similar powers.