Experts' view of day one

BBC Two's Newsnight asked a panel of experts for their impressions of the first day of evidence in the inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly. Here is what they said.

Alistair Hay, a professor at Leeds University, a friend and former colleague of Dr Kelly:

I think the public found out the truth. It's what a number of people had been saying already but government was not saying the same thing.

We heard that (Dr Kelly) was unique in his knowledge of Iraq's chemical and biological capability, particularly the biological warfare component, that he was involved in inspections in Iraq to assess that and in fact identify it, and that he was uniquely placed to talk about Iraq's biological warfare capability.

Glenmore Trenear Harvey, expert on the intelligence services:

I and a number of others are absolutely vindicated in the stance that we took over a month ago saying that he wasn't a middle-ranking person, he wasn't someone who had little or no involvement in intelligence.

In point of fact, he had been positively vetted and had the highest security clearance one can get - on a need to know basis.

And he was an intelligence analyst. He was someone who take some of that raw data which was gathered by MI6, by the CIA and of course the Defence Intelligence Staff itself.

Within the Defence Intelligence Analyst Staff, the DIAS, he would look and consider much of that information they produced. He couldn't be more involved.

James Humphreys, former Downing Street civil servant:

I think one of the interesting things that came out today was how Dr Kelly technically was middle ranking. This is one of the things he found upsetting about, if you like, the bureaucratic treatment he had had in his time.

It is interesting that that has come out. It may shed some light on his state of mind at that time.

The point about whether technically he was a member of the senior civil service for anyone on the outside would seem terribly arcane.

But actually if it's your job and your pension and you feel that you have been out serving your country and trying to track down these weapons of mass destruction, you haven't been back at base checking out that all the paperwork for your employment has been done, and suddenly you find coming up to retirement you might have lost out on quite a lot of money, you can understand how that would play on your mind and would be really quite a significant thing.

I would not have thought he would speak out because of that.

I just mean that if we are looking for things that would indicate why he would take this extreme step, it seems perhaps having myself spent too many years in the civil service, that actually things like this, the way the bureaucracy treats you, can be just as bad as the way the politicians treat you.