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Oct. 7, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:03
Edition 127 - David Halpin

This edition features retired surgeon David Halpin who wants the inquest into the death ofDr David Kelly re-opened...

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The views you're about to hear expressed are not necessarily those of the unexplained, Howard Hughes, or Creative Hotspot.
This program is Copyright 2013.
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for returning to the show.
Thank you very much for your emails that keep flooding in.
I'm going to do a great, big, long section of shout-outs very soon on the show, but this one's going to be quite a long one, so I'm going to have to keep this short.
But you said some really nice things.
Thank you for the support.
People like Claire in the U.S. for the things that you said.
You're a big fan of Art Bell, too.
So thank you, Claire.
The man at Armar Planetarium, who emailed about Comet Eisen with some very interesting information, thank you for that.
And the many, many other people who've emailed recently, I see all of your emails, and I thank you very, very much.
Now, on the last show, I spent a little bit of time talking about a subject I don't talk about much, and that is money.
And I said that because I've had a career in radio, I don't have pots of it.
And that's a fact.
You know, some people in radio make millions of pounds or dollars, and some people in radio don't.
I come into the don't category, but I had a great career.
I'm not complaining.
I interviewed some great people, did some great things, and I'm going to keep doing things.
But I didn't come out of it financially secure in any way, which is why I have to ask for donations to this show, not for any other reason.
But I do appreciate, as a lot of you are telling me, that life is really hard.
I don't think I totally appreciated how difficult things were in America at the moment, because that's not the story we're getting over here.
I know things are difficult here, and I know that petrol, gasoline prices are rising a lot, utility costs generally, food costs rising ridiculously over here.
I had no idea that people were feeling the squeeze the same way in the States, but they are, and you're telling me about that.
Question is, can we make any changes in our own lives or maybe to society at some point to try and deal with that?
I really don't know.
I'm not political.
I don't do politics, so I don't have the answer to that.
But that's what you're telling me.
Now, this time we're going to do a very, very complex and very, very controversial show.
It is a topic that you've wanted me to get into over the last year or so.
And I will.
We're going to talk to a man who is one of those campaigning for the reopening of an inquest into the death of Dr. David Kelly.
Now, in America, you will know the case of Marilyn Monroe, who died, supposedly committing suicide.
And many people have questioned for years whether she did.
Well, Dr. David Kelly, if you're not in the UK, you may not know this, was a scientist working for the government who effectively questioned the case for going to war with Saddam Hussein.
A mild mannered man who found himself at the center of a huge media furor frenzy.
Not a position that he liked to be in.
And it clearly disturbed him, having to go so public and be in such a public position.
And he was found dead, with his wrists or part of his wrists cut, and pills in his pocket.
It seemed to be an open and shut case of suicide.
But there are people who've been questioning that.
I don't know what to think.
It's not for me to take a view.
But David Halpin is a retired surgeon living in the southwest of England who's been questioning this for years and researching it.
One of a number of doctors who are calling for the inquest to be reopened.
Is it a classic conspiracy theory story?
I'm not sure.
Is it a story that is worth hearing here?
Yeah.
What you make of it?
I don't know.
That's for you.
So we're going to get him on in just a second.
Dr. David Halpin in the southwest of England.
If you want to make a donation to the show, I've said this before, need to keep saying it.
www.theunexplained.tv is the website, and that is also the place if you want to communicate with me.
Tell me what you think about the show.
Tell me what I should be doing better and what I'm doing okay.
I'm very keen to hear from you.
I couldn't do the show without your feedback and support.
www.theunexplained.tv.
Right.
Let's cross now by digital hookup to the southwest of England and let's talk to Dr. David Halpin.
David, thank you for coming on.
Thanks for asking me, Hard.
Now, David, I often talk with my guests about their location, and I especially want to with you because your location is very, very special.
Tell my listeners where you are.
Well, we live at Haytor in a wonderful spot with a very beautiful garden just on the edge of Dartmoor, about a mile from Haytor Rocks.
It's one of the most memorable, most notable tours on Dartmoor.
So we're very lucky, and we say that most days.
And remind me what a Tor is.
It's a small hill, isn't it?
A Tor, actually, is the remnant of a volcano.
So the granite that forms the Tor was igneous rock from a volcano that formed, exploded about 350 million years ago.
And I think you see an equivalent of that in our lake district, which is hundreds of miles north of you, where you have a mountainous area that has a similar kind of formation.
No, I'm not sure about that.
I think that's probably upheaving of established rock.
You see, whereas these tors on Dartmoor pushed up amongst within established, often sedimentary rock, and they formed these remarkable features.
And the other interesting thing about that is that after some time, it's a magical process, the granite, which is as hard as iron really well, changes slowly into kaolin.
And that gets washed down.
So only about a few miles from here, there are very large clay pits.
Yes, hence the China clay industry, of course.
And you see the same in Cornwall, you know, in Round St Austral.
But it was and still is actually a big industry.
But the headline to draw from all of this is if you live in America and you're trying to imagine the sort of place that David is in, and tell me if I'm right about this, David, if you've seen romantic movies where you have a Spartan, windswept, expansive and very beautiful landscape.
That is exactly where you are.
Yes, below the exposed granite, it's gorse, that's yellow-flowered, thorny bush, heather, some grass, some bracken, a type of fern, and Dartmoor ponies, many of those, and the farmers in the summertime graze their cattle on the slopes as well.
So it is a most remarkable and beautiful landscape and quite unique.
The only snag is it often sometimes has low cloud veiling it, as it was for the last few days.
But just as I speak to you, the sun is coming out.
First time in five days.
Well, sitting in London, as I do, at least I live very close to a royal park.
I saw that.
I saw that.
It's a very beautiful place you live.
Now, we're going to talk about a very, very serious matter.
And it's not the kind of subject that I normally probe on this show.
