Kelly Inquest Quitter Coroner Helps Avoid Enquiry into Dead Solders

Because the bodies of service personnel killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan are flown to RAF Brize Norton, Oxon, it is the Oxfordshire coroner Nicholas Garner who should have been conducting the backlog of 111 inquests now due.

Nicholas Garner was the coroner who aborted his inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly. Under the 1999 section 17A amendment to the 1988 Coroners Act, provision was made that if the Lord Chancellor tells a coroner there is to be a public enquiry (into the events surrounding the death) before the coroner's inquest is likely to be completed, the coroner shall adjourn their inquest. This is only if the Lord Chancellor considers it is 'likely' the cause of death will also be investigated by the inquiry and that there is an absence of any exceptional reason to the contrary.

The Lord Chancellor was wrong to allow the presumption that Dr David Kelly's cause of death would be adequately investigated within the terms of the inquiry he had called for 'to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death' and with witness evidence not to be taken under oath. The coroner Nicholas Gardiner should have recognised the 'exceptional reason to the contrary' within the inquiry's terms and procedures allotted and hence should not have adjourned his inquest before establishing cause of death.

The same Coroners Act section 17A amendment could now be legitimately deployed to save the Oxfordshire coroner Nicholas Garner conducting these multiple individual inquests, supplanting that process with an all encompassing inquiry into 'the circumstances leading to and surrounding the deaths of these 111 servicemen'. There is not so much doubts as to how each of these men were killed but a honest answer to how they were caused to go to war would be revealing.

Who says the Pentagon did not have a plan for post-war Iraq?

Who says the Pentagon did not have a plan for post-war Iraq? Everything appears to be proceeding swimmingly to plan - the plan to allow Iraq to disintegrate into civil war so to fragment the nation into a series of weaker states that individually, on the balance of probabilities, will be easier to influence and control.

Iraq's autocratic rulers, the Bathists under Saddam Hussein, were emboldened, by the wealth of oil and autonomous power, to resist the coercions of foreign powers. Having previously succumbed, in their fruitless war with Iran, they learnt to resist the hand of their master with which they used to be fed.

The frustration of such indiscipline lead those who thought themselves to still be Iraq's masters to beat and eventually destroy their once useful hound. And to ensure that Iraq would not resurrect, phantom like, it's corpse was to be dismembered. Should one of the new smaller Iraqi states fail to tow the line (as is probable) it's power and strategic regional threat posed (to you know who) will be much diminished from that considered to exist with Saddam's Iraq and mixing it up yet again, in the hope of a preferable fresh outcome, an easier task.

As Henry Ford said "Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs"