Anytime fractional reserve gets mentioned the BBC run a mile.
Kudos to RT for mentioning it, they are biased when it comes to Russia of course, but I do enjoy the female presenters they get on RT too lol.

Anytime fractional reserve gets mentioned the BBC run a mile.
Kudos to RT for mentioning it, they are biased when it comes to Russia of course, but I do enjoy the female presenters they get on RT too lol.

andyh wrote: *quoted to highlight the FR bit.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-25420945
So mr BBC, your lead line in the first quote says death by Syrian authorities.
You then say there's a good chance it may have been secret services. Cough CIAMI6SAD cough.
So you hold Assad accountable for the apparent 'rebellion'?
And you mention the secret squirrels half way down the page, when you know most folk will only read the lead line...?
Despicable as ever.

Another innocent goes to their grave in the battle of globalization and another death gets twisted by the BBC to bolster support for it.

m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25517356

I note with the usual amount of disgust, that today whilst mr Khan is buried, the bbc have chosen to drop any mention of the secret squirrels. Now they only mention the uk gov line, that the syrian authorities murdered him...

Wankers.

BBC accused of 'corporate fraud and cronyism' over payouts for rule-breaking executives

One in seven BBC executives paid more than they should to quit

Unfolding in the shadow of the greatest crisis in the BBC’s 90-year history has been another scandal, rather less publicised, which again reveals how profoundly the BBC has gone off the rails, morally and professionally. Last week, I reported how the BBC had spent large sums of our money fielding an array of lawyers against a pensioner from Wales to hide what I called, with considerable understatement, “a dirty little secret”. But that secret has now been disclosed to the world, confirming how seriously the BBC has been misrepresenting its policy on one of the most far-reaching issues of our time.

A year ago, I published a detailed report attempting to unravel what has long been a serious puzzle. How was it that, over the past six years, the BBC has been so ready to betray its statutory duty to impartiality by such relentlessly one-sided promotion of the scare over global warming and all it entails, such as the Government’s policy on wind farms? No organisation has done more to obscure the truth about an issue whose political and financial implications for us all are incalculable.

The BBC’s decision to defy its charter obligation to report on this subject impartially followed from a secret day-long seminar held at Television Centre on January 26, 2006. It was attended by all the BBC’s top brass, including George Entwistle, the short-lived director-general, then head of TV current affairs, and several executives who have had to “step aside” because of the Savile affair, such as Helen Boaden, then director of news, and Steve Mitchell, then head of radio news.

In 2007, the BBC Trust published a report claiming that this unprecedented decision to flout its charter was taken after a “high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts” on climate change. Among those who tried to get the BBC to identify these “experts” was Tony Newbery, the blogger who recently faced the might of a highly paid legal team which persuaded an information tribunal to uphold the BBC’s right to keep secret the names of those attending this seminar.

When, last week, those names were finally revealed – thanks to another blogger, Maurizio Morabito (see omnilogos.com) and the Wayback Machine, which stores information deleted from the internet – the result was even more startling than had been suspected. Only three of the “28 specialists” invited to advise the BBC were active scientists, none of them climate experts and all committed global-warming alarmists. Virtually all the rest were professional climate-change lobbyists, ranging from emissaries of Greenpeace and the Stop Climate Chaos campaign to the “CO2 project manager” for BP, one of the world’s largest oil companies.


As shown in my report, “The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal” (on the Global Warming Policy Foundation website), the consequences of what this roomful of “climate activists” advocated as BBC policy were devastating. The seminar’s co-organisers, Roger Harrabin and Joe Smith, were later able to boast that one of the first fruits of their good work was the BBC’s Climate Chaos season, a stream of unashamedly propagandist documentaries, led off with two fronted by Sir David Attenborough which featured a string of ludicrous scare stories.

This was merely the prelude to hundreds of further examples, up to the present day, of how the BBC has abandoned any pretence at honest or properly researched reporting – all in accord with the party line agreed on at that seminar, the nature of which the BBC was so desperate to keep secret.

As with the Savile scandal, there seems no end to the further embarrassments the BBC cover-up has been bringing to light. Harrabin and Smith ran a small outfit set up to lobby the media on global warming, funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, WWF and the University of East Anglia (home of the Climategate emails scandal).

Stranger still, their co-sponsor of the BBC seminar was another lobbying group calling itself the International Broadcasting Trust, which in the past seven years has received £520,000 from the Department for International Development’s foreign-aid budget for “media research” – which includes lobbying the BBC on issues such as climate change. This body in turn is part of a “coalition” known as the Broadcasting Trust, and one of its partners in that is the Media Trust – of which the BBC is a “corporate member”.

So our climate-change obsessed governments have given public money to bodies to lobby the BBC, including one closely associated with a body that the BBC itself belongs to – all to ensure that the BBC promotes government policy.

There is a scandal here that is, in its own way, as disturbing as the one over the Savile affair. But whereas that is being looked into by a series of inquiries, we can be sure that no one will inquire into this second scandal. Remember, after all, how the BBC Trust (now chaired by that committed warmist Lord Patten) aided the cover-up with that lie about “the best scientific experts” in its 2007 report – which was, laughably, supposed to be addressing the BBC’s statutory commitment to impartiality.

Isn’t it odd how often, through all this, one word recurs: “trust”?

Slovaks win out over the child-snatchers

All last week I was waiting on tenterhooks for the verdict of the Court of Appeal on as murky a case of child-snatching as I have ever reported. The case had only got up to the Court of Appeal because of the intervention of the Slovakian government, which had expressed its concern at how many Slovak children have been seized by British social workers “for no sound reason”.

This harrowing story began two years ago when two young boys were forcibly removed from their Slovak parents, who had been working for some years in England. The reasons for their removal could quickly have been shown to be wholly groundless, had a crucial piece of photographic evidence been allowed to be questioned in court. Even so, at one point in a story that involved dozens of lawyers, social workers, “experts” and official carers, it seemed that the children were about to be handed back to the care of their grandmother in Slovakia. But the council was determined to hang on to them and persuaded another judge to rule that they should be put out for adoption.

The case has caused a huge stir in Slovakia, with television coverage and demonstrations in the streets. Nine days ago, thanks to the involvement of the Slovak government and John Hemming MP, the appeal court ruled that the boys should be handed to their grandmother. Lord Justice Thorpe told the family “you have won”, and asked for everyone to return last Tuesday to report on the arrangements made for the handover. But still the local authority refused to give up, hiring a QC to work over the weekend on a case for the boys to be kept in England. Again the hearing had to be adjourned.

Finally, on Friday, two judges confirmed that the children should be returned. But a third said that the council should be allowed to spend thousands of pounds more on appealing to the Supreme Court. If and when those children at last arrive in Slovakia, I look forward to reporting this story in full, because it reveals so much of how, behind its self-protective wall of secrecy, our “child protection” system too often actually works.

Not apathy but contempt

In Manchester the turnout was 18 per cent, the lowest at any by-election since the Second World War. The national turnout for police commissioners was even lower, one polling station in Wales registering no voters at all – while a record 3 per cent of those who did vote spoilt their ballot papers to show their disgust at the farcical exercise.

When I walked into our village hall on Thursday evening to spoil my own ballot paper for the first time in 50 years, I found that only 15 of my 200 neighbours had turned up all day – most of them totally bemused.

Meanwhile, in Bradford, my friend Richard North was staring at claims that commissioners would restore “local control” over the police, asking how this could possibly make sense when the new commissioner for West Yorkshire will have to decide policing priorities over an area of 800 square miles, with a population of 2.2 million, containing five metropolitan districts and including the cities of Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield and Halifax.

With the election of 12 non-party commissioners, Thursday was the day when, more clearly than ever, we showed the political class, which for so long has treated us with such contempt, that our only response is to reciprocate. But how to re-establish democratic control over that class, which rules our lives as surely as if we lived in a one-party state, is one of the greatest political challenges of our age.

Some incorrigible optimists have suggested that only a right-wing extremist of the notoriety of Likud leader Ariel Sharon will have the credentials to broker any sort of lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Maybe so. History is not devoid of such examples. But Sharon?

Sharon’s history offers a monochromatic record of moral corruption, with a documented record of war crimes going back to the early 1950s. He was born in 1928 and as a young man joined the Haganah, the underground military organization of Israel in its pre-state days. In 1953 he
was given command of Unit 101, whose mission is often described as that of retaliation against Arab attacks on Jewish villages. In fact, as can be seen from two terrible onslaughts, one of them very well known, Unit 101′s purpose was that of instilling terror by the infliction of discriminate, murderous violence not only on able bodied fighters but on the young, the old, the helpless.

Sharon’s first documented sortie in this role was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 101 unit records 50 refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20. Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that “bombs were thrown” by Sharon’s men “through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons”.

In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon’s unit 101 on the Jordanian village of Qibya, whose “stain” Israel’s foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, confided to his diary “would stick to us and not be washed away for many years”. He was wrong. Though even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon’s role are scarcely evoked in the West today, least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag of the New York Times who recently wrote a whitewash of Sharon, describing him as “feisty”, or the
Washington Post’s man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as “the portly old warrior”.

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre thus: “Sharon’s order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was
revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses.”

The UN observer on the scene reached a different conclusion: “One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshhold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them.” The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan).

According to the diplomat’s account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies were still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the
neighbouring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.

And what of Sharon’s conduct when he was head of the Southern Command of Israel’s Defense Forces in the early 1970s? The Gaza “clearances” were vividly described by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent on January 21 of this year.

“Thirty years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon, favourite to win Israel’s forthcoming election, was the head of the Israel Defence Forces’ southern command, charged with the task of ‘pacifying’ the recalcitrant Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well. Especially the old men on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage, or Had’d, Street wasn’t a street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza City’s Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting for the international community to settle their future. The street acquired its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr Sharon’s soldiers. Their orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street. This would allow Israeli troops and their heavy armored vehicles to move easily through the camp, to exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation Army.

“‘They came at night and began marking the houses they wanted to demolish with red paint,’ said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. ‘In the morning they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all the soldiers shouting at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla! They threw everyone’s belongings into the street. Then Sharon brought in bulldozers and started flattening the street. He did the whole lot, almost in one day. And the soldiers would beat people, can you imagine? Soldiers with guns, beating little kids!’ By the time the Israeli army’s work was done, hundreds of homes were destroyed, not only on Wreckage Street but throughout the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid of wide security roads. Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed into the already badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually those with a Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken to exile in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel.”

As Reeves reported, the devastation of Beach Camp was far from the exception. “In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon’s command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 16,000 people for the second time in their lives. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were arrested and deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971, 104 guerrillas were assassinated. ‘The policy at that time was not to arrest suspects, but to assassinate them’, said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City”.

Israeli complacency leading to their initial defeat by the Egyptians in the 1973 war was in part nurtured by the supposed impregnability of the “Bar Lev line” constructed by Sharon on the east bank of the Suez canal. The Egyptians pierced the line without undue difficulty.

In 1981 Sharon, then minister of defense, paid a visit to Israel’s good friend, President Mobutu of Zaire. Lunching on Mobutu’s yacht the Israeli party was asked by their host to use their good offices to get the US Congress to be more forthcoming with aid. This the Israelis managed to accomplish. As a quid pro quo Mobutu reestablished diplomatic relations with Israel. This was not Sharon’s only contact with Africa. Among friends he relays fond memories of trips to Angola to observe and advise the South African forces then fighting in support of the murderous CIA stooge Jonas Savimbi.

As defense minister in Menachem Begin’s second government, Sharon was the commander who led the full dress 1982 assault on Lebanon, with the express design of destroying the PLO, driving as many Palestinians as possible to Jordan and making Lebanon a client state of Israel. It was a war plan that cost untold suffering, around 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over one thousand Israeli soldiers. The Israelis bombed civilian populations at will. Sharon also oversaw the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The Lebanese government counted 762 bodies recovered and a further 1,200 buried privately by relatives. However, the Middle East may have been spared worse, thanks to Menachem Begin. Just as the ’82 war was getting under way, Sharon approached Begin, then Prime Minister, and suggested that Begin cede control over Israel’s nuclear trigger to him. Begin had just enough sense to refuse.

The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatilla took place from 6:00 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8:00 in the morning on September 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the Israel Defense Forces. The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed.

An official Israeli commission of inquiry – chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel’s Supreme Court – investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which remains secret until now).

Amid desperate attempts to cover up the evidence of direct knowledge of what was going on by Israeli military personnel, the Kahan Commission found itself compelled to find that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre. The commission’s report stated: “It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded ["entirely cognizant of" would have been a better choice of words] the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed [i.e."eagerly taken this into consideration"] to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists’ entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the
non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged”. (For those who want to refresh their memories of Operation Peace for Galilee, of the massacres and the Kahan coverup we recommend Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle.)

Sharon refused to resign. Finally, on February 14, 1983, he was relieved of his duties as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.

Sharon’s career was in eclipse, but he continued to burnish his credentials as a Likud ultra. Sharon has always been against any sort of peace deal, unless on terms entirely impossible for Palestinians to accept. As Nehemia Strasler outlined in Ha’aretz on January 18 of this year, in 1979, as a member of Begin’s cabinet, he voted against a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1985 he voted against the withdrawal of Israeli troops to the
so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon. In 1991 he opposed Israel’s participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 1993 he voted No in the Knesset on the Oslo agreement. The following year he abstained in the Knesset on a vote over a peace treaty with Jordan. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997 and objected to the way in which the withdrawal from southern Lebanon was conducted.

As Begin’s minister of agriculture in the late 1970s he established many of the West Bank settlements that are now a major obstruction to any peace deal. His present position? Not another square inch of land for Palestinians on the West Bank. He will agree to a Palestinian state on the existing areas presently under either total or partial Palestinian control, amounting to merely 42 per cent of the West Bank. Israel will retain control of the highways across the West Bank and the water sources. All settlements will stay in place with access by the IDF to them. Jerusalem will remain under Israeli sovereignty and he plans to continue building around the city. The Golan heights would remain under Israel’s control.

It can be strongly argued that Sharon represents the long-term policy of all Israeli governments, without any obscuring fluff or verbal embroidery. For example: Ben-Gurion approved the terror missions of Unit 101. Every Israeli government has condoned settlements and
building around Jerusalem. It was Labor’s Ehud Barak who okayed the military escort for Sharon on his provocative sortie that sparked the second Intifada and Barak who has overseen the lethal military repression of recent months. But that doesn’t diminish Sharon’s sinister shadow across the past half century. That shadow is better evoked by Palestinians and Lebanese grieving for the dead, the maimed, the displaced, or by
a young Israeli woman, Ilil Komey, 16, who confronted Sharon recently when he visited her agricultural high school outside Beersheva. “I think you sent my father into Lebanon”, Ilil said. “Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for 16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things that made a lot of people suffer in this country. I don’t think that you can now be elected as prime minister”.

Ilil was wrong. He’s there. And now the bloodbath will begin. CP

Israeli and world figures have paid tribute to a man who fought in four major wars before taking up politics.

The BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen said he had shaped the current state of the West Bank and Israel's relations with the Palestinians more than any other Israeli politician in recent years.

He fought in Israel's war of independence in 1948, took part in Israel's invasion of the Sinai in 1956 and commanded an armoured division in the 1967 Middle East war. In 1973, he led Israel's counter-attack against Arab armies across the Suez Canal, cutting off Egypt's 3rd Army.

Given the bitterly divided history of the modern Middle East it's inevitable perhaps that a man eulogised by Israelis would demonised by its Arab enemies. Nothing in that would have surprised Sharon who understood the region well and saw his role as the establishment and protection of the Jewish state in which he passionately believed..

Much of what we think we know about the 1914-18 conflict is wrong, writes historian Dan Snow.

No war in history attracts more controversy and myth than World War One.

For the soldiers who fought it was in some ways better than previous conflicts, and in some ways worse.

By setting it apart as uniquely awful we are blinding ourselves to the reality of not just WW1 but war in general. We are also in danger of belittling the experience of soldiers and civilians caught up in countless other appalling conflicts throughout history and the present day.

Historian Dan Snow says there are ten myths used to portray the First World War as uniquely horrific that are historically false. Lindsey German from No Glory in War thinks he is wrong.