Yes, we've talked about conspiracy theories before, and I've explored subjects like the death of JFK, and we'll do that again, of course, next month when the anniversary occurs, and the very, very strange death of Marilyn Monroe.
And the case, oddly enough, that we're about to talk around, has similarities with Marilyn Monroe to some extent.
If I can summarize it, maybe you can tell me exactly where I might have gone wrong, because you have to remember that in the British mentality, the case of Dr. David Kelly and his death has probably subsided now because it's been a decade and people move on and they forget, so they need their memories refreshed.
And in America, of course, I think it made CNN headline news for a while.
And other than during various investigations and inquiries that were televised, I think it probably just went away.
So Dr. David Kelly, government inspector, scientist, expert, around the time when America and the United Kingdom were making a case to go to war against Saddam Hussein and effect regime change, basically is the phrase that we all came to use.
Of course, nobody's using that about Syria now, but regime change is what we were talking about then.
And the linchpin of the argument here in the UK made by Tony Blair, for which he has been roundly condemned and criticized in succeeding years, was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, WNDs, that he could deploy within 45 minutes.
Tony Blair stood up in Parliament, told MPs that, and that swung the case for Britain's involvement in what subsequently happened, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the maelstrom that we got involved in that continues to this day.
Now, David Kelly had doubts about that claim and some of the evidence supporting Tony Blair and the government's case.
And he expressed those concerns, at which point he became a marked man.
The whole idea that the dossier upon which the invasion was based was, and here's another phrase that got into the language, sexed up.
In other words, the claim of 45 minutes and all of the details were made just a little bit Hollywood to make a better case for the British public.
David Kelly didn't agree with this.
David Kelly was derided for it.
David Kelly had to testify in front of what Americans would recognize as something akin to a federal grand jury.
He had to be put on the spot and questioned hard by MPs.
Clearly, he showed the signs of pressure for that.
Clearly, this nice scientist didn't enjoy that procedure.
It depressed him, and he was then, within days, found dead.
That's where you come in, yes?
Have I summarized that correctly?
Please tell me.
Yes, but the context and the emphasis I would wish to correct in parts, Howard.
The thing is that if you read the transcripts of his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee, the grand jury you speak of, and if you read some of the references to his appearance the next day at the Intelligence and Security Committee, and some of the evidence in the Hutton inquiry, it is not obvious that he was the primary source of Gilligan's story.
We have to rely for Gilligan on that partly.
Andrew Gilligan, being the investigative reporter, worked for the BBC, now is an accomplished newspaper journalist and is still writing about this now.
But he was a source, was he not?
No, he was possibly a source, but there's great doubt about that, actually.
It is admitted, I think Kelly has said that he, in fact, I'm sure he did say this, that in the September dossier, which was the one that our friend Blair was relying on and the cabal, that in that September dossier, Kelly had to revise, his job in the Ministry of Defense was to look at the so-called intelligence, and he had to revise parts of it.
He did not have any Lien, any power to edit a large part of it.
You will remember, this is important for context, in February, another dossier came out, and it was within a few days destroyed by Glenn Rangwala, who showed it was in fact copy and pasted from some PhD thesis from a student of some years before.
I remember quite extraordinary.
And what I'd like to say is this, is that I don't believe that what Kelly had to say was that if he was the source, and there's doubt about that, if he was the source of saying the thing was sexed up, most millions of us knew it was sexed up.
I was trying to say on BBC television on the 1st of February that he'd snatched pretext from thin air.
This was D.S. Halpin at Torque Dock before he sailed off to Palestine.
And I wasn't one of a dozen.
I was one of millions of people, I think, in this country who knew the thing was a lie.
Do you see?
Well, a lot of people were questioning it at the time, and there were a lot of people with misgivings.
But the general mood, as I remember it reporting the news at the time, was that people were incensed at Saddam Hussein.
They had memories of what happened in the very, very early 90s, where we had to confront him face to face.
And there was a general mood in this country and certainly in America that we had to once and for all deal with this guy.
But how that was that was largely, I would say, a media business.
And of course, you know very well the Sun newspaper, which was promoting a lot of this, has six million readers.
So there were a lot of many people, I agree, who felt differently about it, but there were many people, who I would say were thinking people, who knew the thing was being egged up.
Do you know?
So, why did David Kelly find himself in the crosshairs of criticism at that time, which was so damaging to him then?
I believe that Kelly, and if you read my last article in Global Research, which I sent you, I examine what motives there might have been, in fact, for wanting Kelly to be quietened, shall we say, to put it mildly.
And the thing is that he did things after the invasion of Iraq, the bombardment and invasion, which was intended to destroy Iraq.
It wasn't just Saddam Hussein.
And there are two things that are very relevant indeed, which your listeners, I think, would like to know.
The first is that he went in May the 17th.
He went with, he had trouble with his visa, which is extraordinary for a very senior fellow in MOD as he got on the plane at Heathrow or before he got on the plane.
He got to Kuwait.
He was in fact arrested.
His daughter Rachel speaks of this in her testimony to the Hutton inquiry.
And he was arrested, confined to a hotel.
His cell phone was taken from him.
He was sent back to London, to Heathrow, the next day.
Now, that is not the way that this man, he'd been to Iraq 37 times as an expert in germ and chemical warfare and as one of the most rigorous inspectors that they had.
I remember reading about this, David, and sorry to interrupt, but I also remember vaguely in the back of my mind, which is by no means an encyclopedia, that there were many slips along this route to getting inspectors in there.
There were a lot of delays and a lot of things went wrong, and they didn't just affect David Kelly.
No, this was two months after the bombardment and invasion started.
And as I said, he was a very senior man.
We know that he was always accompanied.
We don't know who accompanied him on this occasion, but he always went with an ex-RF navigator.
He was his minder.
He was a very central man in the intelligence regarding lethal weapons.
