Dr Michael John Powers KC

HE KNEW THE DOSSIER WAS FAKE. WEEKS LATER HE WAS DEAD IN A FIELD Dr David Kelly was Britain's foremost weapons inspector. He spent years inspecting Iraqi facilities, earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and knew more about Saddam's arsenal than almost anyone in government. In 2002, Tony Blair's government published a dossier claiming Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes. Britain went to war on the back of it. No weapons were ever found. Kelly knew the dossier was rubbish. He said so, quietly, to a @BBC journalist. That conversation ended his career, his privacy, and ultimately his life. The MOD carefully allowed his name to leak to the press as the BBC's source. He was then hauled before parliamentary committees, stripped apart by his own employer, and thrown to a media frenzy he never asked for. Two days after giving evidence to MPs, the 59-year-old was found dead in woodland near his Oxfordshire home. Instead of a proper inquest, Tony Blair asked Lord Hutton to run a private inquiry. Hutton concluded suicide. The inquest was opened, then suspended, and never resumed. Eight senior legal and medical figures, including a coroner, later wrote to @thetimes saying the verdict was unsafe. They argued the wound found on Kelly's wrist, a severed ulnar artery, would not have caused sufficient blood loss to kill a healthy person. There were no fingerprints on the knife found beside his body, even though he was not wearing gloves. In 2011, Attorney General Dominic Grieve rejected all calls for a new inquest. He said the Hutton Inquiry was "tantamount to an inquest" and that further investigation would be dismissed by judges with irritation. A man challenged the government's justification for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. He was publicly destroyed, died in mysterious circumstances, never got a proper inquest, and the people who sent him into that media storm faced no consequences whatsoever. Tony Blair became a Middle East Peace Envoy the following year. You genuinely could not make it up. Sources: @BBCNews, openDemocracy, Hansard, @thetimes | Hutton Report