Medawar's Cornflakes

Stalkers and Malware

2011-12-17T19:07:00.006Z

Many "phishing" and other scam e-mails are sent from hijacked e-mail accounts, using lists of e-mail addresses found on computers by infecting malware. Usually, these are friends and contacts of the account holder, so they may be people who'd be sympathetic if he got into difficulties and needed money.

But what happens if such malware infects a computer owned by a stalker?

Well, the malware searches for lists of e-mails and personal details, and sends scam e-mails to them, and passes any other contact details to cold-calling scammer's call centres, as usual. Except these are not the computer-owner's friends and contacts: they are the people he's been stalking and obssessively gathering information on: see below for an example.

-- On Sat, 17/12/11, PHILIP BEAVEN <philbeaven@btinternet.com> wrote:

From: PHILIP BEAVEN <philbeaven@btinternet.com>
Subject: My Sad Trip...Philip Beaven
To: philbeaven@btinternet.com
Date: Saturday, 17 December, 2011, 9:34

I really hope you get this fast. I could not inform anyone about my trip, because it was impromptu. I had to be in Madrid Spain for a program. The program was successful, but my journey has turned sour. I misplaced my wallet on my way back to my hotel after I went for sight seeing. The wallet contained all the valuables I had. Now, my passport is in custody of the hotel management pending when I make payment.

I am sorry if i am inconveniencing you, but i have only very few people to run to now. i will be indeed very grateful if i can get a loan of 2,605 Eur from you. this will enable me sort my hotel bills and get my sorry self back home. I will really appreciate whatever you can afford in assisting me with. I promise to refund it in full as soon as I return. let me know if you can be of any assistance. Please, let me know soonest. Thanks so much.

Phil

Normally, one is sympathetic to someone whose computer is hijacked in this way and in whose name, friends and family get reams of malicious spam.

But in this case, Mr Beaven seems to have been hoarding details of people who were not friends, family or contacts: they are people he hounds.
Including the unfortunate stained glass artist from Ipswich who Mr Beaven tried to out, falsely, as "Medawar".
The e-mail lacks the profanity and hate-filled abuse that Medawar normally expects from Mr Beaven, which is partly how it was spotted as a scam.

Stalkers and Snake Oil

2011-12-15T15:21:00.005Z

Rhys Morgan, a young man with a serious illness who decided to expose some of the cranks and con-artists peddling harmful alternative "cures" for his condition, is beginning to experience the early stages of an organised stalking campaign.

This may get worse, but he may also find that many of the threats are empty ones. If someone is really going to sue, they get a properly registered solicitor to send a letter. Threatening e-mails have no legal force whatever, and the person sending them is almost certainly breaking the law and/or professional codes of conduct.

The way to tackle this kind of thing, is to keep striking at the head of the snake (or the snake-oil salesman) and not to allow skanks hired by the snake oil salesman to divert attention from the con.

The people doing this are in the United States, they are almost certainly breaking Federal Laws and are exposing themselves to massive civil liabilities from people they have sold harmful substances to on the basis of false promises. They have a great deal more to lose from a court battle that Rhys Morgan has, so what they are doing is lay down a barrage of threats of legal action, as well as threats of a more direct nature (sending him Google Earth images of his home, for example) precisely in order to keep the matter out of court.

The stalker's next move will be to use a campaign of lies to induce individuals to initiate some kind of physical harassment against Rhys and his family. These lies may be completely unconnected to Rhys's campaign, and probably won't be based on even a grain of truth. At which point, he must contact the police, very firmly and preferably with a solicitor in tow, and make it plain that there is a criminal smear campaign against him, and that it is taking place in order to protect a large scale consumer fraud.

The ACPO advice, which leads many police forces into abject failure on stalking cases in particular, is effectively to blame the victim for provoking "anti-social behaviour" from conveniently unidentified local "kids". (The Data Protection act supposedly (but not actually) makes it illegal for the police to tell the victim who they think it might be!)

It is very important to squash this suggestion from the outset and every single time it is subsequently deployed, because a succession of police officers will be involved, and it only takes one of them to succeed in making this suggestion without challenge, for it to go on the file and become the official explanation for any crimes committed against Rhys and his family. The above advice may sound hostile to the police, but it's necessary to recognise that many of their guidelines are issued precisely in order to limit the number of cases they get involved with. They will help, providing that the victim can ensure the case is recorded and presented in a way that triggers investigation and solution, rather than pallative or evasive measures preferred by the more political levels of the criminal justice system.

If threatening e-mails originate from the USA, this is where to report them.

Meredith Kercher: Evading the Obvious Explanation

2011-10-05T19:42:00.006+01:00

Now that there's nothing about the Meredith Kercher case which would be defined as sub judice under English Law (no-one facing an unresolved criminal charge) it may last be safe to point out a painfully obvious probability, and pose the one question which Italian Police and Prosecutors notably failed to ask:

In the two or three months before Miss Kercher was murdered in the cottage she shared with Miss Knox, did anyone in Northern Italy (not necessarily Perugia itself), systematically research the financial means of families of foreign students studying or due to study in Perugia? The Knox family in particular, but it wouldn't be confined to them, at least not in the early phases. Someone would have found out the names of foreign students, found out where they came from, then narrowed their sights a bit onto those who seemed to come from prosperous communities. These would have been researched a bit more deeply, until a shortlist was drawn up, of students with caring families who could afford a ransom, but could not afford (and would not know how to hire) a small army of ruthless mercenaries instead.

The Kerchers are from Surrey, which might excite interest, but there's a bit of a financial gulf between St George's Hill and Coulsden, and once the list-maker discovered the Kerchers came from the latter, Meredith might have been struck from the list.

Eventually, such lists have one name on it, and, with hindsight, Amanda Knox probably struck the ideal balance between wealth and vulnerability, so the name would have been hers. The name would be passed to someone more local, who'd played no part in researching the list, and who was definitively expendable -and they would have to be known to organized crime. The expendable local would have cased the joint, more competently or less, and when he observed a window of opportunity, he would have summoned a small group of specialists, whom he would have led to, and into, the property.

Both Meredith and Amanda have the same general description: English-speaking ,young, female, long brown hair. Miss Knox protests that until she was arrested, she'd never been in the same place as Rudy Guede before, and this would imply that Mr Guede would not have been a reliable authority on the crucial matter of which English-speaking young woman with long brown hair was which.

Fairly quickly, the specialists and their expendable local would have realized that something wasn't stacking up. Almost certainly, the specialists would have realized this long before the expendable local was prepared to admit it. Faced with a choice between total disaster and trying to get a ransom for a different young woman, they would have chosen the latter, and tried, in a few minutes, to establish equivalent information to everything which the researcher had supplied for Amanda after a month's work. That would account for the huge number of injuries on Meredith's body: sexual assault and torture at first, giving way to frustrated psychopathic rage when her answers, or the lack of them, signalled the end of their perceived opportunity for gain. This would have also served to impress Mr Guede with the urgent need not to implicate or identify the specialists in any way. Which he's managed not to do.

A bloody handprint links Mr Guede to the murder scene, but there are also fingerprints for several other persons, none of whom Italian Police have been able to (have tried to?) identify.
Tne unambiguous bloody hand-print emphasizes Mr Guede's expandability.

The above is not a flight of fancy, but a well-informed description of one of the most famous and lucrative industries of Northern Italy, one which every level of Italian officialdom, politics and the judiciary, has always preferred to pretend doesn't exist. Kidnap for ransom.

Amanda Knox is not lucky to get out of jail: she is lucky not have to have spent a few terrified weeks in a cellar or cave, having peripheral parts of herself sliced off and sent to her family through the post, before being found, almost certainly dead, in a car boot somewhere on payment of a ransom. Meredith Kercher was very unlucky, but also possibly, and we will never know for sure, brave enough not to cooperate with Amanda's would-be kidnappers.

A further observation might be that a young member of an important organized crime family, might have felt the need to pull off a major crime to prove his worth. If this was it, it couldn't have gone more wrong. As Medawar has observed elsewhere, "clogs to clogs in three generations" applies to organized crime families as well as industrialists.

Update:
The Appeal Court has published its reasoning over Miss Knox's acquittal.
There has been some deabte over whether Miss Knox might have been convicted on the evidence produced by the Italian prosecution, in a "UK" or US Court.

There is no such thing as a "UK Court"; an English Court is presumably what is meant, as the victim came from a long way South of Hadrian's Wall.

But the question really ought to be , what repercussions would there have been for the chief prosecutor and the detectives involved? Because they are the only ones who might be convicted of anything in an English Crown Court on the basis of the case they presented against Miss Knox and her boyfriend! What they did may be legal in Italy, but as the Appeal Court Judge has made very clear, it's definitely not acceptable in Italy and it's certainly not a way to solve a murder.

The case against Miss Knox and her boyfriend looks, for all the world, like an attempt to fill in the obvious two-person gap in the case against Rudy Guede, which is very incomplete despite, in some ways because of, his guilty plea. We'd be a lot nearer the truth if he'd fought the case and forced the prosecution to produce more of their evidence against him.

But that might have cast a spotlight on names and faces which the world still hasn't seen or heard about. Given a choice between that, and a sixteen year prison stretch, Mr Guede willingly takes the porridge. Which implies that the obvious two-person gap is in reality filled by much more frightening and resourceful personalities than those of Miss Knox and her boyfriend.

Forced Labour in Skane

2011-09-24T18:52:00.006+01:00

This link is to an article reporting that human rights researchers in Sweden have found that at least seven Irish organized crime gangs are using forced labour on construction contracts in Sweden, with the slaves receiving little help or concern from Swedish authorities and, even more shamefully, no detectable concern from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office at all. It is apparently being left to the Serious and Organized Crime Agency and local (English) police forces to do all the work, and they obviously have no diplomatic power to pressure the Swedish government into living up to one of the most basic responsibilities of a government in the civilized world: to stop slavery happening and to punish the slavers.

Whilst the Daily Mail concentrates on those slaves who may be British subjects, it appears that practically all of them have been trafficked through the UK, which makes their welfare a British responsibility regardless of where the gangsters involved originally kidnapped them from. The current British Prime Minister is an appeaser at heart, and nothing would pain him more than to embarrass a fellow European politician on behalf of down and outs who don't own a single top-end Rangerover between them, but using the very considerable power of his office to protect the weak against the venal and ruthless is one of the duties that goes with all the power and privilege. The Swedish Prime Minister should not feel humiliated by being taken to task for this: the dishonour and humiliation lies in allowing it to happen, and that would appear to cover several successive British Home Secretaries from the early nineties to the present day, as well.

Stalkers in Central Texas

2011-09-24T14:50:00.006+01:00

The unlovely pair on the left are stalkers, active in Fredericksburg. Readers with names, addresses and other useful details about them are welcome to post anonymous comments here. Medawar would also be interested to hear victims of this pair other than the lady who took this phonetrait. It would be interesting to know how far out of Fredericksburg their writ (if they are literate) runs. It would be helpful if anyone suggesting names states red or blue so we know which is which.

Markrepcarinabking

2011-09-21T23:48:00.002+01:00

The above "follower" has been blocked on suspicion of being some form of spam follower.
Unless Medawar receives an intelligent communication which convinces him that something other than spam was intended, that follower will remain blocked.

Fresh Slavery Arrests

2011-09-21T19:04:00.004+01:00

Three more people have been arrested in connection with slavery adn servitude offences at Green Acre caravan park in South West Bedfordshire. See Link.
So far, everyone ever arrested in England under the "Slavery and Servitude" Section 71 of the Coroner's and Justice Act, has been a member of the same, Connors, family.

However, it is becoming apparent from the testimony of liberated slaves, that some of them were traded, and had originally been abducted by persons unconnected with the Connors family. It isn't clear how effectively the new laws deal with the trading of persons for forced labour. The basic techniques employed, seem remarkably consistent regardless of who the slave-holders and traders are, and this would seem to indicate that the practice has been going on for long enough for "best" practice to be established and disseminated, albeit within a narrow community.

Medawar hopes that the Proceeds of Crime Act will be applied in all of these cases, because Section 71 appears to set a maximum prison term of 14-15 years, and some of the slaves have been held for longer than that. If there cannot be complete justice, there must be reparation.

Cocaine, Cartels and Vermin

2011-09-16T16:35:00.006+01:00

The people who committed this atrocity are apparently concerned that their good names will be sullied by allegations made by public-spirited bloggers.

Recently, Ms Cherie Booth QC, sitting as a Crown Court Recorder, came to the startling conclusion that a cocaine smuggler did not deserve a custodial sentence. (Fortunately, the court of appeal begged to differ.)

Quite apart from the fact that any Recorder whose son earns a living as a football agent really ought to declare a conflict of interest and decline to hear cases related to the supply of class A drugs, there's a whole raft of liberal opinion that seems completely oblivious to the nature of the trade which supplies them with a brief, sordid and never entirely satisfactory thrill. That, in fact, is the effect of the drug they take and not the fact that it's illegal: cocaine damages the parts of the brain associated with empathy. Shocking and awful as this picture is, no cokehead can look on it and feel anything but anger at the fact that someone finds fault with him and his habit.

It's psychosis in powder form: a way of leaving the human race.

New Tories: Corruption

2011-09-12T11:05:00.001+01:00

A further link from the Daily Telegraph for those who wonder why the New Tories are intent on destroying the country.

"My Subjects, Like Any Other"

2011-09-11T15:03:00.013+01:00

The words of Charles the Second, when asked about the legal status of slaves, former slaves and coloured people on St Helena and other colonies. Although Parliament likes to date the abolition of slavery from when it finally took action, a couple of centuries later, (and only after the High Court had, in 1773, made essentially the same ruling as Charles,) it was only the post civil war vanity of Parliament which prevented slavery being made illegal on the spot when Charles spoke, as he was being asked for his formal opinion on the law.

So how, then, do we react to the news that Bedfordshire Police have rescued two dozen men from forced labour and being detained against their will, for up to fifteen years, on a Traveller's Site in South West Bedfordshire, near the Buckinghamshire border?

See link
and indeed, link as the police now have their side of the story online.

Medawar thinks that any reaction other than cold fury is probably wrong.
If it hadn't been for Margaret Thatcher and Kenneth Baker suspending the old laws on slavery for some ill-defined European and UN action, which never amounted to anything except a green light to restart the slave trade, those arrested today would have been facing the death penalty if convicted.

For whatever reason, when the UN and European Commission first asked Great Britain to do away with the death penalty for aggravated trafficking, Jim Callaghan refused. (It is said that his words were "I am against the death penalty in principle, but I'm not silly enough to abolish it for pirates and slave-traffickers." Whether he used those exact words or not, this is undoubtedly a fair reflection of his thinking. Thatcher and Baker did not think at all: they merely gave into pressure from people who thought progress would be effected by "modernising" this brutal but effective part of English law.)

The death penalty is off the table, but this case already shows every sign of being at the most extreme end of the possible offenses under the more recent, 2010, anti-slavery laws. There must be no half-measures: if fairly convicted, the harshest possible sentence must be passed. It would be a terrible mistake for judges to hold a little bit back in case there is a worse offence sometime in the future, because that would invite just such an offence.

Britain was free of this scourge for more than a century precisely because the first few slavers to be sentenced, suffered the most brutal punishments the State could mete out. Slavery is a crime for calculating men, not sociopaths compelled by some internal disorder, and brutal deterrents demonstrably work with this crime. And, yes, it is worse than murder.

And it will be interesting to see if those guilty of this abomination, are part of the Traveller's groups who have been playing the victim to such perfection recently, aided by certain journalists, Bishops and actresses who seem to have, not rose-tinted glasses, but rose-tinted corneal grafts.

Most importantly, this link is to the official register of plot-owners at the site. The relevant entries are under Little Billington, Greenacres, Gypsy Lane. This is a document of public record and you are fully entitled to download and keep a copy.

Update:
Four men, all from the Connors family, have been charged. See link.
It is likely that more charges will materialize against these four, and against others higher up the food chain, in due course.

New Tories: The Enemies of England

2011-09-10T18:10:00.034+01:00

In the past few weeks, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, the Chancellor, George Osborne, and a junior minister who, frankly, deserves nothing but complete anonymity so that his brief political career can vanish from the memory of men, have been orchestrating a determined effort to so drastically redraft planning law, that elected local councils will be obliged, either by government inspectors or the courts, to approve practically any planning application which the applicant claims is of economic value. To this end, planning guidelines which are currently more than a thousand pages long, will be cut to an entirely arbitrary fifty pages.

Medawar is all in favour of "cutting out red tape", but there's a difference between concise legislation, which states Parliament's intent in a few words of clear and unmistakable meaning allowing no room for misinterpretation, and truncated legislation, which leaves everything important unstated or undefined and allows almost any self-serving interpretation to be placed on a document which no longer has a clear meaning or, indeed, any useful purpose other than the feeding of lawyers.

Because arbitrarily-truncated planning guidelines cannot clearly guide, any obviously destructive proposed developments which government planning inspectors actually reject, will invariably be reinstated through the courts, because the guidelines don't support any grounds for rejection clearly enough for a judge to over-ride the stated preference for development to take place. The guidelines may indeed contain the comforting suggestion that planning applications might be denied, in exceptional circumstances, but the fiddly definitions which would allow a judge to actually identify those circumstances are in the thousand pages being disposed of.

The existing planning guidelines run to more than a thousand pages, primarily because in the eighty odd years since the Greenbelt was devised, crooked property developers have been so inventive in their attempts to run rings around legislation meant for the long-term public good. If Property Developers as a class had tried nothing on, the guidelines would be no longer now than they were in 1927.

All this is being justified by invoking the current economic crisis, with the suggestion that dissenters are madmen threatening the economic recovery.

The Greenbelt's predecessor (urban development boundaries, determined locally by Urban District Councils) and other basic planning tools were introduced after the British General Strike and just before the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. They were not abandoned in those extremely hard economic times, because the Statesmen of the time saw that planning law would ensure that the country remained habitable for the long term, whilst they were trying to encourage short-term economic growth. Planning law was the safety net under the high wire that Chancellors Baldwin and Chamberlain were performing on. Planning law takes care of the long term while Statesmen and Captains of Industry deal with any crisis.

We do not have Statesmen and Captains of Industry these days: we have career politicians, property developers and oligarchs, and there is no comparison.

The greenbelt was partly a conscious rebuff on the part of Thomas Sharp, to the "Garden City Movement" which believed that if developments were made leafy enough, destroyed countryside wouldn't be missed. The recent vogue for "eco-towns" and "sustainable development" suggests that this error has not entirely died yet. Sharp saw that the countryside was something distinct from the town, that it had a unique value of its own, and that it was in the interests of both town and countryside for the distinction to remain. One of the important differences between the two is the timescale: the English countryside has been shaped by the activities of man as surely as any new town, such as Milton Keynes, but that process has taken thousands of years and in most of the British Isles, it is perfectly possible for an informed and caring eye perceive the entire progression from the copper age to the early twenty-first century. Towns can keep an identity for centuries, or they can be transformed beyond recognition in a couple of decades, but the countryside is where thousands of years of gradual change can be seen. The importance of this to human life and understanding transcends all immediate and political argument, or ought to. The Statesmen who saw the United Kingdom out of the Great Depression were prepared to accept this, the career politicians who are dabbing ineffectually at the current financial crisis (which they largely made for themselves), show no such wisdom.

As with the Cameron government's attempts to do away with the Forestry Commission, (from which they were forced to retreat, still protesting that their inane policy was somehow right but "misunderstood" by us, the little people,) the current policy is the product of "advice" from highly partial sources which deliberately excludes any counter-argument, sound advice or even dissenting opinion, from any other source. The genesis of the new planning laws may be close to that forestry policy in more than one way, in that the same very narrow interests might profit from it. A recent article in the Daily Telegraph offers a potential mechanism whereby a bad idea which benefits only a handful of extremely wealthy property developers, might be the only one that actually reaches the ears of ministers. Lobbyists don't just pay political parties and ministerial advisers to put their client's views to the minister: they pay for the minister not to hear any others.

Another article, in The Guardian, will give Medawar's readers a shrewd idea of why the Liberal Democrats, the Conservative Party's idealistic and "green" coalition partners, have sabotaged almost every Conservative policy goal, except this one.

Quite apart from issues of the Greenbelt and the countryside, the truncated planning guidelines will basically leave it up to market forces to prevent a property developer building houses on sites which will inevitably endanger anyone who lives there. This is based on a complete misunderstanding of how market forces work: they do not require developers to refrain from building houses which will kill their customers, market forces merely require the developer to get the customer's bank draft into his first account, and then transferred overseas, before it rains.

Medawar would like to close with his own observation, which is different from, but not in opposition to, the theories of Thomas Sharp. Landscapes are not always valuable because they have an immediate and striking beauty on the large scale, which would gain them the status of "Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty" which the Prime Minister is claiming will lead to protection even under the new laws. (The Slad Valley is a designated AONB, the setting of Laurie Lee's iconic novel, Cider with Rosie, and it's now going to be built on by one of the developers which has given the Prime Minister's party money.)

Sometimes, the value of a landscape lies in all the information about ourselves, going back thousands of years, that it contains. Sometimes, the value of a landscape is in the way it inspired brave men to sacrifice their lives for something greater, especially in the fight against Nazism. And most of all, the value of a landscape is sometimes in the very small things it contains and gives a home to, which developers and the new breed of "conservative" politicians simply pay no heed to. As was said when John Major's government slid into an abyss of sleaze and incompetence: these are conservatives who will not conserve anything!

Ted Williams Tunnel

2011-09-10T12:34:00.004+01:00

This is one of three large and hugely expensive road tunnels under Boston harbour, and, indeed, under a lot of buildings and other transport infrastructure on shore, too. See link.

Medawar is concerned that recent intelligence about three potential truck bombers having entered the United States, is being too readily interpreted as meaning that an attack on Washington or New York is imminent. It might be, but the late Osama bin Laden was a civil engineer, from a family of civil engineers, and if he had a hand in selecting the target, one with a spectacular payoff that would be linked directly to his own engineering expertise, would seem more likely. There are also three bombers, three tunnels. This is the way Osama's mind worked until the lumps of lead intruded into it.

One hopes that the high level of alert in new York and Washington does not leave Boston undefended, or that city might suddenly and painfully discover what it feels like to be on the receiving end of terrorism after so many years of allowing numbskulls to put fifty dollar bills in the NORAID bucket to knowingly fund similar atrocities across the Atlantic.

Hopefully, a modicum of alertness might spare Boston from ever having to find out what it was like in Woolwich, Birmingham, Manchester, Docklands, The Baltic Exchange, Omargh....

Judit Nadal, Inquest Findings

2011-09-01T11:10:00.005+01:00

This link is to the Daily Mail report on the inquest into the death of Judit Nadal, a researcher at Imperial College, London.
It seems that she did make a mistake of some kind, shortly before her electric car was hit by a much heavier Skoda. The Gee Whiz Electric car was turning across the path of the Skoda and the broadside impact tore the Gee Whiz in half. Which makes argument as to whether Judit Nadal was wearing a seat-belt or not a little academic.

The Coronor and Investigating Officer make some comments as to the lightness of the Gee Whiz.
Actually, it's more to do with strength and weight distribution. The cockpit of a Formula One racing car weighs less than a Gee Whiz, but if a driver stays in it, he can survive enormous impacts which send the cockpit safety cell spinning through the air.

The Gee Whiz is very light, but within that light weight, is a very heavy battery pack, which concentrates nearly all of the vehicle's mass under the back seat behind the driver. The photograph of the wreckage clearly shows that the structure failed, almost neatly, along the front of the battery. Had the light structure not contained the battery, the heavier Skoda might simply have knocked it spinning across the junction. This wouldn't necessarily be survivable; that would depend on the nature of subsequent impacts, especially if this involved a still larger vehicle which might ride over the Gee Whiz. But still, surviving the first impact would in most cases leave the occupant facing smaller second and subsequent impacts, so it would be a worthwhile improvement of the odds. Especially as a structure which survives the initial massive impact, can also be made to shed kinetic energy in s series of glancing impacts as it bounces around. This is why the crash of a modern Formula One car looks terrible, but is survivable. It's meant to spin around the landscape, so that it loses energy, with glancing impacts on a different bit of structure each time.