So you think the message here was that clearly you're not welcome here?
Exactly.
You've got the message.
Now, the second time was, and this is the people, you'll remember this, is that in, I think it was June, it was in June, there was a story of two machines being found in the Iraqi desert, which the Americans put forward as a machine to produce biological weapons.
And there was a tremendous amount of publicity, well, there was a lot of publicity about it.
There were aerial photographs, no doubt in Sunday Times.
There were diagrams, this, that, and the other.
Kelly was out there.
There isn't much about this particular visit.
He was there for, I think, two or three days.
He was put up in the most terrible accommodation by all accounts.
I know there'd been a war, was a war, still going on.
And he said they are what the Iraqis say they are.
They are for the production of hydrogen for artillery, for the laying of artillery guns.
And this is the irony of it, British Aerospace had sold these two machines to the Iraqis.
Now, you can just imagine what the Kelly Cabal thought of that when it came through, because what they were trying to do, as you know, they scurried around Iraq under a man called Mackay, the Iraq survey group, it was ISG.
They were going around trying to find weapons of mass destruction.
As it happened, Mackay resigned some months later in disgust and said quite plainly there are no weapons of mass destruction, as in fact the Iraqis had been telling them before the invasion.
And what about David Kelly himself at this time?
Well, after the Gilligan one, there was first of all silence, and it was only with time they decided, in fact, to out him.
And as you know, once they outed him, they had this revolting exercise where journalists were invited to phone the MOD and to give names to people who they thought might have been the source.
And when they said the name, they were then to confirm it.
And it happened within, I think, 24 hours for Kelly.
And then the hunt was on, and he certainly was hounded from that time on.
But there are certain things that, in fact, Rachel, his daughter, his three daughters at Hutton, she said that he was, one of the things is cut off, actually.
The transcript is incomplete.
She said he was fond of the Iraqi people.
And I found an email, sorry, entrance on the internet, which was extraordinary.
It's not on her anymore.
But during the millennium celebrations, he joined two colleagues.
He was a bacteriologist by training at his Oxford College.
And they decided to bury a Times capsule.
Do you know what he buried?
Tell me.
An Iraqi Army cat badge.
Now, it sounds odd.
You think, what was in his mind then, actually?
But what I feel is that although he had this job of trying to find eventually non-existent WMDs in Iraq, he'd been there 37 times.
He'd stayed in hotels.
I know very well how Arab people treat visitors.
It's in their blood to be courteous.
And he probably did become quite fond of the Iraqi people.
So I don't know what he felt after this broadcast.
I think at the time, I think he might not have thought he had anything to do with it.
I don't know.
There are lots of details about this.
I actually heard the broadcast from Gilligan.
I forget the date now.
And this was the crucial broadcast that began to expose the fact that the claim of 45 minutes to the deployment of WNDs was wrong.
Well, I don't know about actually hard.
I'm not sure whether that hadn't been discussed before, because as you know, there was discussion about, I think there were several people who said this is ridiculous.
You cannot get chemical, lethal chemicals together.
They have to be put into the shells.
They're not waiting, sitting there in the bunker, waiting to be loaded into the artillery guns or whatever.
They have to be, in fact, mixed.
And it stretches credulity to think that a ramshackle outfit Like the Saddam Hussein regime, which it could be in parts, could actually get its act together to move that fast.
Exactly.
And the country has been broken.
But there is one problem here.
I don't want to lose this problem.
You talked about that Iraqi insignia, rather, the cap badge.
Yes.
This suggests to me then a man who is sympathetic towards the people of Iraq.
And once you start to have sympathy, then you start to have an axe to grind.
So I can quite understand people if they said, well, David Kelly clearly had an axe to grind and didn't want there to be an invasion of Iraq for whatever reasons.
Perhaps he knew people in the military there.
Perhaps he knew ordinary civilians there, which of course he would.
He didn't want them to suffer.
Maybe.
Well, he stated, Howard, on at least one occasion that he was reported, always the problem, always the problem.
It was reported that he thought the invasion was necessary.
And I'm not sure whether that was through his daughter, but I have actually read that.
I think in the Hutton, the Hutton transcripts are vast.
They're designed to be vast.
It's not a surprise that we have to surmise what he thought because his business, his life was not to be political.
His life was to deal in fact.
So he wasn't there to espouse his views.
He was there to do his job.
No, I think he was punctilious about this, Howard.
His job was to advise on, was to advise the MOD.
I think he received his salary from the Foreign Office, actually.
So rather sort of mixed instruction.
But his job was to analyse the scientific basis of inverted commas intelligence coming in.
As you know, a lot of it regarding Iraq was rubbish.
But he also had the job, and this was admitted, this was acknowledged, I should say, that he should speak to journalists if they should ask for an explanation of a story.
He did this often.
And interestingly, the day that he walked away from his home, never to be seen again until he was dead on the next day at 9.20, the time he walked away, he was meant to have prepared a list of journalists for the MOD.
And there was some urgency in this.
I don't understand why.
But it's interesting to know that the doctor, Wing Commander Wells, who was in his office at the MOD, phoned him at about 5 to 3 on that 17th of July, 2003.
And he phoned him to ask if he'd got it ready, this list.
I think there were about something like 20.
There was a list as provided, something like 20 journalists.
And you know, he went on phoning him for the next, as he went on, he went on office walk at three o'clock.
He phoned him every quarter of an hour, but the phone gave no ring.
It was as if it had been switched off.
But interestingly, at quarter to six, Wells went home.
A deputy of Wing Commander Wells phoned him at about quarter to six that day, and the phone rang then, but there was no answer.
So let's make this very clear.
You believe that his telephone was in some way disabled for a period, and during that period, of course, he died.
Well, he probably, it is thought that he died around the estimation of the core temperature, estimation of time of death from that estimation, approximation.
Is that a right he died?