Myth 5. 'Lions led by donkeys'

Dan SnowDan Snow says:
This saying was supposed to have come from senior German commanders describing brave British soldiers led by incompetent old toffs from their chateaux. In fact the incident was made up by historian Alan Clark. During the war more than 200 generals were killed, wounded or captured. Most visited the front lines every day. In battle they were considerably closer to the action than generals are today. Naturally, some generals were not up to the job, but others were brilliant, such as Arthur Currie, a middle-class Canadian failed insurance broker and property developer. Rarely in history have commanders had to adapt to a more radically different technological environment. British commanders had been trained to fight small colonial wars, now they were thrust into a massive industrial struggle unlike anything the British army had ever seen. Despite this, within three years the British had effectively invented a method of warfare still recognisable today. By the summer of 1918 the British army was probably at its best ever and it inflicted crushing defeats on the Germans.

No GloryNo Glory says:
The record of the generals speaks for itself at the battles of the Somme (20,000 British soldiers killed on first day), Gallipoli (43,000 British soldiers killed), Vimy Ridge and Passchendaele (over 300,000 British casualties).

9. The Versailles Treaty was extremely harsh

The treaty of Versailles confiscated 10% of Germany's territory but left it the largest, richest nation in central Europe.

It was largely unoccupied and financial reparations were linked to its ability to pay, which mostly went unenforced anyway.

Versailles was not harsh.

More on how the fracking issue is being ''spun''.

Just contrast the B ullshit B roadcasting C ompany - check out the imagery and slant

Fracking under homes could be allowed without permission

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25914066

with a different reporting style

UK Fracking could be allowed under people’s homes without their consent

rt.com/news/fracking-property-laws-change-254/

Imo Beeb is shit peddling for the govt nudge unit and coffers- what do u think?

Open letter re: Proposed Crimewatch programme 14 October 2013 - Madeleine McCann.

The letter is from PeterMac and he suggests that others also write to Crimewatch to express concerns about its likely content:

whathappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.c...ewatch.html?spref=tw



Tel

email

7th October 2013

Mr Gavin Cappelle, Production Co-ordinator and Mr Joe Mather, Series Editor,
BBC Crimewatch Programme
BBC Broadcasting House
Portland Place
LONDON
W1A 1AA

Also for the attention of presenters Kirsty Young, Matthew Amroliwala and Martin Bayfield

By email to:
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Dear Mr Cappelle and Mr Mather

Proposed Crimewatch programme 14 October 2013 - Madeleine McCann

I have a number of concerns about the above proposed programme.

I understand that there is to be a ‘live’ interview with the McCanns and that a reconstruction of events will be shown, presumably of part of Thursday evening 3 May 2007, the day Madeleine was reported missing.

The BBC has said that it will be showing a reconstruction of Madeleine’s ‘abduction’.

The alleged ‘reconstruction’ is reported in various media as taking place ‘abroad’ or in Spain but not in Portugal, and certainly not, therefore in Praia da Luz.

The duties of the BBC and Crimewatch

I understand that the BBC Charter requires that it be truthful and accurate and, where appropriate, must provide 'balanced' coverage of any issue, and that OFCOM has the power to investigate complaints.

‘Crimewatch’ has a formidable reputation, based on setting before the public accurate information about a crime, and asking for the public’s help in identifying the perpetrators. These principles must apply just as rigourously to the case of the reported disappearance of Madeleine.

Given the controversial, sensitive and high profile nature of this case, I must assume that the research done by Crimewatch into the background for any reconstruction and interview of the McCanns has been exceptionally thorough and meticulous. You will be aware that there are thousands of pages of witness statements, experts’ reports, forensic reports, photographs, videos and other material, which was made public on DVDs by the Portuguese Police as long ago as August 2008, and all of which has been translated into English, read and analysed in great detail on numerous internet websites, blogs and fora. You will no doubt for example have read all the relevant information on the McCannfiles blog (www.mccannfiles.com), a library of factual material about the case.

Was Madeleine McCann abducted?