There is not just a need for the structure of lightweight electric vehicles to be made stronger and "smarter" (more thought given to where the strength is), but also for the mass of the power source to be spread over the vehicle. It appears the Nadal's car was hit at a position and angle which ideally exploited the mass and strength of the battery to shear the vehicle in half. If the front of the Gee Whiz had shared more of the mass, it might not have been cut in half.

This is an argument for electric vehicle development to centre on super-capacitors rather than environmentally questionable lithium batteries, let along nickel-based batteries which are proven environmental disasters.

Super capacitors are more efficient, in that pretty well all the electricity put in can be got out, and they can absorb massive surges of power, allowing much more effective use of regenerative braking. They are also much lighter for any given amount of energy stored, which would allow more of the car's weight to be structure than battery. And they do not suffer from such a rapid loss of storage capacity as chemical batteries.

But the prime virtue of super-capacitors is that they are made of carbon nano-fibres and they are themselves very strong structural components. This, coupled with the fact that they can last the economic life of the car, means that they can be used throughout the structure, making everything stronger and avoiding any single concentration of weight that concentrates the force of an impact on what becomes a line of failure.

David Kelly: Application for Judicial Review

2011-08-27T14:31:00.007+01:00

This link is to a site soliciting donations towards the costs of legal action, by a group of concerned medical professionals, to secure a formal inquest (scandalously denied by devious and wicked machinations of the Blair government and apathetic connivance of the Cameron government) into the death, on Harrowdown Hill or quite possibly elsewhere, of Dr David Kelly.

As before, the photograph is of Gruinard Island, as a reminder that Dr Kelly was a public servant of very great value, who did far more for his country than any of his detractors and persecutors within Downing Street.

The first step towards securing an inquest, is an application for judicial review of the Attorney General's perverse decision not to ask the Oxfordshire Coroner to hold one, as has been the normal practice in practically every other sudden or unexplained death in England for many centuries. It is expected that the judicial review will incur legal costs around £50,000, although if the review is granted and the Attorney General does not expend huge sums of public money defending the indefensible and merely delaying the inevitable, the judicial review may be the only adversarial legal action that is necessary.

It has been hinted that there are delicate matters of national security involved. Medawar does not believe that there is anything in this, other than a desire to conceal possible illegal actions by agents of foreign states, in order that the government may appease those states. "National Security" is in all cases better served by standing up to murder and blackmail rather than by giving in to it in craven fashion. States which are allowed get away with murder come to believe that they will be allowed to get away with military intimidation and even conquest.

The medical professionals involved are tackling only the medical evidence, from a medical standpoint, and Medawar has always sought to give them the elbow-room needed to do this. However, whereas Lord Hutton's inquiry was presented with partial, incomplete and possibly highly unreliable medical evidence, the evidence of a very expert forensic botanist who made detailed investigations at the scene and on the body, was not heard or even referred to, at all. Either by the Hutton inquiry or any other official investigation.

In many cases of unlawful killing in recent years, the forensic botanists have produced by far the most important and most reliable evidence of all, and it is now normal practice to give them the highest priority access to crime scenes and the body of any deceased person. Medawar's view is that, especially where the medical experts question whether Dr Kelly died where his body was discovered, or even anywhere near, the forensic botany evidence will be the most important.

It is also important to note that the Hutton inquiry did not hear any evidence under oath, therefore there is no legal sanction whatever for any person who deliberately lied to the inquiry, or omitted evidence. Several incidences of false evidence are now known, including a police officer who admits to having lied to conceal the presence of a third party who attended the scene with the officer and his partner. This was supposedly to "protect" a trainee officer, but since there is no reason why a trainee officer should not have accompanied his experienced mentors to a crime scene, to observe proper procedure, it is ridiculous to conceal the trainee's presence if this explanation is really true. The officer's actions make sense only if the third party's presence would seem to the general public (and possibly the courts) to be inappropriate, and that would only be the case if they were not an officer at all, but some other category of person.

Only a proper coroner's court can examine these witnesses under oath, and therefore under strict legal sanction for lies and omissions, and therefore, in a case where it is already established that people are lying, only a coroner's court has the tools to access the truth.

There must be a full inquest, with a jury, where the liars are made to tell the truth (and all of it!) and the coroner calls the most competent witness with the professional tools to answer the most pertinent questions, and that would be the forensic botanist.

And as for Iraq and all the conspiracy theories surrounding Iraq:

All of the most important tasks of Dr Kelly's career, concerned not the WMD programmes of Iraq, Syria and Libya, but the much larger and better-resourced WMD programmes of the Soviet Union and more latterly, the former Soviet states which inherited these programmes, sites, hardware, software and bacterial and viral cultures. If it does transpire that Dr Kelly was unlawfully killed, the murderer will most likely be found in connection with the most important matters of his career and not the least or necessarily the most recent.

Update:
Solicitors have been formally instructed to apply for judicial review, and the appeal for funds had, last time Medawar checked, raised £33,000 of an estimated £40,000 cost. Seven grand more, please!

There is going to be an inquest into the death of Gareth Williams, too, but some "senior police source" is still briefing the press with absurdities to try and prevent any objective and rational inquiry. However, only the Daily Express is still willing to print this person's dissembling and the Daily Mail and even the Sun have ceased to even acknowledge that the "death by his own perversion" line is still being peddled. The officer involved may soon find that no journalists at all are willing to pay for his lunches and dinners in return for being told improbable and grossly defamatory lies. The reason for this is simple: the officer's conduct is likely to pervert the course of justice, assisting him by reproducing his falsehoods in print could make the journalist and his publisher co-conspirators in that perversion of justice, this can carry any penalty up to and including life imprisonment. It isn't at all surprising that journalists don't appreciate being used as mouthpieces for this kind of campaign!

However, there is still no sign of any progress whatsoever towards an honest and open-minded investigation into the suspicious death of Dr Kelly's former research student, Dr Timothy Hampton, in Vienna. Medawar suspects that this may prove to be at least as important as Dr Kelly's death. A link to former Soviet WMD programmes can't be ruled out there, either.

Diplomatic Immunity and Murder

2011-08-14T12:35:00.004+01:00

This link is to an article that was published in the Mail on Sunday, on the 14th of August. Medawar has taken the liberty of reproducing the above crucial photograph from the article, in case improper pressure from Downing Street or what's left of the former leadership of the Metropolitan Police, causes the paper to withdraw this article from its webpage.

The BMW Series 3, diplomatic registration 251D198 was seen fifty yards from Mr Williams' flat, the day after he was last seen outside the flat.

Another BMW series 3, registration 251D306, was seen in a multi-storey car park behind the flat, the occupant, a brown haired-man, got out to pay the parking charge, but wasn't seen to go anywhere.

Both sightings were made by a Russian emigré with a very healthy regard for his own safety, which causes him to carefully document the presence of Russian Embassy cars near his home. It is unusual for Russian Embassy cars to appear in this part of London, and these particular ones were not seen there before or since the week of Mr Williams' murder.

Medawar has already commented on the fact that Mr Williams was working on ways to track illicit movements of money (now hitting £18bn a month) from Russia to London and presumably beyond. The article in this link gives some idea as to why these money movements are important, and who might be on the receiving end.

Leaving the EU

2011-08-07T17:03:00.006+01:00

This is a link to a petition on the UK government website, calling for Parliament to debate an orderly withdrawal from the EU.

It currently (7th of August) appears to be gathering only about 2,000 signatures a day, which may reflect the capacity of the server rather than the level of public interest. According to opinion polls, about 80% of the UK electorate supports the broad aims of the petition, even including nearly half of all Liberal Democrat members, but almost no Liberal Democrat party officials, MPs or Parliamentary candidates, which dislocation has interesting implications for the party's future.

This is not the only petition on the site, where results are somewhat askew compared to the response one would expect from the British public. Regardless of whether one supports a particular petition or not, Medawar hopes that the published results are indeed honest. Because if they are being manipulated, as night follows day, the manipulators will be found out, and given the current mood of the British public towards the political elite, they won't get off at all lightly.

High Speed 2: Vanity, Ignorance and the Chilterns

2011-07-03T10:53:00.018+01:00

There are some non-ideological economic fundamentals that are the same for almost any ideological and social model. The only exceptions are completely nihilistic regimes that are actually trying to erase humanity's presence from the Earth.

And yet, economists and their political sponsors have a weakness for economic theories so detached from the fundamentals that the result resembles a "Breatharian" cult, whereby meditation, self-discipline and enlightenment are supposed to allow the devout to live for months or years without food.

All economic activity consists of doing something to a resource to make it worth more. Even in Aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies, gathered food will be processed to make it more nutritious when eaten, or to preserve it so that it can be carried to sustain people on a journey. These goods are not necessarily exchanged for money (the society might not recognize money as a concept) and they may not even be traded at all. But if something is being processed to make it more useful, that is economic activity. That's the utter baseline of the economy. Can even political economists ignore this? Yes they can.

"Knowledge-based economies" are one way in which the fundamentals can be ignored. This isn't inherent in the concept, which has virtue, it's just that a combination of wishful thinking, laziness and vanity, can lead to policy-makers becoming indifferent to the nation's access to resources and the means to process them. If the real world is being engaged with, a "knowledge-based economy" enhances our access to resources and our means to process those resources to make them more useful, making such work more efficient and expanding the number of different ways in which something can become more useful.

If the real world is not being engaged with, then a "knowledge-based economy" is just a totem or idol: "we don't need resources or the means to process them, because we've got knowledge". Give them a few years, and they will be asking a wooden figure called "Knowledge" to rise and fill their granaries and treasuries for them. An early symptom of this might be an unhealthy concentration on the needs of the "wise" (or "the rich") at the expense of taking care of resources and those who process or manage those resources to make them more useful. No matter what resources might exist, those accessible to us at any one time are finite, and if we expend an excess of resources in ways that do not in turn enhance either our access to resources or our ability to make more of them, then we reduce those resources and we diminish our ability to process them into more useful forms. We become impoverished.

Limiting the resources expended on pleasing the elite is not an ideological preference: it is frequently a matter of life and death. Ancient Greece survived the Persian onslaught only because the Spartan elite put themselves in harm's way, when the elites of every other Greek tribe insisted that their festival rituals were more important than making any preparation to resist an invading army that was already on Greek soil. It wasn't a case of other Greeks not being willing to march with the Spartans, it was largely a case of their not being allowed to, because the festivals were an expression of the elite's importance and must therefore come before anything else, even the survival of Greece...

A resource may be all kinds of things, and in the case of the Persian invasion of Greece, time was the resource being most seriously squandered. In modern Britain, as elsewhere in the modern world, investment is squandered because the elite values the convenience of the elite above the needs of the nation. It is not utterly venal, but a sufficiently ignorant and insular elite is generally incapable of perceiving for itself what the true needs of the nation might be, and highly resistant to being told, either by someone from outside the elite or by a dissident from within the elite. (Who departs the elite the moment he differs with it.) The elite directs the resources of the nation towards its own whim and convenience, because those are the limits of its perceptions.

Because, for a generation or more, resources have been diverted to ends which do not even replace those resources, still less enhance them, investment in Britain has become extremely scarce and correspondingly precious. The scarcer investment gets, the more it matters when a given sum is misdirected and misapplied. Britain can no longer afford to mis-invest a single billion. (Neither can the United States, although the folks on the hill clearly do not see it yet.)

The available investment in energy is being squandered, because a system of subsidy channels that investment into methods of energy generation which do not work, but which meet a need of the elite: that it should appear to be addressing the issue of global warming. Appearance is all. Investment in other new methods of energy generation is limited to non-existant. The untried methods might or might not all work, but it is certain that if they are never tried, they will never work. However, as long as the non-working methods are accepted as being a solution to something or other, diverting billions of investment in that direction every year satisfies the elite, even as it impoverishes the nation.

Energy is a resource, and it is also part of our means to process other resources to make them more useful. Transport, too, is a fundamental economic resource. Otherwise, there is no way to bring other resources together, or to allow people access those resources in order to process them to make them more useful. Indeed, in many cases, "processing something to make it more useful" may be defined as simply moving it from somewhere it is moderately useful or not useful at all, to somewhere it is needed and therefore very useful.

Now, the distinction between working and non-working transport systems is a little bit less obvious than the difference between a power station that produces power intermittently and one which produces power on demand.

A true knowledge-based economy that engages with the real world, requires transport that moves labour and resources so that "knowledge" can help the labour process those resources into more useful forms. A false knowledge-based economy, destined to sink into idolatory or a secular equivalent, requires transport for the "knowledgable" alone. The elite must be moved ever faster, in ever greater comfort, whilst labour and material resources are moved grudgingly, if at all.
Knowledge itself can now travel at the speed of light: there is no practical benefit in giving preference to the physical movement of the "knowledgable". The quotation marks are there because in this kind of voodoo economy, the "knowledgable" are in reality ignorant of and insulated from, the real world.

This is where the proposed "High Speed 2" new railway link between London and Birmingham comes in. After denying funds for everything from encouraging school children to stay in education till at least the age of eighteen, to allowing the Royal Navy even the most basic means of projecting air-power ashore in precisely the way that is needed in Libya, the current British government blithley proposes to invest, in this single railway, the sum of £34bn if you believe their own estimates, and up to £60bn if you give the cynics any credence at all.

This rail link, despite cutting through one of the most densely populated regions in the world, will not have enough stops to play any role in local commuting, and indeed, is designed as far as possible NOT to serve this need. Medawar predicts that some factory or shop worker will be enterprising enough to find a way of getting to work on HS2, but that's not what it's intended for. (Perhaps by taking a second job on the train, as a cleaner or steward, a worker will be able to reach his regular place of work?)

Nor is the HS2 line intended to carry a single wagon load of freight during its projected sixty-year operational lifespan.

The sole purpose of the HS2 railway line, is to carry the business and political elites between two fairly adjacent major cities, a predicted 26 minutes faster than the trains on the existing rail routes between those two cities -which will still be quite a lot slower than competing low-cost airlines, which are also likely to offer significantly cheaper fares.

Tellingly, the official economic case in favour of this massive investment, assumes that the average salary of passengers will be £70,000 in 2011 sterling. Does £70,000 sound like any average citizen that you know? The economic case also assumes that passengers on a train do nothing economically productive or necessary while on the train, and that they will immediately do something economically active and necessary during their extra 26 minutes at their destination. Neither thing is the experience of businessmen who regularly travel by train. They read letters and use their laptops on the train, they eat, drink and rest on the train: time on the train is often valued as a distraction-free opportunity to finish awkward items of work, or prepare to make the most of whatever meeting they are travelling to. When reaching their destination quickly takes precedence over these advantages of train travel, businessmen take a scheduled airline service, (this can cost as little as £59 London to Birmingham) and the uber-elite will use a private plane or helicopter.

And yet, rarely does a businessman or politician travel to a city and spend every last half hour of his time there doing something economically productive.

Even allowing these two highly questionable assumptions, the best any independent verification of the official case can come up with, is that the economic benefit of HS2 will return 47% of the projected £34bn cost. The economic benefits of countryside, way of life and existing economic activity that will be disrupted or destroyed by the construction of HS2, seems to be valued at or close to, zero. The route is through a densely populated region (Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Warwickshire), the adverse economic impact of the construction phase will certainly not be neglible!

Taking the case for HS2 pretty much at face value, the nation's resources will be reduced by £18bn. Allowing a realistic figure for economic disruption in the many population centres along the route, and the absence of local stops means that few of these populations centres derive ANY direct benefit from HS2, it looks as if we might be lucky if the net loss to the nation's resources of HS2 is limited to the £34bn it is supposed to cost to build and equip. HS2 has the potential to show a negative return: reducing the national economy by more than the money invested in it.

There is no prospect of an intangible benefit to even things up, because every aspect of the design and technology is to be imported and already exists. The nearest we're likely to get to a "technological breakthrough" for this £34bn, will be the waiting room seats.

What is anomalous to the point of being offensive, is the way that whatever is in the way of the construction tends to be assessed as being of minimal value the way it is. This kind of bias drives a very high proportion of the elite's worst decisions. The other great offense, is that the case for these great projects is only presented in a way that tests it against its own internal assumptions: it is never, ever, tested against an alternative way of investing the same (or much less) money.

Medawar believes that it would not be an unsurmountable challenge, to identify five more pressing investment projects in Britain's railway network, each one of which would yield more than the £16bn of benefits claimed for HS2 over a 60 year operational life, and yet all five together, would cost less to implement and operate.

Firstly, it probably only costs £3M to pass a simple piece of legislation through Parliament. What is needed is an act of Parliament repealing and forbidding any law or agreement which prevents services on the existing Marylebone to Wrexham line from competing with other lines and services via the West Midlands. Currently, the Department of Transport protests about limited capacity from London to Birmingham, and simultaneously presides over a regulatory structure which prevented Marylebone to be used in competition to, (or in support of) Virgin's services from Euston station. Delete Richard Branson's unjustified sweetheart deal, and the basis for more capacity is there.

Secondly, invest up to £3bn on each of the existing railways lines from London to or around Birmingham, there are several of these. Most are capable of capacity and speed improvements by removing bottlenecks and by adding stretches of extra track along existing lines, so that freight and commuter trains can be moved out of the way of high speed intercity trains, without actually having to stop and wait. There are many stretches of line in Britain, not just near Birmingham, where the permanent way for such track is already there, and the extra tracks were simply removed as a short-term (and false) economy measure after the Second World War.

Some of the bottlenecks involve track that contorts itself to avoid an obstacle that is no longer there anyway, or which can more easily be dealt with by modern technology than was possible when the line was first designed in the Edwardian era.

Were a critic to point out that this might cost £15bn, they would be revealing just how many railway lines there already are between London and the Midlands. Making all of them work to modern standards would yield much more capacity, for commuters and freight as well as high-speed elite passengers, than building another, single-purpose, line.

Thirdly, we must recognize that the biggest problem with all of Britain's transport policies are the words "London to..." The most expedient way of removing the traffic congestion between London and Birmingham that afflict all modes of transport, road, rail and air, is to provide an efficient rail route between Bristol and Manchester. This does not need to be, and should not be, a hot-shot single purpose high speed line, merely a bottleneck-free version of what's already there, with a new tunnel under the river Severn, and as much extra parallel track as the existing permanent way will support, to allow freight and passenger services to co-exist.

If the rail route between Bristol and Manchester were of the same quality as the one between London and York (that's about the same distance) then we'd see a far healthier distribution of population and economic activity around the country, and we'd also see a lot of the heavy freight traffic through the Midlands disappear. Nearly all the freight on Britain's road and rail networks arrives by sea: if the railways out of Bristol worked better, more of that sea-traffic would arrive at Avonmouth and other south-western ports.

Fourthly, lunatic decisions are already being taken in order to divert all available investment to HS2. Perhaps the least noticed but most destructive of which is to confine the modernisation of railways in East Anglia to a modern "Thameslink" engineering standard, to lines south of Cambridge. This, coupled with a massive investment in new trains for this standard, eliminates the possibility of through trains from London, via Cambridge, to anywhere beyond Cambridge. The same government which trumpets the fact that East Anglia is the fastest-growing region in the country, is determined that modern rail travel will end in the centre of that region, trapping that growth in East Hertfordshire and Essex, basically.

Over time, because only older trains will be able to use the unmodernised network to the North of Cambridge, not only will passengers have to change trains there, but the services in the North of East Anglia will become increasingly costly to maintain. The investment will always be out of sync. And this includes services to significant sea ports, such as King's Lynn. Ports in the North of East Anglia handle relatively little freight, other than timber imports, which are considerable and vital, but they are the construction and service ports for all of the offshore windfarms, gasfields and oilfields in the Southern North Sea. Government transport policy is cutting the throats of ports upon which its energy policy depends!

The rail network to the North of Cambridge must be included in the investment to produce a common engineering standard across East Anglia and the East Midlands, or there's no discernible point in that investment! At the same time, freight links to King's Lynn must be fully restored and upgraded.

This takes us back to the "Beeching Cuts". Although railway enthusiasts traditionally hate Beeching for closing lines, what he was attempting to do, was identify a network that the country could afford to upgrade to a modern common engineering standard -and discard what couldn't be modernised. He knew that piecemeal modernization would be worse than useless: everything had to move together and to the same standard. Of course, what happened when Dr Beeching had made his cuts, is that self-interested lobbying from the elite promptly sabotaged the modernisation and commonisation programme that was supposed to go with the cuts. So what he did looks like random savagery, because its beneficial purpose was thwarted.

Unless the whole of East Anglia and the East Midlands is included in the upgrade to a common engineering standard, the effect will be to ensure the eventual closure of the unimproved parts of the network. Far from enhancing rail travel in the region, the partial modernisation will eliminate rail travel altogether from half of the region. This is precisely what Dr Beeching made huge and painful sacrifices to avoid. It is the worst outcome possible -and it is being contemplated simply in order to feed investment to HS2.

The fifth project would be a wholesale and thorough improvement in rail freight capacity and efficiency between all the "middle" East Anglian seaports: Harwich, Felixstowe, Ipswich and Yarmouth, and Peterborough (and thereby London, York and Edinburgh) and the Rugby railfreight terminal. The alternative is not merely the currently-needed £1.6bn capacity improvement to the A14 trunk road, but an ongoing need to increase the capacity of this highway by a similar amount, every five years for the foreseeable future.

All this could be done for less than £34bn. Any of them would benefit the country more than the hugely expensive single-purpose HS2 line.

(The photograph at the top of this article is of typical Chiltern Hills flora and fauna. The sort of thing which supporters of HS2 believe is worth absolutely nothing at all. Medawar doesn't argue that it has infinite worth, but it does have a worth, and that shouldn't be wiped off the balance sheet.)

Christopher Shale

2011-06-26T19:01:00.003+01:00

A leading Conservative Party figure has been found dead at the Glastonbury Festival, on the very day that this article appeared in the Mail on Sunday, based on documents he had written about the future direction of the party.

Medawar thinks that Mr Shale's final thoughts deserve to be taken proper notice of, and not buried under a thick blanket of warm words from his increasingly heedless former protegé.

Gareth Williams and The (Russian) Texas Bankroll

2011-06-26T18:47:00.005+01:00

This article in the Daily Mail suggests that before Mr Williams was murdered, he was working on a method and software to enable the intelligence services to track money being moved to and through London, by the Russian mafia.

To this article Medawar would add the following two observations:

Firstly: any chain of money-laundering transactions with the Russian Mafia at one end, tends these days to have the Israeli Mafia at the other end. The Russian Mafia's cosy relationship with the FSB and "United Russia" is mirrored by the Israeli Mafia's relationship with Mossad and many prominent members of Likud.

Secondly, and far more importantly: London is experiencing an ongoing property price boom in the middle of a global credit crunch, recession and debt crisis. This is driven by money coming from Russia. The experience of Dublin and Miami, both of which have experienced similar property bubbles, started by an influx of money from organized crime and sustained by investment lemmings, is that the organized crime figures whose cash drives the boom, know from the outset that it is unsustainable. Estate agents, bankers and politicians, never know this and always think that their own genius has created a golden paradigm, where unearned wealth will multiply permanently. Organized crime knows a shower of mugs when it sees one.

Some time before the bubble reaches bursting point, organized crime will stop pouring its money into London, except for a relative trickle on high-prestige projects to keep the estate agents feeling good. The lemmings will keep investing for a while longer. During this period, organized crime will either quietly sell nearly all the property it has bought, borrow hugely against it, or, very naughtily, do both at once. There will be a sudden and massive reversal of the money flow accompanied by great woe, because far more will flow out, due to fraudulent loans, than ever flowed in. Meanwhile, some other city, possibly in China or Argentina, will experience a massive influx of "investment" and the local politicians there will think they've hit the jackpot through their own brilliance.

It is a sophisticated variant of the "Texas Bankroll" scam, whereby genuine notes are peeled off a huge roll of money in a bar, to buy drinks all round, gamble with, the roll's owner gracefully losing and paying up with only mild complaints. Then a really big transaction or gamble will be proposed with what's left of the roll. Only, the "winner" will find himself holding a roll of writing paper with just one fifty dollar bill on the outside. Just about all the real cash or items of value in the bar will have already left, in the saddle bags of the generous stranger who came in with the Texas Bankroll.

The Greek debt crisis isn't the main danger to the British economy at the moment. The biggest danger is that the Russian mafia is about to do to Britain's economy, and especially London, precisely what Greece's own mafia have already done to their own economy and Athens.

If Gareth Williams was tracing the transactions involved in this, there was an obvious danger of his alerting politicians and financial regulators before the scam was complete. He was a lone Spartan in the pass, and he deserves a lot better than systematic efforts by unidentified "police" sources to smear him as a pervert.

An Invaluable Public Servant

2011-06-09T15:13:00.016+01:00

(This photograph, of Gruinard Island, is by Kevin Walsh, of Oxford, who is not responsible for any of the following text. Medawar hopes this attributes the photograph as required by the licence which Mr Walsh has kindly granted to the world to use it.)

Today (9th of June 2011), the Attorney General of England, Mr Dominic Grieve QC MP, has told Parliament that he sees no need for there to be any proper inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly, and that he finds the evidence that Dr Kelly committed suicide to be "very strong". At no time in the history of Coroner's courts in England, has the subjective perception by an official that the evidence made a particular verdict a likely outcome of an inquest, been accepted as a legally valid reason for not holding such an inquest. Nor is it all usual for anyone except the coroner to decide whether or not to hold an inquest.

A coroner's court is different from any other court in two respects: inquest findings, in the form of a verdict or narrative, are a finding of fact and not guilt or liability -and the findings of an inquest are not the sole or even the primary reason for holding one. The public examination of evidence, under oath but also under privilege to stop the truth being used against someone who tells it, the testing of that evidence by counsel for interested parties and by the coroner, the comparison of evidence and testimony from divers sources, are an end in themselves and definitively in the public interest.

The Hutton Inquiry did not test any of the evidence or testimony, none of which was presented under oath. Evidence from official sources was largely accepted at face value and read into the record. Including evidence from a police officer who now admits lying to conceal the presence of a third officer when he testified that he and one colleague attended the scene where Dr Kelly's body was discovered.

The Hutton Inquiry did not call many of the most expert and important witnesses: most conspicuous by her absence was a forensic botanist; normally the most competent authority on where the deceased might have been prior to death -and in this instance, Medawar believes, one of the most competent forensic authorities in the country.

It is impossible to share Mr Grieve's supine contentment with the inquiry as a substitute for an inquest, and it's certainly an abuse of the English language to describe that inquiry as being as good as an inquest, which in effect is what he did today. Evidence was not tested, false evidence from a police officer was not noticed, challenged or punished, and whole sweeping categories of evidence, such as forensic botany, (customarily relied on to establish the truth about locations and movement history) were excluded altogether, without explanation.

In fact, the only normally acceptable reason to delay an inquest, is to allow the police and other authorities to complete a criminal investigation and prosecution. Since a criminal case would require the rigorous examination of much of the evidence which the Hutton Inquiry accepted at face value, or ignored completely -and because of this, a criminal case might satisfy the public interest in a way that neither Lord Hutton's Inquiry nor Mr Grieve's fag-packet review of it, possibly can.

This brings us to the greatest misapprehension surrounding the David Kelly case: for there to be a crime that can be brought to court, there has to be specific evidence of unlawful killing. Even many of those calling for a formal inquest, including Dr Stephen Frost QC, appear to have fallen for this. It simply isn't true.

Persons who discover a dead body are legally obliged to report the matter to the local coroner, promptly and accurately. Any misrepresentation, wilful omission or trans location of evidence, including the body itself, is a crime. Any wilful action on the part of anyone thereafter, which tends to prevent or hinder the detection and prosecution of that crime, is "conduct tending to pervert the course of justice" or "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice."

If Dr Kelly died by suicide, accident or natural causes, but in a location or manner other than which was reported, a crime was committed there and then, and any subsequent attempt to conceal that fact in turn, was also a crime. As both Lord Archer and Mr Jonathan Aitken have proved, in far less serious circumstances, perverting the course of justice is a crime for which even cabinet ministers can be convicted and jailed. Precisely because the Hutton Inquiry was given a non-judicial status, there was no oath, but no privilege either, so nobody involved in that inquiry would actually be immune from prosecution for perverting the course of justice or other offences.

Those campaigning now for an inquest might be heartened to read that Medawar expects that they will eventually get one. The problem lies with "eventually" because the government can spend unlimited amounts of public money delaying this for as long as the higher courts will allow, which will make any subsequent criminal prosecutions very difficult indeed.

However, whilst a long-delayed inquest might derail a criminal prosecution, the reverse is rarely true, which is why they normally occur in the order of criminal case first and then the inquest. Indeed, a criminal case, having both a prosecution and a defence actively discovering and presenting evidence, can set the stage nicely for a formal inquest to establish the definitive truth for the public, and historical, record.

The other argument in favour of a couple of swift private criminal prosecutions to break the logjam of evidence withheld and ignored, is that individuals, especially those in positions of authority and trust, must be held to account for their actions. Medawar isn't interested in "conspiracy" as such, other than where that is a legal description on a charge sheet. The only way to fight conspiracies in the first place, is to hold individuals to account for their own actions, and nine times out of ten, that is what any conspiracy is intended to avoid in the first place.

Sometimes, there is only evidence available to prosecute one individual or two out of many who might be involved in a hypothetical conspiracy. This is only a problem if one is obsessed with the conspiracy itself. If one puts the conspiracy to one side, to deal with the actions of individuals as evidence emerges, then things acquire a natural order and progress can be made before the "whole picture" can be seen. And in the end, justice can only be served by holding individuals accountable, anyway.

An inquest isn't there for "justice", we hold them because human beings are not expendable machines or puppets that can be discarded. We have a duty to account for every unnatural death, simple as that. Inquests are the standard way of doing this and there is no compelling need for there to be an exception, especially not in a case of the greatest possible public concern. The inquest has to happen, but it can come later.

For now, there is apparently incontestable evidence that one junior police officer gave a false account, and allowed a still unknown colleague to conceal the fact that he had been one of the first policemen on the scene. The doctors and lawyers pursuing an eventual inquest, have every right to bring a private prosecution in the meantime, either for "conduct tending to pervert the course of justice" or the lesser charge of "wilful misconduct in a public office."

There is also alleged to be evidence that a much more senior officer, an Assistant Chief Constable, also misled the public and key officials, and may have misdirected inquiries being carried out by his subordinates and various Home Office experts. If that evidence is indeed available and compelling, then the ACC, too, could be the subject of a private prosecution for the same charges.

Private prosecutions usually require the prosecuting party to have a legitimate interest in the case: Dr David Kelly was a internationally famous expert in microbiology, who taught and furthered the careers of other important experts, such as Dr Timothy Hampton. He made safe biological warfare test ranges dating from the second world war and earlier, he detected and helped bring an end to a treaty-violating programme by the Soviets to weaponize the Smallpox virus, which was a far greater threat to our national security than anything found or suspected in Iraq ever was. His career, had it continued to the present day, was highly likely to bring benefits to the whole of British society, and beyond. This man was of value to all of us, we all have an legitimate interest in his case.

This isn't an attempt, either, to single out and persecute two individuals, it is merely the start of a vital process of holding every individual to account for his or her own actions. If it is done consistently enough, and fairly enough, this process will free us from all conspiracy and all fear of conspiracy, because there is no point to any conspiracy at all if the individuals involved will inevitably be called to individual account.

The Perils of Living In Tony Blair's Old Constituency

2011-05-19T19:14:00.003+01:00

For anyone who believes that Antony Charles Lynton Blair is a good man and a "pretty straight kind of guy", here is a link to a blog about organized harassment in his former constituency, his constituency party officials appearing to be amongst those doing the organizing. Strangely, for a man who made anti-racism so much a part of his mission, there's a strong racist element to some of the harassment practiced by his former goons.

Global TAC, LLC

2011-05-01T16:21:00.003+01:00

This appears to be an anonymous proxy service, based in Las Vegas, which allows people to access blogs, websites, etc. without leaving their own IP. Sort of online stalker's toolkit, doubtless in Las Vegas to better serve the Mob.

Anonymous, and indeed unrecorded, that is, until they store a complete page on their desktop "to read later" and then click on the article title when they do. This promptly tells Medawar that:

file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/sean/Desktop/americas-forgotten-anti-gangstalking.html

They are called Sean and they are an idiot.

Look! It's a blog, people are supposed to be able to read it! Skulking in using webtools designed to hide your IP, just makes you look like a stalker or a terrorist. As long as you don't leave threats or self-serving lies in the comments section, Medawar doesn't mind people reading the articles. If Medawar was keeping a secret, would he be publishing it on his blog?

America's Forgotten Anti-Gangstalking Law: USC 18 Section 241

2011-02-25T14:31:00.004Z

Many of Medawar's fellow bloggers are calling for laws in the USA, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom against "gangstalking" and "proxy stalking" which could both collectively be called organized stalking. And certainly in Canada and Australia, some legislative action is imperative. But it's long been Medawar's view that in the United Kingdom (both England and Scotland; unlike the Berlin Wall, Hadrian's Wall has never fallen in the legal sense) all forms of organized stalking were breaking several laws already and the problem was recognition of that fact by the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Crown Prosecution Service and action by the police.

In the USA, there already is a highly specific law, under which it is pretty well impossible for any two or more persons to carry out a stalking campaign against a citizen, without conspiring to deny that citizen their legal and constitutional rights. Under USC18 section 241, this is an offence normally punishable by a fine and/or up to ten years imprisonment. But if the conspiracy leads to a loss of life, and the usual qualifications of premeditated murder are not specified (because murder is not a Federal offence and would be dealt with under county or state law if it had happened) then the penalty can be life imprisonment, or death.

So, if somebody is harassed and deprived of their legal and constitutional rights to the point where they commit suicide, or become ill and expire as some other consequence of the conspiracy to deny them their rights, then a capital crime has been committed. For example: if a conspiracy to harass a citizen restricted his ability to earn money to keep himself properly fed and housed and he were to die as a result of living rough, the conspirators have committed a capital crime, just as they would have done had they conspired to prevent him receiving proper medical treatment for an illness. Or, if they conspired to restrict his freedom of movement and he was unable to flee a natural disaster, they would have committed a capital crime that could be investigated by Federal Agents and tried in a Federal Court.

The possibility of life imprisonment or capital punishment also applies if the citizen is kidnapped, sexually assaulted, or there is an intent to sexually assault, or an attempt to kill.

These are extreme examples to demonstrate the circumstances in which organized stalking is a capital crime under US Federal Law. But not so extreme that there are no stalking groups currently risking such a charge. In fact, the threat and fact of sexual assault is pretty common.

In the less extreme case, whereby a citizen is not harried to his death, merely prevented from living the normal life of an American citizen, it is still a felony, punishable by a longer prison term than many burglaries, assaults and contraband offences. And nearly ALL stalking activity involving two or more persons acting together, commits this felony.

Even if a lone stalker enlists the help of another for a single part of his stalking campaign against a citizen, a conspiracy to deny that citizen his rights has probably taken place.

The relevant legal text is a lot shorter than this post and is reproduced, below.

       If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or
   intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth,
   Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any
   right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of
   the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same;
   or
     If two or more persons go in disguise on the highway, or on the
   premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free
   exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured -
     They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than
   ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in
   violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an
   attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit
   aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, they shall be fined
   under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life,
   or both, or may be sentenced to death.

The second paragraph makes it obvious that the Congress had the Ku Klux Klan very much in mind when drafting this law; anyone who thinks that they are stalking in a more noble cause, should think again: if you resort to the Klan's methods, your cause is incapable of nobility and you fully deserve to be tarred with precisely the same brush. It is legally impossible to stalk in a good cause. This title is not an anti-racism law: it is a law against denying a citizen his constitutional and legal rights on any pretext whatsoever.

Bent American Police & Federal Agents: How to Report Them

2010-11-23T15:28:00.008Z

The first thing to say, is that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of US Citizens who feel hemmed in and trapped between criminal gangs and corrupt or indolent police who will offer no legal relief or redress. They go searching for some way to report the fact that their local police, or someone if their local FBI field office, is in the pocket of the criminals who are persecuting them. They search the Internet.

Now, the official advice, which they desperately need to find, is remarkably dull, boring, unobtrusive and, having been last updated ten years ago, easily missed by most popular search engines. Try this link and see! The procedure outlined here is pretty involved, and requires sending a complaint and supporting documents by post. It is possible to discern from this page that there is a procedure, but also that it hasn't been given any love by those in power since the month before George W. Bush was elected president. That being said, it's the official way, and if you follow the official procedure and nothing happens, you do at least have grounds for complaint or legal action.

America is the land of Free Enterprise (so we're told, but not in the same way as Hong Kong or Dubai) and an entrepreneur has realized that desperate American citizens, their lives threatened by gangsters and corrupt policemen, even corrupt FBI and DEA agents, are looking for much more than a ten year old webpage telling them to write a letter. He has duly created something that looks just like the desperate people are hoping to find, see this link here!

Glossy, friendly, helpful, professional -and completely and utterly bogus. This is the welcoming portal of what amounts to an advance fee fraud at best, and blackmail and stalking at worst. For the would-be complainants, it is the equivalent of those businesses that offer to get your screenplay adopted by a major production company for £25,000 "development seed capital" or those "agencies" that will kickstart your pretty daughter's modeling career by compiling and distributing a "portfolio" for an advance fee somewhere between £250 and £800.

For any corrupt policeman or Federal Agent that the site's owner manages to identify from the complaint, this is the portal to help or hell, depending on how vulnerable they prove to be. If they are in a strong position and backed by frightening people, they will be tipped off about the complaint, and given all the complainant's personal details, gratis or for a very modest fee. If the corrupt officer or agent happens to be out on a limb, though, they will be blackmailed for everything they have, to the point where they might even wish they'd been brought to justice and put in jail.

This link is to a site set up to collate and air the woes of those would-be complainants, who have had their legitimate cases against corrupt law enforcement officials hijacked, their remaining wealth leached away, their phones bugged, their computers hacked -and everything they said about the corrupt officials -and all their private details- communicated directly to those they were trying to complain about. The site at http://policeabuse.com/ is utterly bogus, a mantrap, designed to bleed the victim white and to take perverse revenge against them by betraying them to their persecutors. It has been made possible by the fact that Federal officials and politicians have completely sidelined the issue of police and FBI corruption for a decade, till all the official avenues of redress are choked with dust and a whole new field of criminal endeavour has sprung up exploiting this.

For the record, policeabuse.com connects to the "Police Complaints Centre" website, which is not an official organization, and, though all its addresses and phone numbers give the impression of it being in Washington DC, the phones are answered (eventually), mail opened and cheques cashed, in Florida, by an unlicensed private investigator. The only honest way to describe a private investigator who cannot get licensed, even in Florida, is a conman.

So, what should people do about corrupt police in America?

Well, if you're a victim, steer clear of the policeabuse.com site, and anything else like it. The real thing is dismal and boring, the con sites are glossy, inviting, and just what you are desperately hoping to see. Look at the official DoJ webpage again, and try your best with the procedure there. You cannot complain about the procedure not working if you don't try, and if you do try and nothing is done immediately, at least your complaint will still be in the system when public pressure forces the politicians to shake the dust off it and make it work again. Also, see below, for another way to put American organised crime under pressure.

If you are not a victim, it's your public duty to bend the ear of your elected representatives on behalf of your fellow citizens who are victims of police corruption and misconduct. Until they either take effective action or their ears bleed, poor things. Make your Congressman and Senator look at the official page for reporting corruption and at the conpage for fleecing anyone who is trying to be a good citizen and report corruption. Make them ashamed that this is happening!

Meanwhile, there is another way.
Very little organised crime in America completely lacks an international dimension, and no matter how much corruption and indolence are choking America's response, any intelligence on large-scale criminal dealings and connections will be read with interest if communicated to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs . Pretty much regardless of what country is involved, because most of the world's money-laundering crosses one British jurisdiction or another at some point in its journey. If you've got something to say about drugs, arms, money or trafficked persons being moved around, say it there.

It is also worth knowing the following:
Any item of criminal intelligence placed on the UK's police national computer, the computers of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, or even MI5, has to be accompanied by a risk statement, which helps determine who can be allowed to see that intelligence and who cannot. Therefore, when reporting anything, even if you're doing it anonymously, and you know about a risk involved, say what the risk is. (This rectifies a major failing of most American criminal intelligence, and indeed, military intelligence, handling.) If you report criminal X, and you know that policeman Y is in his pocket, say that there is a risk if policeman Y knows that criminal X has been reported. And so on. Just list the risks. You're making it easier for the officer who reads your information to put that information on the system in the proper way.

And the HMRC page does allow you to leave information via the internet, on a secure server, that is outside all American jurisdiction and untouchable by corrupt American officials, whether they are in the Baldwin County Sheriff's Department, or the White House. It's not appropriate for everything, but it'll be interested in a lot of stuff and it's a start.

Update:
The official, but very long unmaintained, DOJ page on reporting police corruption, on the link above, has recently had all its content removed, although the link isn't totally dead.
This is probably a good thing, because it looks as if it were hacked several years ago, to include links to the bogus confidence trickster's site. A serious criminal offence was committed by whoever did that, although the DOJ was negligent in that it doesn't appear to have checked its own page between the last month of the Clinton Administration and the publication of this post, a decade later. It is unknown how many people have been conned in the meantime, or precisely when the DoJ page was hacked to include official-looking links to an entirely bogus site. Probably, some time after it became obvious to the conmen that nobody in the DoJ was maintaining the page.

However, the number "three hundred" tends to crop up in other cases involving pathological liars who are keeping a number of victims on a string, and it may be that this is the maximum number they can keep track of and string along at any one time. Scams with larger numbers of victims are done on a "fire and forget" basis.

Where Aircraft Park: Qantas In the Dust

2010-11-06T06:39:00.004Z

Despite the inevitable hysteria from those American journalists and politicians who want Rolls Royce "to be the next BP" (Medawar thought this honour was supposed to be bestowed on GSK anyway), there has to be an environmental factor at play in the failure, on two successive days, of two Rolls Royce engines on the left side of two different Very Large Aircraft as they climbed away from Singapore on two successive days.

The first VLA was a new Airbus 380, the second a middle-aged Boeing 747. The first engine was a new Rolls Royce Trent 900, the second a mature Rolls Royce RB211. Whilst the Trent is the technical descendant of the RB211, there are huge differences, and the Trent in many ways resembles its Engine Alliance rival more than it does the RB211. In any case where material failure is being suspected or alleged, the age of the parts concerned is a very pertinent factor, and this pertinent factor was very different, making such a convergence in timing of the two similar factors most unlikely through causes internal to the two different, in design, size and age, engines.

Factors that are convergent, are the failure being on the left hand side, and the distance between the centreline of the undercarriage as the aircraft were parked or taxied, and the engine concerned: number 2 engine on the (larger) Airbus and number 1 engine on the Boeing.

The manner of the failure was somewhat reminiscent of the kind of hot section "glazing" failure we were warned to expect, but never actually saw, when British airspace was affected by a volcanic ash cloud earlier this year ("visit Iceland, before Iceland visits you") and there is indeed a volcano, spewing ash, in the general direction the aircraft were traveling towards. But other aircraft have not, apparently, been affected and in both cases the failure was on the left side of the aircraft. Unless other engines were affected nearly as badly but didn't quite fail, this would seem to make any airborne dust at altitude a somewhat unlikely. Airlines other than Qantas have reported no trouble, so far, either.

Furthermore, the evidence from the Icelandic ash cloud is that, in cruise configuration at least, volcanic ash or dust affects modern engines a lot less than had been feared. If it was volcanic ash or dust, then there must have been a factor, perhaps the cloud being at a lower altitude where aircraft were still climbing under full power, to amplify the effect. Which hardly explains why it should happen both times on the left hand side.

Any foreign object much bigger than dust (not present in the engine before startup), would have had most impact on the fan and compressor stages of the engines, which did not in this instance fail. If a significant foreign object was in the engine at startup, neither aircraft would have got into the air, much less fifteen minutes into their flight, before a loud bang was heard.

How, then to explain this?
Well, the failure mechanism when volcanic ash goes through a turbofan engine, is that the ash melts and turns to glass, coating turbine blades and combusters, until the engine "chokes" or, more accurately, glass-coated blades start to hit the surrounding structure, causing vibration and eventual failure. It can be quick, but it's not entirely symptom-free.

But if the dust was some other sort of dust, especially if it contained metallic aluminium or titanium, then the failure mechanism would be different: the dust would melt and stick, as with ash, but it would be chemically reactive, both with the air/exhaust gas and with the steel and Inconel alloys of the hot section. This would cause extra heating on those surfaces, as well as chemically attacking the alloy of the hot turbine blades. The measured net temperature of the exhaust gas might rise a little, and the engine's Full Authority Digital Engine Control would attempt to control this, but the temperature on, and importantly, inside, the blades would rise a lot more.

Turbine blades operating at hot section temperatures are very intricate components, because they are internally cooled by air taken from the compressor stage of the engine. A small proportion of any dust ingested by the engine, would pass through the insides of turbine blades. If it were ash dust, not a lot extra would happen, but if it were potentially reactive metal dust, the blades could be chemically weakened from within, even as they were being cooked from without.

Engine containments are designed to contain a failure by one or even several turbine blades in one disk, not the failure of an awful lot of blades at once -and any reactive dust would have weakened the first layer of containment, too.

Investigators and airport authorities need to do the following:

1/ Trace out, for both aircraft, the path of the worst-affected engines over the ground, everywhere they went at the airport prior to the affected takeoffs. Especially where that's something sticking out over grass or airport light structures as the aircraft turned to its right. Look for sources of dust, especially metallic dust, under the engine's path, every foot of the way.

2/ Trace every use of an angle-grinding tool on airport buildings and infrastructure, that was nearer the left side of the two aircraft than it was to the right side.

3/ Review every metal-cutting operation that has taken place near the aircraft, or where their engines have been taken for maintenance, in the past month or so.

4/ Review any and all CCTV of the aircraft on the ground, for signs of someone cutting metal nearby, or for signs of metal dust arriving by more deliberate means. This is a potential sabotage method and one which might easily occur to someone who understood metallurgy and engine function, or to any lower-grade functionary who had ever been given a bollocking for cutting metal near an engine.

5/ Search every waste bin and skip on the airport for discarded disk cutter and angle-grinder blades with aluminium or titanium traces on them.

Medawar suspects that somewhere, somehow, by accident or just possibly malicious design, a Trent 900 and an RB211, both ingested dust on the ground. Unless it was a gross amount, dust from soil, sand or ground concrete, would not have done enough harm. Only a reactive metal dust could have done enough harm in a quantity small enough not to be a pretty obvious cause of trouble at the time.

Steel and similar alloys dissolve in melted aluminium. Burning titanium can melt even Inconel.

The Leader of Stalking Gangs is Not Always the Most Prominent Member

2010-10-30T15:08:00.002+01:00

Just a link, really, to an article about Sarah Whitehead. Anyone who saw this group's own material and listened to its oral tradition, would have believed that Greg Avery and his (second) wife, Natasha, were the kingpins. They were jailed, everything carried on as before.

Let's just wait and see if it all really stops now that Sarah Whitehead has joined them inside. If it doesn't, then perhaps the police need to look for someone canny enough not to visit the frontline activists at all.

Someone more like Ronnie Lee, John Curtin, Andrew Mann, or Paul Richardson, perhaps?

David Kelly, No Drugs Overdose

2010-10-30T14:48:00.003+01:00

An expert has done what the Hutton Inquiry and Home Office Pathologist very glaringly did not do, and calculated how much co-proxamol painkiller Dr Kelly had actually absorbed before he died: approximately two tablets, a normal therapeutic dose.

There is also a strong dislocation between a recently-released pathologist's report, claiming several "hesitation" wounds to his wrist, and the witnesses who found and first attended the body, including two very experienced paramedics, who did not mention multiple wounds and who all dispute that there was much blood spilt at the scene. The report filed by the paramedics is missing: Thames Valley Police requested that the Ambulance Trust send it to them, which they did, and now Thames Valley Police claim that it never arrived.

There still needs to be a proper inquest, to evaluate the glaring difference between the conclusions and observations of official witnesses and expert ones, especially the experts who actually saw the body as it was when discovered.

It's beginning to look as if the scene was being dressed a little more each time anyone turned their back, because the searchers who found the body reported it in a different posture and position from the first policemen and paramedics, and they in turn didn't see the multiple wounds and masses of blood that the pathologist saw a while later, when he examined the body in situ prior to authorizing its removal.

If this was a "text-book case" of suicide, was someone in the woods, with a place-marked textbook, popping out of the trees as people came and went, calmly making sure that the evidence was going to tick all the boxes?

Sounds absurd, yes, but there's not merely a lot of contradictions between successive witnesses: there is a clear and steady progression in all their testimonies, from an ambiguous scene and body, that might have represented murder or even natural death, to one that was "textbook suicide."

It's that progression that seems most peculiar to Medawar. It needs an inquest, with a jury, and most importantly, cross-examination of witnesses under oath, to shake out what they really saw from what they were expected to say.

Judit Nadal, Another of Britain's Experts Falls.

2010-10-24T19:04:00.005+01:00

Dr Judit Nadal, who was leading some very important biochemical research at Imperial College, London, has been killed in a car crash. Although news reports make much of the frailty of the "G Wiz" electric car that she was driving (more on that below), it doesn't look as if the other vehicle can possibly have been driven at a speed, or in a fashion, that was legal for that urban road, approaching a junction. So, the police investigation really serves to determine exactly how unlawful her death was; it almost certainly was not an accident unadulterated by criminal action, though it remains to be seen if there was any element of aggression in it, targeted or otherwise. (There are groups in the UK who constantly threaten, plot and occasionally even manage to execute, deliberate harm to researchers in almost any sort of biomedical discipline. Some of them are up for sentencing at Winchester Crown Court this very week.)

But one way or the other, Britain loses an awful lot of its best experts, scientists, economists and, yes, bankers, and yet the only members of society to merit special protection and care, seem to be politicians and "celebrities", some of whom, Peter Doherty, for example, are far more likely to commit violent crime than be a victim of it. More than a dozen armed men guard Antony Charles Lynton Blair (a former prime minister) twenty-four hours a day, lest he strike his foot against a stone. Can't we employ a handful to see our best scientific brains safely home at the end of the working day? When it comes to their relative value to our society, there's no contest at all between Dr Nadal's research and Mr Blair's endless self promotion and "fundraising".

As for the ability of the G Wiz car to withstand a high speed collision:
The problem is not that the G Wiz is very light: so is a Formula One Racing Car, and the drivers of those walk, however unsteadily, away from some quite horrendous crashes. No, the problem with the G Wiz is that the battery pack weighs more than the rest of the car put together, and it forms an immensely strong and incompressible cell just behind the driver's seat.

This means that there's a huge concentration of inertia, and strength, just behind the driver's spine. So any high energy collision sends the rest of the car flying, while the battery pack has the inertia to stay put, cutting the car neatly in half, close to the driver's spine.

Very lightweight electric vehicles may never be especially safe until battery technology, whether nickel-hydride, lithium, or more exotic, such as poly-acetylene, gives way to super-capacitor technology, as being developed at the Universities of Cranfield and Cambridge, that can be integrated into the whole structure of the vehicle. Then, in the absence of any built-in inertial chopping block, it should be possible to build an affordable electric car with crash-worthiness as good, if not better, than a Formula One Racing Car. The power storage device would add strength, rather than provide an instant mechanism for compromising it. You would have a car that bounced, not one that sliced easily in half, executing its occupants.

Update:
Inquest has now been held, and some fairly shallow conclusions drawn abotu what is wrong with the Gee Whiz car. See new post on this subject.
Medawar has ntoiced that most reader searches for "Judit Nadal" are taking them to this post and not the latest one, for whatever reason.

Beauty Behind the Hedgerow

2010-10-14T11:16:00.005+01:00

For once, an echo of Richard Jefferies rather than George Orwell.

The photograph is of a wild rose (or "Dog Rose") in an English rural hedgerow. It's not a rare thing, nobody specially planted it and it might one day be hacked back by a tractor-mounted hedge flail or make a meal for a Roe Deer. (NB: Given the choice, Roe Deer will take carefully bred and nurtured garden roses over wild ones, every time.)

It is, however, a little bit of beauty, sitting there waiting to be noticed. But this kind of thing is only noticed by those with an interest in the world as it is, the world around them, what's really there. People blinded by ideology, greed, material things, fear and aggression, can pass this kind of ordinary beauty by a million times and never notice once. That's not the only thing they never notice, either.

Those who cannot perceive plain, ordinary beauty in the world around them, are usually quite incapable of perceiving ugliness, especially in their own actions. Those who are not interested in what might behind the hedgerow, or further down the lane, cannot be custodians of lane and hedgerow. If they are disinterested, they have no stake in England.

Some extreme right groups have latched onto June Tabor's rendition of the alternative national anthem, "A Place Called England", which proves Medawar's argument twice over, because not only does that song define the English as "anyone who loves the English Earth" but they used the song, completely oblivious, never noticing that line or thinking about what it meant. They see and see, but cannot perceive.

The stunning, all pervading absence of perception of what England is, what matters about it, what it stands for, disqualifies the British National Party and the English Defence League from any claim to be English other than by the limited virtue of a dog-eared birth certificate for some members.

But if we are to disqualify from Englishness, anyone who is ignorant and unperceptive of what matters about this place, huge swathes of our mainstream politicians are out on their ear, too.

Antony Charles Lynton Blair, who isn't even legally entitled to the dog-eared birth certificate, having been born in Scotland. This was no shame, but it's not what he told the electors in his constituency and certainly not what his parents told the Durham Cathedral Chorister's School when they got him his place. Many a proud Scotsman has loved England more than Blair does, so why the very peculiar lie?

David Cameron, so ignorant of England that he thought that Great Britain was America's junior partner in the fight against NAZIsm in 1940 (when America's great and good were debating which side they were on, with a near-majority including Henry Ford and Joe Kennedy in favour of siding with Hitler).

William Hague and George Osborne, who think that if we have a sufficiently unfastidious foreign policy, we need spend little or nothing on defence.

Nick Clegg, whose hope and ambition is that England one day will become "A little bit of Spain or France", just like one of Elizabeth the First's less successful advisors.

They are not English, or capable of becoming English, anymore than the shaven-headed thugs of the BNP and EDL are. They are a foreign power, utterly alien in heart and mind to this country.

Everyone who has ever taken a quiet thrill in looking behind the hedge to see what's there, has already come to loathe Antony Charles Lynton Blair and all his works. Sooner or later, these others will give them equal cause for loathing, because they just cannot perceive what it is about this country that we value.

Elizabeth the First inherited a kingdom brought to the brink of ruin by her sister's ideology and extreme violence against free speech and tolerance, the life-blood of the country.
Rather than bend with the many fierce winds of European politics, which was the only course of action the materialists were able to perceive, she stood against them, and risked her own life and that of the nation to stand against what she knew was wrong and for what she believed to be right. She did not lead the nation to ruin by this reckless stubbornness, her reign became known as the golden age. She increased the military power of the realm, not to bully the world, but simply so that nobody could force her to do wrong.

If you glance behind the hedgerow, out of interest to see what's there, you are, or can be, English. If you look beyond the hedge only to dream how you can impose, by force, some memorial to yourself upon the landscape, you cannot be, however cunningly Mummy and Daddy spoke to the Durham registrar to persuade him to make a false entry.

The Obvious, The Smear and the Ecological Evidence

2010-09-12T15:33:00.010+01:00

Contrast today's article in The Daily Telegraph about the unexplained death of Gareth Williams, with this one, in the Mail on Sunday. The former dares to face the possibility that Mr Williams was murdered by a foreign government (or a drugs cartel?) the latter tries to concoct a way in which the death could have been both innocent and grossly demeaning at the same time.

The Mail article is rather odd, but the "death by auto-eroticism" line has been peddled before, not only with regard to the MP Stephen Milligan and Jonathan Moyles, the air defence expert, but also with the veteran intelligence courier, James Rusbridger, who publicly questioned this as a cause of Mr Moyle's death, only to be found dead in grossly demeaning circumstances himself. Mr Moyles definitely was murdered, and Mr Rusbridger might well have been, because there were unexplained movements of strangers to and from his (extremely remote) cottage shortly before his body was found.

We are also required to believe that one of the score of sonar experts to die during the Stingray and Spearfish torpedo programmes, committed suicide by placing a noose around his neck, with the other end of the rope tied to a tree, sitting in his car and driving it at speed towards the Avon Gorge. Some of his colleagues supposedly committed suicide nearby in cars soaked in petrol, and so on and so on. Spectacular, but all of them rather easily murder, too.

The article on Mr Rusbridger's death is very, very pertinent to the death of Gareth Williams, even though Mr Williams was an unusually young university student at the time, because Mr Rusbridger had been publicly concerned about the birth of the GSM-tapping technology which Mr Williams was to perfect a generation later.

And it's an apposite coincidence that all of these issues should revisit the headlines again when the new Downing Street Director of Communications, Mr Andrew Coulson, is under investigation by both police and parliamentary committees over mobile phone hacking, carried out when he was the editor of the News of the World and thus an employee of Mr Rupert Murdoch.

The convergence of these two stories tells us that phone tapping technology is one thing, but what really matters is who uses it, and whether they do so with good or evil intent. Nobody is suggesting that Mr Coulson was trying to save the world, although Mr Williams evidently was.

Meanwhile, the "official" line, that Dr David Kelly bled to death from a small wound, now depends on the concept that all the blood soaked into the ground before experienced paramedics arrived at the scene and immediately remarked on the absence of blood and other things which seemed strange to them, such as the water bottle by Dr Kelly's hand being neatly upright. In their experience, dying people make involuntary movements and knock nearby objects over.

It's been seven years. If several pints of human blood soaked into the ground from a single wound, then the soil at the spot where Dr Kelly's body was found, will display a quite different mineral and nutrient balance to a soil sample taken from under any neighbouring tree. (To eliminate variables, on the equivalent side, getting pretty much the same amount of sun and rain, as this was on the edge of reasonably dense woodland.) If there is no appreciable difference between the two samples, it's extremely unlikely that pints of blood entered the ground and decomposed at that spot. The soil in and around Roman Gladiatorial Arenas still shows the nutritional benefit of all the spilt blood, after eighteen centuries.

If the official explanation were true, Medawar would expect to see differences in ground level herbiage each spring by now. If it's too dark for wildflowers, even in the spring when the woodland canopy is still open, then, by definition, the soil will be part of an underground fungal network extending across the woodland (always the case with established broad-leaved woodland in England.) The underground threads of fungi will reflect what happened. If there's enough light for grass to grow, it will be lusher, greener and probably broader-bladed than other grass getting the same amount of sun nearby.

"The Earth shall reveal the blood shed upon her face, and make all murders plain." Especially if they happened somewhere else.

Another Expert Falls

2010-09-05T15:36:00.019+01:00

An awful lot of what has been published in the press about the murder of Gareth Williams, has not been theory, speculation or valid comment: it has been a downright lie, utterly unfounded in any fact. Much has been suggested, by "intelligence sources" to journalists who really ought to have known better than to believe, still less print, most of it.

Medawar will ignore anything to do with Mr Williams' personal life, still less his hypothetical sex life, as irrelevant, and the suggestion that he "might have been suicidal" is a vicious mockery in light of the fact that his body was found locked inside a large sports holdall, in a bath, filled with an unknown fluid. Although libel and slander actions cannot be undertaken on behalf of the deceased, any attempt to conceal or alter the circumstances in which a body has been found, prior to a coroner's jury returning a verdict, can be prosecuted as perverting the course of justice.

This doesn't mean that the case cannot be discussed (if criminal charges were laid, that might be a different matter) -and it's unlikely that anyone could be prosecuted for speculation. But "security sources" have told the press, with the intention of their telling the public, things which they know to be untrue, with the deliberate intention of changing how the circumstances of Mr Williams's death will be perceived, by press, public and any jury, as yet to be empaneled. The sources in question most definitely can be prosecuted for that, and jailed for a significant amount of time.

Here, then, is Medawar's analysis, sticking strictly to well tested facts from the public domain, and what has been said by the police investigating the case, rather than any third party.

Gareth Williams was a mathematician and encryption expert, working for MI6 and GCHQ, to intercept and analyse the communications of some of the world's most dangerous governments, criminal organisations and individuals. The probability that he might be murdered for any personal reason is certainly no higher than that for any other member of the public, and given that he was of above average intelligence, extremely self-disciplined, and apparently content with wholesome pleasures such as cycling in competition and, more recreationally, with his father, the probability that he would be murdered for any reason to do with his personal life is almost certainly lower than average. Most ordinary citizens in the UK don't get murdered in their whole lives, not even once.