He died either just before midnight or in the hours after midnight.
But we don't know where he was.
I've been trying to find, before I spoke with you, an FOI which Myles Gosling, our journalist...
That's right.
Regarding the self, we asked lots of questions.
We got some answers, but a lot of them are, there's no explanation for the answers we got, like, for instance, not finding fingerprints on his DNA on his spectacles on the knife.
There's no fingerprints on the knife.
We have to say we haven't yet said the method of his death, and we will, but we need to explore it.
We need to explore it more deeply.
Slash wrists and an overdose of pills.
Yes, well, let me say very quickly that we asked about the phones, but I couldn't find the response that we had.
Someone else, I didn't ask for it.
I wasn't good at the FOI business.
But it was brushed aside.
But you know very well that you can, by various methods, find where a phone has been.
Do you know that?
You know that, don't you?
Oh, yes, you know at any time if a phone is on, you can track it through whichever cell that it's connected to.
And that's very easy.
We're all subject to that.
Yes, that's right.
But you can do it.
Actually, I understand when it's off as well.
Can we?
Okay, well, that's something that I wasn't aware of.
So we're saying here that his phone, at this crucial time for him, of course, completely disappeared.
No, we're saying that the police in Verticom was interrogated the phone, and the answers that I can recall being given were not very satisfactory.
What does that mean?
Well, what I'm trying to say is that it should have been possible, for instance, actually, if this man phoned, I forget his name now, at quarter to six on the 17th on the Thursday, then it should have been possible to know where the phone was then.
They say the technology was not as advanced as it has been since, but I understand it was quite advanced in 2003.
2003?
Yes.
It was certainly possible to locate people via their phone.
More than possible.
You can always tell the rough area where they're in because there are cells all around us.
There's one near you, there's one very close to me.
You mean the antennae?
And of course, hard, there's a call log as well.
Yes, and the call log would indicate that too.
And it's come up this morning, this is why I looked at it, it's come up this morning in regard to Madeline McCann in Portugal, where apparently, not, should we say this in a neutral way, not enough has been made, apparently, of the cell phone dump, as they call it, in regard to Madeline's disappearance.
And now they want to, this is the disappearance for listeners in the U.S. I'm sure the whole world knows this story anyway.
But this is the tragic case of a little tiny girl abducted from her parents' holiday apartment in Portugal, and she's never been found.
And now they're saying we really ought to have looked more carefully into the mobile phone records in that area at that time.
And now they've got to try and interrogate mobile phone records from different networks, foreign employees at hotels, visitors from other countries, but all of that is doable and I would have thought should have been done by now.
But that's the ballpark we're in here.
Even in 2003, it was possible to tell where somebody was by using their phone records, their phone data.
So that, in a way, doesn't stack up.
There might be a perfectly logical explanation for it, but from what you say, you haven't had one.
No.
Okay.
And this is one of the reasons that you and a group of other people would like the inquest into the death of Dr. David Kelly reopened.
Well, if your North American listeners, it's important to know that within three hours of Dr. Kelly's corpse being found, the Falconer, the Minister in the Department of Constitutional Affairs and the Lord Chancellor, had set up, had already arranged with Lord Harton for him to chair an ad hoc inquiry, ad hoc being no oath and none of the rigor of an inquest.
And that was done within three hours.
And as I said, it's quite obvious it was done to contain and to emasculate any inquiry.
But it could not just have been the fact that this was an awful tragedy.
He was a decent, good man, and this will have devastated his wife and family.
No, no.
The invasion and bombardment of Iraq was a conspiracy.
It has been disaster to that country.
It has destroyed Iraq.
When you say it's a conspiracy, a conspiracy between whom?
A conspiracy between Blair and George Bush?
Who?
And George Bush.
In the critical conversation, or one of the critical conversations took place at Crawford Ranch in 2002, in April, when they were enjoying a barbecue.
And over the blooded stakes, Blair gave support to Bush for their plans to bombard and invade Imraq.
But let's be fair, an awful lot of people at that time were saying this disgusting man, Saddam Hussein, is getting away with crimes against humanity, crimes against his people, crimes against the world.
He's got to be dealt with.
But that's not a conspiracy, is it?
That's a point of view.
No, they were wrong, Hard.
There's evidence for that.
He was not.
You mean he was a good man?
No, no, no, of course he wasn't.
But, you know, we had people like Anne Cluyd, an MP, who was saying that he put a human through mincing machines.
A lot of the propaganda was, well, it was vile, as well as being fanciful.
But he was not somebody that you'd want in charge of your country.
No, no, no, no, no.
He was a dictator.
But the thing is that he was a dictator.
The linchpin of this is whether you would want to remove him and how you would want to do that.
No, but what was done was entirely against all international law, and in particular, the Nuremberg Protocols.
So it was a conspiracy to, in fact, to involve this country, and centrally this country, in a supreme war crime, and that is it.
But Tony Blair interviewed quite recently, and Tony Blair interviewed a lot over the years, and Tony Blair interviewed by the late and excellent David Frost, has stuck to the position that what was achieved in Iraq was worthwhile.
That is Mr. Blair's assessment.
I think very few people in this country, even his previous supporters, and I voted for him or his party in 97, sadly, and I feel ashamed of that.
But very few people would take any word of his as of use.
And of course, we have to say that we didn't go into Syria.
We didn't get involved in Syria.
I'm talking about the UK here.
Very simply because now there is a great storm of public opinion.
It's possible to put your views on Facebook and other places and make it known.
And politicians got so afraid of committing themselves to something similar, the British public didn't want it, and so Parliament voted it down.
We're not going to do it.
That's the difference between then and now.
Yes, it is hard, but of course that's why they have to use surrogates.
And you know very well that our country and France and NATO via Turkey is deeply involved in the armed invasion of Syria.
I've heard it said, but you believe that we are still doing this, but we're just doing it by the back door.