Given the claim by the BBC in its advance publicity for your proposed programme that Madeleine McCann was ‘abducted’, the first question that the producers and editors of any Crimewatch programme have to answer is whether or not this is established as a fact

I hope, therefore, that you have considered the following:

• The detailed investigation Interim report by Inspector Tavares de Almeida dated 10 September, and publicly available on the internet, giving numerous clear reasons for concluding that Madeleine died in the McCanns’ holiday apartment and that they and/or others hid her body

• The contents of the book ‘The Truth Of The Lie’, written by Dr Gonçalo Amaral, which as you will be well aware is currently the subject of the final trial in the-long running libel action the McCanns brought against him

• The fact that the content of Dr Amaral’s book has been repeatedly shown to be entirely consistent with the contents of the police files released to the general public in 2008 (indeed this fact has been repeatedly emphasised during the first six days of this trial)

• The fact that the concluding report signed off by the regional Attorney-General in July 2008, whilst archiving the investigation and deciding there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone, made it plain that the Portuguese judicial authorities by no means established as a fact the McCanns’ claim that Madeleine had been abducted

• Indeed the probability that Madeleine had died in her parents’ apartment and her body hidden was explicitly acknowledged in the very same report.

If you have considered the above facts, I am not sure how the BBC can proceed with this programme at all, or to continue to refer to ‘the abduction’ of Madeleine. The alerts of two sniffer dogs belonging to top police dog handler Martin Grime cannot be ignored in considering whether or not Madeleine was abducted. The McCanns for example have never been able to explain the dogs’ alerts to the past presence of a human corpse in four locations in the McCanns’ flat, on three items of their clothing, in the hired car and other locations associated with them, and in no other places. Dr Gerald McCann has claimed that sniffer dogs are ‘incredibly unreliable’ despite the fact that their reliability is well established and their use in ever more fields of detection, drugs, explosives, medicine and other disciplines is growing rapidly. There are excellent BBC programmes on this very subject, the most recent showing a dog detecting early cancer of the kidney from urine.

To reinforce this point, let it be stated clearly - the only ‘evidence’ of abduction is the say-so of the McCanns themselves.

I believe that a complaint may be made to the disciplinary body of the National Union of Journalists if any member of the NUJ had contributed to a dishonest programme which ignored or set aside relevant facts.

The history of reconstructions or attempted reconstructions

In the Portuguese criminal justice system, reconstructions of events surrounding a murder or disappearance or other crime are used to test the validity of the witnesses’ statements. The actual persons involved in such events are the witnesses themselves. They will be invited to the scene of the crime. Such reconstructions are commonly video-recorded for the benefit of the criminal investigation. This is especially true where there are obvious contradictions between the witnesses’ statement, as is manifestly the case regarding Madeleine’s disappearance. Your researchers must be fully aware of these. They have been extensively catalogued and analysed (a) in the interim report of Tavares de Almeida (b) in the Attorney-General’s final report (c) in Dr Gonçalo Amaral’s book and (d) on numerous Madeleine McCann information and discussion sites on the internet.

This type of ‘reconstruction’ is very different from a ‘Crimewatch’-style televised reconstruction.

Dr Amaral wanted to do such a reconstruction as it was clear in the first days of the investigation that there were significant inconsistencies in the witnesses’ statements, even between various statements made by the same witness. As he explains in his book, he decided not to do one because of the intense media spotlight he and his team were under.

A reconstruction of some of the events of 3 May 2007 was shown on the BBC’s Panorama programme on 19 November 2007.

A second attempt by the Portuguese police to hold a reconstruction occurred in the spring of 2008. The McCanns and their friends all declined to take part, after taking legal advice, giving a variety of reasons for not doing so. Dr Gerald McCann specifically said at the time that he saw no purpose in such a reconstruction as the police would not be showing the reconstruction on TV. He said he wanted a ‘Crimewatch-style’ reconstruction. Therefore the proposed Portuguese police reconstruction could not proceed.

