Reply #32: Suppositions are hypotheses, Straight Shooter. But don't you think

[Joe Chi Minh]

the word "hypotheses" has more positive, less dismissive connotations? You don't appear to fault his intellectual rigour, otherwise.

As regards your dismay that he didn't write it down to be kept by a trusted friend, I would conjecture that an at least ambivalent, if not by now positively hostile, surveillance would have been kept on him, at least since his discovery as the "mole", and that he knew it would not have stopped at his front door. The extent of the surveillance powers of the British clandestine services is awesome. As is their execution of their operations.

This leads me to wonder if indeed the ambiguity of the circumstances of the good doctor's death, and even more of the subsequent obfuscations of the authorities might not have been intentional. To warn others. I mean, I really believe that in the final analysis, clandestine services in every country - even with much less closed societies than our own in the UK - are ABSOLUTELY unanswerable to the laws of the land and untouchable.

As far as the UK is concerned, with the passage of time and a growing awareness of how imperfect any human democracy is ever likely to be, this side of the Paarousia, I'm not sure it would be possible, or even desirable for it to be otherwise, for the simple reason that, to borrow a description of Nixon by H S Thompson - a worse "pool of rancid genes and broken chromosomes" as our body politic here in the UK represents, could scarcely be imagined, and would be most unlikely to represent a better repository of the ultimate power of government. Indeed, their custody of the legislature, the law of the land, is a standing disgrace; while the Lords (for all the historically eccentric "take" on economic matters of its culturally Norman members) has, as best it could, been acting as a brake on the worst excesses and degenerate machinations of the Commons.

The acquisition of plenary powers by the PM of the day over the clandestine services would simply ensure that no vestige of Christian values would remain in them, and Dr Kelly's likely killers would have no countervailing "guys in white hats" - such as did prove viable, being emasculated.

Of course, officially, unlike that SAS officer, the clandestine services must remain PC, even if they do kill people.