No question.
No question.
David Kelly, let's get back to it.
You have to look at what Mr. Cameron said about cruise missiles before you can see that the public opinion and MPs' opinion with a small balance was against that happening.
And the fact that we're two years away from an election and MPs in marginal constituencies were beginning to worry.
They did not want to get boots on the ground.
Exactly.
And blood on the carpet.
Okay, Dr. David Kelly, this is whatever it might be, conspiracy, murder, suicide, whatever, it's a tragedy.
This man need not have died.
Exactly.
And what happened was he was found, as we said, with, was it an artery or vein cut?
So he'd bled a great deal.
He was found with coproximal painkillers, boxes of them in his pockets, and within himself.
And to all intents and purposes, because of the pressure the man had been under, that had to be suicide, didn't it?
He didn't bleed.
I forget your word.
Well, I said a lot.
He bleed very little, actually, but we don't know that.
But the thing is, all the evidence apart from that of the pathologist Dr. Hunt, including two paramedics, were very well used to picking up people who've been cut or injured in road accidents, whatever.
But he had coproximal painkillers, and I can tell you that I had a problem once that I had those four.
And they, just one or two of those, they're incredibly powerful.
Well, Howard, can I just...
I hadn't taken a great interest.
I'm certainly very angry that he didn't have an inquest, and he should still have one.
But I wrote a letter which I delayed for about two months in the Morning Star in December 2003.
And this paragraph, it's only three sentences.
All right, we have to see for listeners who don't know, the Morning Star is a left-wing newspaper.
In fact, it was, I think, originally a Marxist paper.
But as far as I was concerned, it revealed truths which other papers didn't.
And I could reel this off.
I said, this is the central paragraph, a very short letter, but it's a good letter.
I said, as a past trauma and orthopedic surgeon, I cannot easily accept that even the deepest cut into one wrist would cause such exanguination, that means bleeding out, that death resulted.
The two arteries, in fact, I thought it was two then, but it was one, the ulnar artery, they're the same size pretty well.
The two arteries are of magistic size and would have quickly shut down and clotted.
That is a fact.
Furthermore, we have a man who was expert in lethal substances, and I really mean that, and who apparently chose a most uncertain method of suicide.
And in that paragraph, I encapsulate a lot of the discussion which hasn't really should have taken place.
The thing is that the artery is three millimeters across.
If I cut, if I had 100 people and perhaps without local anesthetic, cut the older artery into 100, not one of those 100 people would die.
That's a fact.
Now, I can't prove it, but that's a fact.
One thing that occurred to me about it, that if anybody wanted to, and I hope that nobody does want to, hearing this, contemplate suicide, why would you use two methods to do it?
Why would you take both pills and have an insurance policy of cutting veins or arteries?
It's inferred in the case of Dr. Kelly, in fact, it is said, I think, by the pathologist in some discussion, perhaps at Hutton, I think at Hutton, that you take the analgesics, and it's quite a powerful analgesic, these two drugs together.
You take it, so you're more able to do the cutting.
He had a useless knife with him, it is said, the one that had no fingerprints on it.
It's a pruning knife.
It has a concave blade.
I can tell you, as a surgeon, it's jolly difficult to cut a tendon with any knife.
It is not like a scalpel.
But then if somebody else had effected this and they'd use that particular knife, I know it's been said before, but let's say it very clearly here.
That knife came from his home.
They'd have had to have burgled his home in advance to get the knife.
And even then, it was a knife that wasn't, as you said, very good for the job.
We don't know much about the knife.
But the knife was supposed to come from his kitchen, wasn't it?
It was in his drawer.
He was fond of the knife since schoolboy, since boyhood, apparently, or since youth.
But the wife, Mrs. Kelly, and one of the daughters was shown a photocopy of a photograph of the knife.
So you didn't actually see the knife.
Okay.
So what are we to infer from that?
Well, I don't know, but if I was, in fact, asking if I was investigating a murder and I wanted to be certain about the knife as the instrument of the death or part of the death, then I would show the person the knife.
You know, I don't know how often Mrs. Kelly would have looked in his desk drawer to see if the knife was there and how it was.
I don't know.
The funny thing is, it's very, I have an exact, very similar knife, a pruning knife.
Well, it's a very, very difficult knife to sharpen.
And as I've said, it's very difficult to cut.
There's a tendon overlying the artery, the ulnar artery, or partially in sheathing it, called the flexor carpia ulnaris.
And to cut a tendon with anything but a scalpel is jolly difficult.
And I can tell you that because that was my job.
And if this is a pruning knife, it will have quite a broad blade, won't it?
Well, it's got a broad blade, but it's difficult to sharpen.
And a concave blade is about the worst thing to cut anything.
Scalpel, as you know, has a convex blade, most scalpels and all.
And that allows one to cut a tissue with efficiency.
These are gruesome and enormously sad and upsetting matters to talk about.
But I can see a situation where perhaps this man is so distraught that he takes an overdose of something.
And then it's not happening quickly enough, and he decides to use something that's been very close to him over his life.
Perhaps he's got it in his pocket and he decides to use that as a kind of speeding up the process method.
Well, he might have done, but as I pointed out, he worked at Portendarm for 10 years, and they used to use these various toxins.
Portendarm being the military's chemical biological weapon research place.
And they used to experiment on mammals, like sheep, and one can be certain that they were used to putting them down.
So he knew very well how I coined the term, I have used it not for a long time, but I used the term the biology of death, what makes the difference between what takes you over the threshold from life unto death.
And that man knew a lot about that in all sorts of ways, partly from his work at Portendown, where he was acting ahead for 10 years.
But of course, the state of his mind was not clear at that time.
He was clearly upset.
He was distressed.
His wife said that he was shrunken.
he was shrunken within himself.
But there was all sorts of Well, Howard, what I can say is that on the morning before he took his walk at about three o'clock, he wrote over 80 emails.