The Channel 4 reconstruction, 2009

In May 2009, Channel 4 screened a reconstruction made by Mentorn Media. This was heavily criticised by many on a number of grounds, including these:

• It featured the description of a possible abductor by Jane Tanner, despite numerous indications that her alleged ‘sighting’ was fabricated (see below)

• It attempted to link an alleged sighting of a man carrying a child by Martin Smith, at around 10.00pm in a different part of Praia da Luz, with Jane Tanner’s claimed ‘sighting’ at 9.15pm. The improbability of any abductor walking around the village for 45 minutes or more carrying a child is so obvious as to hardly require mention

• It attempted to suggest that the man allegedly seen by Jane Tanner and the man allegedly seen by Martin Smith were one and the same, despite Jane Tanner describing the man as having ‘long, black hair’ whilst the man described by Martin Smith had ‘short, brown hair’

• Three witnesses, namely Jane Tanner, Jeremy Wilkins and Dr Gerald McCann gave significantly contradictory statements about the very moment when Jane Tanner claimed to have seen the abductor at 9.15pm. These were contemptuously dismissed on the TV reconstruction by the McCanns’ then chief private investigator, ex-Detective Inspector Dave Edgar, as ‘inevitable inconsistencies’. Any serious detective would have probed the contradictions, which should have been fully aired on the programme

• The man shown in the documentary as carrying a child away from near the McCanns’ apartment did not look the same as Jane Tanner’s description. In any case, of course, Jane Tanner admitted to not seeing his face.

Severe doubts about the credibility of Jane Tanner

The reasons for doubting the evidence of Jane Tanner are many but include:

• changes in her accounts, such as changing the direction in which the person she claimed to have seen was walking

• her recollection of details about the abductor and the child improving with time, such as ‘recollecting’ on a second interview precise details of the pattern of the pyjamas of the girl being carried (in line with what she then knew about Madeleine’s pyjamas, but crucially miscalculating the length of the pyjama bottoms )

• rambling and over-elaborate descriptions of the abductor and what he was wearing, both when interviewed by the Portuguese police and later when re-interviewed by Leicestershire Police

• her positive identification on 13 May 2007 of Robert Murat as the person she’d seen carrying a child away from near the McCanns’ apartment - only for her to change her mind about this months later

• her willingness to claim that the person she claimed to have seen looked like a moustachioed man seen in a sketch by a Mrs Gail Cooper, despite the fact that Jane Tanner admitted on 3 May never having seen the man’s face

• the fact that at a press conference in August 2009, the McCanns’ chief investigator, Dave Edgar, said that Jane Tanner might have been mistaken and seen a woman carrying a child, not a man

• the fact that her story was so vague and inconsistent that the Portuguese police dismissed it as a fabrication from very early on in their investigation.

Other facts that the BBC should perhaps take into account if they are to proceed with this broadcast

I invite you to consider the following additional points:

• The thread of criminality running through the McCann Team’s investigators. If the BBC has researched the background material to this case then you will be aware that the McCanns’ first preferred detectives, the Spanish firm Metodo3, has a long record of criminal conduct. Two of Metodo3’s investigators who worked very closely with the head of the McCann Team’s private investigators, Cheshire businessman Brian Kennedy, have served time in prison.

• Antonio Giminez Raso spent four years in prison on remand due to his association with a 27 strong gang of drug-dealers who were convicted of serious criminal charges in a Barcelona court last year.

• Julian Peribañez who also worked very closely with Brian Kennedy has spent much of this year after his arrest for illegally taping the conversations of Spanish politicians, an offence he has now admitted and for which he is awaiting sentence.

• The McCanns also employed Kevin Halligen, who charged the McCann Team £500,000 plus expenses yet, as exposed in a 2009 article in the Evening Standard and elsewhere, spent most of the time he was employed by them on high living in London, Oxfordshire and the U.S. with his girlfriend Shirin Trachiotis, and was arrested in 2009 on serious fraud charges in the U.S. which he eventually admitted. He spent a total of four years in Belmarsh and another top security prison in the U.S. None of these investigators had any experience in locating missing children but most had expertise in such areas as money laundering and fraud.

These private detectives have together with the McCann Team produced a bewildering variety of so-called ‘suspects’ and ‘persons tightly of interest’, 21 in total so far, two of them women, a fact which also undermines the credibility of the McCann Team’s private investigators, not to mention Tanner’s statements.

Should the BBC continue to promote the claim that Madeleine McCann was abducted, you must take full account of these and indeed many other matters of real concern about the McCanns’ private investigations, which again your researchers must know.

