Friday 6 May 2011

The Death of David Kelly - "Mai Pederson was one of the first to know". True or false?

A few Internet sites have a statement to the effect that Mai Pederson was "one of the very first people to know that Dr Kelly's body had been found".

That statement is, for example, included here: US spy confirms Dr Kelly's death 'was not suicide'.

I haven't been able to trace an original source for what purports to be a quote.

Can anyone help identify where the supposed quote originated from?

Is the quote true? Or is it disinformation? Or is it just plain wrong?

3 comments:

  1. Andrew,
    there is a fascinating piece in the Monterey Herald of 3 September 2003,captured by the Baha'i library.
    "Military authorities at the Presidio said Tuesday they have no knowledge or records of Pederson's time there. The Times of London reported that she was attached to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio.

    According to Air Force media sources, Pederson was serving at the Pentagon as recently as May, where she was involved in Air Force re-enlistments as chief of enlisted skills management. She now lives in Alabama.

    Two men who served as U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq were surprised to learn that Kelly had visited the Peninsula and not called on them.

    Tim McCarthy and Raymond Zilinskas, both now with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies, also worked with the United Nations Special Commission.

    Zilinskas said he knew Kelly but did not work with him in Iraq. McCarthy said he worked with Kelly in Iraq but did not recall meeting Pederson there.

    "David was one of the most respected inspectors," McCarthy said, "extremely well-liked and respected."

    "The whole thing was quite shocking," McCarthy said of Kelly's death.

    Kelly was a private, quiet, careful, secretive man, "not the guy to ever draw attention to himself, very circumspect," Zilinskas said.

    If he had come to Monterey for religious purposes, Zilinskas said, Kelly might have wanted to keep it to himself.

    From his own acquaintance, Zilinskas recalled, Kelly "would never tell you he worked for intelligence or did anything like that. He would just say he worked for the Ministry of Defense or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but not define it any further."

    McCarthy said Kelly was among the inspectors who believed Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction when he worked with him in 1998.

    "At the time, absolutely," McCarthy said. "I remain convinced that they had them."

    Inspectors were given some information but the Iraqis were consistently evasive "in very specific areas, in very strange ways," McCarthy said.

    "When you look at this case like a detective over six years, you start to pick up patterns, where the lies are in the same places."

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  2. Raymond Zilinskas and Jonathan B Tucker wrote the following article in December 2002
    Limiting the Contribution of the Open Scientific Literature to the Biological Weapons Threat
    which followed a conference on 12 August 2002 in Washington,Workshop on Guidelines for the Publication of Scientific Research Potentially Related to Biological and Toxin Warfare (just the sort of thing Dr Kelly might have been interested in)
    One participant did not want to be identified.

    Jonathan B Tucker died suddenly in his sleep in late July 2011 aged 56.

    He was a 2002–03 senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, on leave from the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

    Dr David Kelly recommended Tucker to Victoria Roddam for her planned book. Dr Tucker gave an interview to CNN on 21 July 2003 about Dr Kelly's death.

    More recently Zilinskas and Tucker had written on Synthetic Biology and the concomitant risks, touching on the 2001 Anthrax letter attacks.

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  3. Zilinskas makes an appearance in Rod Barton's book The Weapons Detective.
    At the UN in September 1994, Richard Spertzel introduced Barton to two others, Zilinskas and also Amelia Jones from the UK. Barton says that while Spertzel and Annick Paul-Henriot both thought that Iraq had a biologcal weapons programme, it was clear that Ray Zilinskas "...thought all this was nonsense. In his view Iraq had never had a biological weapons programme."

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