And most of them were upbeat.
I haven't seen them all.
Some of them are exposed at the inquiry.
And one of them was to a good friend.
He said he was looking forward to going back to Iraq in nine days' time.
And his ticket was being booked or had been booked.
I can't remember exactly.
I like to be truthful, Hard.
I'm not sure.
But he said he was looking forward to going back to Iraq in nine days.
That is, even after he'd been turned around at Kuwait and treated like a lump of something, and even after he'd had to speak bluntly about this ridiculous theory about the two machines they found in the desert.
But of course, from what I know of depressed people, quite often they spend a great deal of their time covering up for the situation that they're in.
They try to give the outward appearance to People that life is going on as it should.
I'm very well aware of that.
But the evidence is that he was not, shall we say, overly distraught.
The evidence for that is evidence that he was seeking a way out is not strong at all.
And in some respects, if you read the cases of people who have sadly terminated their lives, they give an indication that they're going to do that.
Or they try in a coded way to say goodbye or reconcile themselves with people close to them, don't they?
Yes, and this man who was fond of his three daughters, as I've written, he'd arranged that morning, this is also important, on the morning of the Thursday, the 17th, he had exchanged, one of the emails was with his daughter Rachel, who lived in Oxford, I think.
And he had arranged to take her down the village that evening, the evening when he was disappeared, to see a foal that had been born quite recently.
And as I said in my piece, nice piece, I think, they were going to rejoice in new life together.
So that's how distraught he was writing about a foal that, taking Rachel down to a foal that evening in a paddock down the road.
So a lot of evidence here that suggests the man may not have premeditated this act.
And if he had committed suicide there, then the decision was made very quickly.
Yeah, that's possible, but I think it's unlikely.
But what I'd like to say is we had a Professor Horton who is expert, a world expert supposedly from Oxford in suicide and how it happens.
It is an extraordinary thing, suicide.
As you know, the most significant group in this country are young men.
I guess it's the same in Scandinavia, too.
And they don't know why it happens.
It's the most, not always, they know sometimes.
It is extraordinary.
So it's not a thing that I'm expert in, and I know it's something which you cannot examine very easily in scientific terms, apart from in its epidemiology.
But what I do know as a surgeon is the explanation for his death, the cut, and the coproxamol, is insufficient.
And, you know, you mentioned the three packets of paracetamol, which it has been assumed came from his wife, who has chronic arthritis.
They found one tablet remaining in one of the three packs.
They found no DNA on one of the packs that they examined.
And if you read the evidence that I've given in Global Research, the fourth and fifth article regarding Dr. Hunt's work and Dr. Shepard's work, you will find that there is no basis whatsoever to saying that he was poisoned.
Because the blood levels...
Well, you've read, should we say, a spoof piece, because he had the toxicologist, Dr. Allen, who's left the laboratories, which happened just to be on the road, in fact, from where he was found dead at Cullum, which used to be an RAF fighter station, I think.
Dr. Allen, I think, gave a good account of what he found.
I think he could have been more explicit, but he examined four blood samples that Dr. Hunt took.
Dr. Hunt took five.
Dr. Hunt only discussed one blood sample at the Hutton inquiry, and the levels given to him by Dr. Allen showed that the dextropropoxifene was only one tenth, sorry, was one hundredth in ratio compared to the paracetamol.
Well, the ratio in the tablets is one to ten.
So you have to explain that.
Dr. Watt, one of my colleagues, has exposed that.
And the fact is that Dr. Allen said that he would expect, and the areas are grey about this, but he would have expected he had seen, I think, two papers of people who died, regarding people who died of caproximal overdose.
And that he said that the levels of dextropropoxaphene were about, usually about three times higher than you'd find in Dr. Kelly.
So that's the answer to what you've been.
And I'm not a medical person, but we do know that after death, for example, alcohol levels in the body tend to rise, don't they?
And morphine, yes, they do.
So could it be possible that there were changes in his chemical makeup after death that would have explained what you've just talked about?
Hard.
You see, I have, and I can put a medal on myself for this.
I have uniquely examined minutely the evidence that they presented at Hutton, and it doesn't hold a stack up.
They only spoke, Dr. Hutton only spoke about one blood sample.
This is where they found these levels, which were not dramatic.
They were, as Dr. Allen said, about a third what you would normally associate with death.
But there were three other samples, and one of those samples, it is absolutely certain, had nothing in it at all.
Nothing.
Right.
Explain that.
Well, that sounds very, very odd.
If that is the case, that is very, very odd.
Read my piece on Hunt.
I think it's the fourth on the Global Research Series, eight things.
There are two on the law by Miriam Stevenson.
Excellent.
Showing how we'd had even less chance of finding out the cause of Dr. Kelly's death.
So to cut to the chase, you're saying here, but haven't said it, that somebody somewhere wanted him out of the picture and got him out.
I think that's, I can't be sure.
This is where an inquest, the trouble is inquest 10 years later, as we were discussing with Madeline McCann, that's, I think, seven years afterwards.
But in this case of Dr. David Kelly reopening the inquest at a decade's time span, memories change, documentation may have been lost or filed somewhere or whatever.
And of course, the recollections of people are not going to be as fresh.
There are lots of recorded facts in Kelly's case, a lot.
We just mentioned the cell phones.
Now, one of the key things, and this will not be known to your North American listeners, that when Louise Holmes, one of the lay searchers with her dog Brock, the dog picked up a scent.
She followed the dog further into the wood, And there she found this man with his head and shoulders slumped against a tree with a cut on his wrist, a bit of blood, not much actually, and that's distinct, the lack of blood.
And that's how she found him at 9:20 on the 18th of July 2003.
When the police came to the body, they found the body stretched out and the head was sufficiently distant from the tree to allow the paramedic to stand there while he placed the paddles on to see if there's any heart action.