• Dr Kate McCann’s refusal to answer any one of 48 questions put to her on interview by the Portuguese police on 7 September 2007.

• The numerous contradictions in the witnesses’ evidence about the events of 3 May 2007.

This is a vast subject. Again, no doubt your researchers, together with D.C.I. Andy Redwood and his team, are aware of the following contradictions and changes of story etc. These contradictions would need to be resolved if possible before any realistic reconstruction could possibly take place. If you proceed with a reconstruction, you will be faced with the problem of which version of events you will be presenting to viewers. I believe the only honest way for the BBC to proceed would be to present the viewer with all the contradictions, letting the viewer see what they are, and allowing us to draw our own conclusions. Among the main contradictions are the following:

• Three different versions about a claimed ‘high tea’ that Madeleine is said to have had with her parents and crèche staff at about 5.30pm

• Two entirely different versions (Dr Kate McCann and Dr David Payne) of an alleged visit by Dr Payne to the McCanns’ apartment, when he claims to have seen all three children alive

• Three different accounts (Dr Gerald McCann, Jane Tanner and Jeremy Wilkins (whom we understand may have worked for Crimewatch before)) about events at around 9.15pm on 3 May, the time when Jane Tanner claims she saw a man carrying a child

• Whether or not the curtains of the children’s room in the apartment were wide open (Dr Kate McCann’s first version) or closed (Dr Kate McCann’s later version)

• Whether you will be showing the shutters smashed, broken, and jemmied open (the McCanns’ first versions) or completely undamaged (reality - and subsequently admitted as such by the McCanns’ spokesman, Clarence Mitchell)

• Whether you will be showing Dr Gerald McCann entering through the ‘front door using his key’ (Dr McCann’s first police statement), or ‘going in through the unlocked patio door’ (Dr Gerald McCann’s second police statement)

• Whether you will be showing Madeleine tucked up in bed because it was a cold night (Dr Kate McCann’s version - the cold also being testified to by the rest of the McCanns’ friends and indeed by weather records ) - or lying on top of the covers because it was so hot (Dr Gerald McCann’s version).

• The extremely limited ‘window of opportunity’ for any claimed abductor to have removed Madeleine from the apartment.

On the basis of statements made by Dr Gerald McCann, Jane Tanner and Jeremy Wilkins, with very precise timing included within them ( Dr McCann for example says he left the table at 9:04 by his watch, and the apartment at 9.10pm, and Jane Tanner says she saw a man carrying a child in the area at 9.15pm ) the time available for the abductor to remove Madeleine is somewhere between 1 minute 20 seconds, and three minutes. During this time, the McCann Team suggest that an intruder could have entered the apartment (either via the open patio door with the father directly outside, or by having a key to the front door), sedated three children, selected one of them, picked her up, turned her round so that her feet are now to the right, opened the curtains, window and shutters as some kind of ‘red herring’ (see ‘red herring’ statement made by Dr Kate McCann) and then exit, all of this being accomplished without being seen or heard by anyone except Jane Tanner and without leaving any forensic trace. (The suggestion that Madeleine and the twins were sedated is a repeated theme of the McCanns and their team over the past six years. They moved from strong denials and threats to sue, to an acceptance that it must have happened, even though there is no known substance which could have been used within that time frame. Dr Kate McCann is a qualified anaesthetist and must be aware of this ).

• The only fingerprints on the window found by police being those of Dr Kate McCann, strongly suggesting that she opened the window in order to promote the abduction scenario.

• In the very unlikely event that Madeleine is still alive and is being held by the abductor or others, has BBC Crimewatch assessed the risk that its programme could lead to Madeleine being harmed by the person who now has her ?

A useful summary of the many contradictions, changes of story and other inconsistencies amongst the witness statements in this case can be read in an e-book by Michael McLean at:

freepdfhosting.com/9099bef539.pdf
or
freepdfhosting.com/d2238cdf6b.pdf

Yours sincerely

Peter MacLeod
BSc LLB MA
Retired Police Superintendent
Nottinghamshire 1972 - 2000

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Related link: jillhavern.forumotion.net/t7917-crimewat...-the-countrys-police