British Press and Officials
Caught Lying in Duggan Affair
Newly released documents from the British Foreign Office confirm that British law enforcement officials have always accepted the validity of the German police investigation in the matter of the suicide of Jeremiah Duggan. The release proves that the British friends of Lynne and Vice President Dick Cheney have been lying in their four-year media campaign about the case.
Duggan was a British student studying in France; he committed suicide in Wiesbaden, Germany after attending a conference sponsored by the Schiller Institute in March 2003, shortly after the start of the Blair-Cheney-Bush-led Iraq War. The Schiller Institute was founded in 1984 by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the wife of the American stateman Lyndon LaRouche. The German police who investigated the incident ruled, based on witness interviews and the accident scene investigation, that Duggan committed suicide by running into traffic on a highway.
Subsequently, the British friends of Lynne and Vice President Cheney, notably Baroness Liz Symons, who at the time was an official of the British Foreign Office, conducted a full-court-press campaign casting aspersions on the completeness of the German investigation, and stated that LaRouche or his associates were somehow responsible for Mr. Duggan's death. These false allegations were carried widely in the British press, repeated in sworn testimony to a British Coroner's inquest, and have formed the basis for requests for a Parliamentary inquiry and, to the British Attorney General, for a new inquest.
However, the July 14, 2003 Metropolitan Police report, just released by the Foreign Office pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request, states that the Metropolitan Police found that the incident was "fully investigated" by the German police, and that all witness had been interviewed. Despite this official conclusion, concealed until now, some British officials, including from the Foreign Office and the Metropolitan Police, have lent credence to the outlandish and baseless charges against LaRouche and his associates.
The Context: The Iraq War
The context in which this smear campaign was undertaken has previously been documented by Executive Intelligence Review (see, for example, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "Cheney Behind Press Campaign: Duggan Hoax Rewarmed Again," Nov. 8, 2006). In the Spring of 2003, LaRouche had emerged as a leading trans-Atlantic opponent to the Cheney-Blair Iraq War, which LaRouche insisted was based on deliberately falsified intelligence. During that time, LaRouche was a prominent guest on BBC and other British news outlets exposing Cheney's and Blair's lies. At the same time, British MPs were raising questions about the role of the "Coalition Information Center" run out of 10 Downing Street by Blair aides Aleister Campbell and Phil Bassett, the husband of Baroness Symons, for "sexing up" the pre-war intelligence on Iraq in order to push the U.S. and Britain into war. (Subsequent events have shown that this pre-war intelligence was in fact false.)
The British scandal over the Iraq War reached a peak in July 2003, when British scientist David Kelly—who had exposed the Blair-Cheney disinformation campaign—was forced to testify before a House of Commons commission investigating the matter on July 15, 2003. Two days later, Kelly was found dead, after apparently taking his own life.
Three days before the Kelly testimony, on July 12, 2003, the London Guardian published the first article on the Duggan case, calling into question the validity of the German investigation, which was picked up by other British news outlets.
However, the newly released Metropolitan Police report, dated two days after the Guardian article, states that the Metropolitan Police accepted the German investigation as conclusive. Despite this, Dick and Lynne Cheney's crony Baroness Symons pledged to pressure the German authorities to reopen the investigation, even though her own Foreign Office was in possession of the Metropolitan Police report approving of the German investigation.
This duplicity of politically motivated British officials and press outlets has continued to this day, with repeated calls for a new investigation, based on wild allegations and conspiracy theories floated by lawyers for the Duggan family. With these long-concealed new documents now surfacing, the public is getting a first hand look at a politically motivated smear job.