So the body had been moved.
That is incontrovertible.
Hutton tried to blur it.
He's seen a photograph of the head and shoulders up against the tree.
there was a policeman, Detective Constable Coe, who was the first policeman to attend the scene.
He came to the, he was at the hospital, And he said consistently at the Hutton inquiry or at other times as well, there was only one policeman with him.
But this was contradicted by other people.
In 2010, seven years later, in the Daily Mail, he said that he was wrong about this, that he had there was the third man with him.
The man remains unidentified, and Koe said that he was a trainee policeman.
But he wasn't called to the Hunting Inquiry, and he hasn't been named.
But Koe also said, this is very important.
He said two other things.
First of all, there's little blood, or some words similar to that.
And he also said that he saw the head against the tree when he came to it.
So the body was moved.
And as I said in my last piece, the conclusion to the little series of eight essays in global research, I said that at that point, a coroner would have said, right, case closed, over to the police.
And the police would have then, in fact, instigated a criminal investigation.
Because no body moves itself.
It's only moved by people.
And there was no explanation offered, proffered at the Hutton inquiry as to who moved it or whether it was moved.
And Hutton most certainly saw a photograph taken by a policeman, I forget his name, which showed the head and shoulders against the tree.
And that was a point I remember being widely reported in the news, but went away, as these things often do.
It appeared in the public consciousness and then faded away.
Let me make it quite plain.
The motive, if this was an assassination, the motive for it is unclear.
One can have one's own ideas about it and how the war was clicked into gear.
But I think if you asked my ten colleagues, you would have different answers to meet, and some would be very cherry about it.
What we are certain is that there has been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
There has been a subversion of due process.
And due process in our law is vital to our law as it becomes more threatened.
In other words, things were not done in the way they're supposed to be done.
Dead right.
And I always quote what John Locke said in 1675.
He was a sort of national solicitor.
He said, wherever the law ends, tyranny begins.
And this is why our law is so precious to us.
And this is what has caused me hard to spend thousands upon thousands of hours of a precious retirement from a busy, demanding job trying to get the truth out.
Andrew Gilligan wrote a piece in one of our newspapers here in the UK back in the summer, which was a very good piece.
And again, before we did this, I read it.
And the very good point that Andrew Gilligan made, of course, he's very central to this whole story, this whole incident.
Andrew Gilligan makes the point that if somebody somewhere within the portals of power had wanted this man out of the picture somehow, that wouldn't have been a very sensible thing to do because that would simply draw more attention to the Iraq war, the case for it, and the whole damn mess.
It wouldn't be something that somebody logical would do.
It's just so implausible for that reason.
And I have to say, I found that the most compelling argument.
What I do perceive is that Kelly knew a hell of a lot.
And he also knew, something which I also raise in my article, he also knew what weapons might have been used in Iraq.
And that's perhaps a subject for another day.
But I think that we might have used, and I've said it in my website on two or three occasions, I said it in my global research thing.
I have said that Kelly might have been very disturbed to know what we were using.
Now, all that's theory.
I know that you've been claiming that we were breaking all sorts of conventions by using weapons you shouldn't.
Yes.
I'm not saying all sorts of weapons.
Well, I say we.
I mean the ininverted commas good guys.
I'm saying that on one occasion, if you look at the images on my website of Ali Abbas, the only explanation of his injuries were his arms were incinerated in a flash and his torso burnt to about an inch deep.
The only explanation for that is intense thermal or nuclear energy.
But you can't know and you don't know that we, the Allies, whatever you want to call them, did that, were in possession of that weapon.
It was 10 days into shock and awe, as they called it, crudely.
And it was when they were fighting for Baghdad airport, which later, and I can't find references to this actually now, but later I understand that they were having to remove the topsol from Baghdad airport.
I don't know why.
I can have some ideas about that.
But what we were dealing, if you only have to see that image which you keep showing of the buildings exploding with incendiary material, going sky high.
We can imagine that they used massive force.
Now, I'm not saying that any weapon that I'm surmising was used widely, but the only explanation, this is the doctor in me, the only explanation that I can have, and I have a forensic mind, for Ali Abbas's terrible injuries, he is now armless and backing back there, the only explanation is intense thermal or nuclear energy.
And what would you say, David, as we come to the closing minutes of this, what would you say to people who say, number one, you implied this yourself at the start, you are now obsessed with this, and number two, it really is time to move on because we're never going...
It's time to move on.
No, well, first of all, I'm not obsessed.
I still enjoy attending my trees and my woods.
I've planted 35 acres of woodland.
I have interests in Palestine, in the NHS, which we haven't had time to discuss.
Well, we'll get to a couple of minutes about that because I do want to talk about that.
But the other thing being, of course, there will be people who will level at you, and I know that you have thoughts and views on Palestine that we don't have time to go into.
And the fact that you wrote in a left-wing newspaper that was originally Marxist that you are coming at this from a political agenda.
No, political in the sense that as I grew up to stand, that everyone should have a fair crack of the whip.
That's my basic belief.
I don't like seeing underdogs kicked around.
So you are doing this from Palestine.
Sorry.
Well, I'd rather not get into the Palestine question because it opens up a whole can of worms.
We can do that another time.
But you're doing this.
I want to make this very clear.
From the old-fashioned perspective that Britain was always seen to be the fairest country in the world.
And you believe that David Kelly did not get fair treatment.
Quite simply, that his death was not, you would not want to die, I would not want to die, without the full circumstances of our death being fully explored.
And then we close the book and the file.
Exactly, Ah.
That's what's driven me.
Let's get to the NHS.
We have a thing here in the UK called the National Health Service.
It was founded in the 1940s.
I had a little bit of treatment from it only this week.
It is free treatment at the point of need.
It's functioned pretty well compared with other countries up to now, but there are a lot of people very, very concerned that it's the beginning of the end for it.
I can tell you, although I cannot name names, but I've heard of a couple of friends who've had day procedures recently.
And if I've got their stories right, they could really have used an anesthetist being present at those procedures and proper anesthetic procedures being gone through.
But they were looked after with local treatments, local anesthetics, because it's cheaper.
And I'm hearing that that is perhaps happening in some places.
I don't have evidence for that, but I have anecdotal stories of that.
Is that what you're saying is happening to our NHS?
It's breaking down?
It's being threatened with being broken down.
And having worked in it, I qualified in 64.
I retired a bit early, but I was, and I had a private practice actually, which was successful.
But I always regarded the NHS as my job.
And I loved it.
I loved the teamwork.
And I loved the expertise.
And I loved doing and seeing excellent work.
It's being attacked on an almost daily basis, mostly via the BBC.
It's being destabilised.
The mantra or the issue of the strategy that I characterise as being used at the moment is destabilize, demoralise, dismantle.
They want it out.
Who wants it out?
Well, it's in fact, in essence, the Chicago school.
It's the monetarists.
And they've been, I saw it first.
This is a long story, and I know we've only got a few minutes.
But Margaret Thatcher was much affected by the Chicago school, by Milton Friedman.
And she had a fellow who was an acolyte, a fellow called Walters, who advised her as well.
And you remember, that was the era of privatization.
That was to bring us cheaper gas and water and the rest of it and higher efficiency.
I hear people laughing, even in the States.
And she also wanted to, in fact, she wanted to privatize NHS, but they went about it with a little bit of stealth.
And they had the internal market.
That was the cry.
And the idea was that doctors would compete against doctors and hospitals against hospitals, as they had in the Kaiser Permanente plan in the States, in the Western States.
And of course, GPs have control of their own budgets these days.
Yes, and the GPs, of course, have always been private contractors.
That's one of the little sticks that they beat us with.
You've always had privatization, they say.
But what they did, you see, this is the essence of it, that we got on with our job.
The money was allocated to the hospitals and the GPs.
There were deficiencies.
We were often short of this or that.
We got on with our job, and we did it actually on the shoestring, really.
But there were no bills changing hands.
There were no massive computer databases.
There was not Mr. Blair initiating a computer spine for the NHS, which has cost £12 billion, and which they're now going to give up and pay compensation to the IT companies that have been involved.
What a mess.
What a mess.
What happened then with Thatcher, with internal market?
I fought it.
I fought it to the point where I became sick.
I was also fighting for Orthopedic Hospital in Exeter, which was a world-renowned, first-class, smallish hospital, but excellent.
I used to love working there.
But I fought both at the same time.
I lost both battles, speaking from a personal point of view.
But what happened with Thatcher was there were suddenly many more desks.
And the RAF have talked about people flying desks.
This was back in the war, Second World War.
So we had long titles, patient services, administrator, more bureaucrats.
And do you know what I knew what happened?
It added 4% to the budget, the administration, extra administration, in that first year.
Now, not many people who might be doubting Whether the NHS should survive or not.
Not many people would know that.
Thatcher's internal market added 4%, at least actually.
But all of this, David, is politics, and we've had politics before.
We had the Thatcher era.
We've had government, in my lifetime, we've had governments of every hue, and the NHS has always got through.
It's always survived.
Exactly.
That's what I like to say.
This is the most important point, is that I've said for 20 years that our NHS should be made.
There's a national executive now.
It's now called NHS England.
I won't go into that.
But I've always said there should be a national executive which has its budget from the Treasury and it reports to Parliament, Parliament, not to the government of the day.
Oh, this can't work, David.
It could work.
And I've recently done a PowerPoint presentation to people in Ashburton in our local town hall.
Good meeting, good turnout.
And at the end of it, I put up a football, and it's got the three political colours on it, and it says, stop the political football.
They come in with a new idea.
They always add gadgetry and desks and complications.
And then, of course, when it all fails, the great thing is that they've done their five years in office.
They can go into retirement, into consultancy, lecturing around the world, and it doesn't really matter to them.
We can make their natures more efficient.
I've already indicated this becomes less efficient because of massive management costs.
David, we have to wrap it up there, as broadcasters other than myself tend to say.
You have on the bottom of all of your emails and a lot of your material the words for truth.
In fact, you write that on your letters.
I do.
Just explain that as a kind of mantra for you.
How do you see that?
I say for truth, for reason, and for justice, because I find the thing like best wishes or yours sincerely a bit sort of vapid, really.
And because it's strong in me, actually.
It's been in me from, I think, since I was a little boy, recently, written a biography, which emphasizes how we're brought up.
And I think it's in those wars, I was born in 1940.
And in those years, when I was a nipper, I was taught by good parents good things.
And the fact you said just now, that's how it goes, you were talking about people, the revolving doors, the corruption in this country is deep.
And it shouldn't be.
We shouldn't have it.
Well, we need to park the conversation at that point.
But I don't know whether you're right in anything you say, but I respect your right to say it.
And I hope that you're always there to put that point.
Because when we don't have someone to put the alternative point, that is when our society starts to get swept into the whirlpool.
Exactly, Howard.
And I thank you for asking me to speak with you.
A lot of food for thought there.
Very controversial.
I don't know what to make of that.
Maybe you can tell me.
His name is David Halpin.
He's been here on The Unexplained.
And drop me an email with your thoughts about him, any future guest suggestions, if you want to make a donation.
There's a one-stop shop to do all of that.
Go to my website, www.theunexplained.tv.theunexplained.tv.
Thank you to Martin, who is at the moment remixing our theme tune.
Martin, good to hear from you.
It's been a while.
Adam Cornwell, of course, the absolute stalwart of our website, www.theunexplained.tv.
And above all, to you.
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And let's see what big things we can try to do in this coming year.
My name is Howard Hughes.
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