It may be a truism (but not rigorously true) that when the average citizen is murdered, it's something to do with their personal life, but Mr Williams was not an average citizen in that respect. In fact, even most personal murders have something to do with the victim's work, because that's such a large part of what the person does.

The only semi-rational reason for supposing that there might be something "personal" about the murder of Mr Williams, would be if there was something extreme about the level of cruelty involved in his death. But serial killers can be cruel, too -and it's an unfounded myth that professional killers are not. Sometimes, extreme cruelty may be part of the client's specification for the murder, in which case third party sadism will be applied with clinical efficiency, as in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, using roughly $3M worth of industrial polonium. The killers may have been professionals, but the client's specification was both psychotically cruel and financially extravagant.

Professionals may also apply extreme cruelty because the reason they became professional killers in the first place, was that they had psychotic tendencies which could safely be given full rein. It's another myth that such people would somehow never be employed by an intelligence agency: psychotic sadists are almost always pathological liars and they can get in anywhere, social or professional. Indeed, if intelligence agencies are selecting candidates for their skill in infiltration, as well as physical violence, the odds that they will find themselves selecting pathological liars, who tend strongly towards sadism, are pretty high.

What was particularly sadistic about this murder?

The published facts, suggest three possible ways in which Mr Williams might actually have died, all of which would have been painful and distressing:

1/ He was found packed into a sports holdall, which was padlocked shut. No need, other than superstition, to padlock a man who is already dead. Even a large sports holdall, would not allow a man of his stature much room to breathe, and it's not just a question of whether the bag would allow air in or not. Suffocation from excess carbon dioxide and insufficient oxygen isn't pleasant, but it's not agonising. But suffocation because one is forced into, and kept in, a position where it takes inordinate effort just to move the chest far enough to respire a bit less than enough air to keep on living, is tantamount to crucifixion: the posture may be compressed rather than extended, but one dies slowly, in the same way. The pathology would be very similar to a classic crucifixion. Medawar believes that this resembles methods of execution in some ancient cultures: more research is needed, though.

2/ When found by the police, the body in the bag was immersed in "fluid" so that it is possible that Mr Williams drowned, inside the bag. He might have been unconscious due to some sedative or muscle relaxant to get him into the bag, but the padlock, again, suggests that he was then expected to regain consciousness. This would also mean that any drug or poison would be fully metabolised before death actually occurred. This factor might be overplayed: the murderer has no particular need to fear identification of the drug unless it corroborates some other link to the killing. Many of the likely candidates are widely available and would hardly narrow down the field of suspects. Whatever killed him, he was expected to be conscious when it happened, and the bag would ensure that he could struggle much more than if he had been bound, perhaps making an entertaining video for the murderer's client, but that struggle would have been futile.

3/ If the "fluid" was intended, as police suggest, to accelerate the decay of Mr Williams' body, then it is likely that it was scalding hot when he was first put into it. (More on this below.) It may also have been kept hot, or warm, if the bath was a luxury model, so equipped, or if the murderers had recourse to portable immersion heaters, available for a variety of catering and animal husbandry applications. Scalding is not a gentle way to go, and again, classic methods of execution spring to mind.

Unless the client or commissioning party was physically present, the existence of video of Mr Williams' last moments, or quite possibly, last few hours, is a very good bet.

What Might the "Fluid" Have Been?

A grown man, immersed, in a bath. This requires rather more fluid than another man could easily carry up to a top floor flat, and more than even a team of men could carry without attracting some attention. So, even if the fluid was "not water" then either it was water based, or diluted with water from bathroom taps (and the hot tap is likely) -or some considerable effort or artifice was used to get fifteen gallons or quite possibly more of it, all the way up to the flat. It is hard to be exact when estimating how much fluid was involved, but an imperial gallon of water weighs ten pounds.

The police say that the fluid appeared to accelerate decay, they do not say that it was a strong organic solvent, an acid, or a strong alkali. (In the course of a week, these might have found their way through the bath, or the plumbing, into the flat below. An organic solvent might also have evaporated and caused a toxic fume hazard, or an almighty explosion. ) The probable candidate is surprising: biological detergent for a washing machine. A saturated solution (as much dissolved in water as will dissolve) of biological detergent, will, by enzyme action, completely strip flesh from bone on a human corpse in a week to ten days, but only if the solution is kept at something like blood heat (thirty-five to forty degrees centigrade) for several days. Whether and how this could be done, would depend on what sort of a bath it was and whether the murderers were able to operate in the flat for some time after the murder, perhaps revisiting it to remove any heating.

One hesitates to hand Fleet Street a catch phrase, but "Persil Bath Murder" probably does describe what was done.

Who Else From the Intelligence Community Was Murdered Around the Same Time?

GRU General Yuri Ivanov disappeared several days before Mr Williams appears to have died (the "fluid" means that the police don't know exactly when this was) and his dead body was discovered on a beach and reported to the Turkish police around the 15th of August. It took several days for the General's body to be identified: he had last been seen alive in Syria in the first week of August (?no-one outside Syria seems completely sure of the date?) having inspected a Russian naval base being built in that country and, reportedly, being on his way to meet his colleagues in Syrian intelligence later in the day. It seems most likely that General Ivanov died on the day he disappeared, or soon after, and his body drifted to Turkey, propelled only by wind and tide. Mr Williams may have died at more or less the same time that the General's body was found, but it's also possible that he died several days later and that the advanced state of decay was the result of the "fluid" and what may have been an optimal temperature for its enzymatic action.

Mr Williams did apparently tell his superiors that he was being followed, before he took leave to cover his intended move from London back to Cheltenham. There's no information about his actually travelling to Cheltenham in this period, but it would be strange not to, unless his London flat contained almost no possessions that needed to be transferred back to his Cheltenham flat. Indeed, sorting out his domestic arrangement for the move seems to be the purpose of the period of leave that he took. If there was no trip to Cheltenham, then it may be that his movements were already constrained by some factor, several days before his apparent time of death. This means that any timeline linking Mr Williams and General Ivanov, must start from the date the General was first missed by the GRU, rather than the date his body was found by the Turks, who didn't know who it was for another couple of weeks. The GRU may have known that he was dead, long before they knew where his body was, though.

It is possible that one death was retaliation for the other, but it's also possible that both men were targeted by some third party, or that it was just a bad month for top intelligence experts. Although General Ivanov seems to have been a much more brutal man than Mr Williams, he does seem to have been the top expert in what he did. In fact, he was the top expert in the world in the sort of thing that was done to Mr Williams. This could link them in four ways:

1/ The General might have ordered the murder of Mr Williams, or someone in MI6 or the CIA might have thought so, strongly enough to retaliate.

2/ Mr Williams may have been killed as retaliation for the murder of the General, the timelines are not clear enough to say which, if either.

3/ Someone planning to murder General Ivanov, may have feared that Mr Williams, with unknown technology and expertise at his disposal, could determine who had done it, which wouldn't be healthy for the murderer and his client if this was ever communicated to the GRU, FSB or SVR. Equally, General Ivanov must have known a lot about the world's best professional killers, and anyone planning to murder Mr Williams, might have thought that the General was the man most likely to suss them.

4/ Both of them independently posed a danger, through their differing expertise, to the same third party, and that the coincidence of timing of both murders, is due to that third party being about to make a move that they cannot afford to have compromised before D-day. This may not be the most likely possibility of the four, but, for obvious reasons, it's the one that requires the most urgent attention from the authorities in both London and Moscow.

Possible Suspects

Russian Intelligence and Security services are always suspect when someone valuable to the British Intelligence Community is found not to be alive anymore. Either for immediate operational reasons, or something more subtle.

The "something more subtle" is that, for at least three decades past, significant numbers of leading experts from or in the United Kingdom have died in strange or suspicious circumstances. Sometimes, as in the case of Timothy Hampton, David Kelly and no less than twenty-five people who worked on the Stingray and Spearfish torpedo projects, we're supposed to believe it's all suicide, sometimes, as in the case of Jonathan Moyles, we're supposed to believe in a tragic auto-erotic suffocation accident.

Mr Moyles is usually described by the press as an investigative journalist, and that's what he was doing when he died. However, as a post-graduate research student, sponsored by the MoD, he wrote a thesis "Soviet Air Attack on the United Kingdom" which basically proved, in excruciating detail, that UK air defences (since cut by about two thirds, about to be cut again) would only survive for a matter of hours against a sustained onslaught. Since nobody else had ever researched the subject as thoroughly and unemotionally as Mr Moyles, he was in fact the pre-eminent expert on UK air defences and most especially how they needed to be improved.

The net effect of all these deaths, however they happened, is that the United Kingdom is weaker for the loss of its best minds, and that the UK government, as a rule composed of people with no hard technical knowledge of any kind whatsoever, has no genuinely expert advice on which to base major decisions, and is at the mercy of vested interests offering partial advice, and predatory foreign powers.

In the past year, it has emerged that France, too, is losing swarms of experts in the same way, especially in telecommunications at the moment. Though, if the UK pattern is repeated, the cull of French experts will wander from one technical field to another as the party ordering the killings, literally turns the page. These people are not being killed for any specific thing they know, or anything they have done: they are being killed to make their countries weaker in the face of what someone else intends to do. They don't have to kill every expert in most fields, just weed out some of the best ones.

If the killings are linked to something more specific, and both Mr Williams and General Ivanov were killed because of the same thing, then it would have to be something that would be compromised by both GRU and Russian military involvement in Syria, and by the highly advanced signals interception technology being developed by Mr Williams and the MI6/GCHQ "cell" that he was part of, or perhaps leading. An invasion of Syria, by a third party, might fit the bill.

If Mr Williams was killed for something specific, rather just to reduce the pool of expertise available to the British as a nation, and this had nothing to do with General Ivanov, then the party that has actually suffered most damage at the hands of British code-breakers in the past year or two, are the American (North and South) Cocaine-trafficking cartels. Recent successes by the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, have involved officers walking into factories in West Africa with local police, pointing out exactly where false walls are concealing hidden rooms, which turn out to be full of cocaine, or computers involved with the multi-million dollars transactions essential to the trade. This is dramatic evidence that SOCA and HMRC know everything that the druggies say to each other, and can probably now backtrack on what they said a decade ago, too.

Yes, the Taliban are losing commanders because of British code-breaking, but this is something they are used to and there is no obvious way that the Taliban would blame a single person for this, and be able to identify him and find his address. One would expect any Taliban murder of a leading intelligence officer to be somewhat publicised by them, too.

The drugs cartels, though, probably know anything that American Intelligence agencies know. It's a staple Hollywood and airport thriller scenario, that renegade (or loyal, depends how paranoid the story is) agents run drugs and are involved with the cartels. What actually seems to happen and is quite evident, in fact, is that some ex-CIA agents are busy developing commercial and residential property in the very parts of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Kentucky, where the cartels and their US distributors, are buying commercial and residential property in order to launder and invest their profits. This makes it almost impossible for the former federal agents, and they may have FBI and Homeland Security people onboard as well as CIA, to be charged with any crime or conspiracy. They are building houses for sale, anyone can buy them. It's not their fault if the druggies are the only ones who can afford to do so at the moment! If a non-druggie has the money, they won't hesitate to sell him a condo or a mansion. But on balance, 80% of their profits are due to the drug-fueled property boom, in states whose real economies are weakened and made to totter by the same drugs racket.

These people may very well have been able to identify Mr Williams, who seems to have travelled to visit the NSA at Fort Meade around four times a year on average. The flat he was killed in, belongs to a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, and that's long been a favourite banking spot for the druggies and their attendant/dependent property developers.

It is possible to see how ex-CIA agents with contacts still active in US Intelligence and a compelling financial interest in the success of the cocaine trade, could have identified Mr Williams as a threat, or as the cause of grief and loss they had already suffered, and tracked him down. Whereas it's stretching credulity to the limit to suggest the Taliban or other Islamist terrorists doing the same.

The Iranian Intelligence services might have been able to do it, but it's not obvious that they ever had any reason to single Mr Williams out as an individual, or felt threatened by his work.

So the suspects have to boil down to:

1/ The Russians, for a variety of possible reasons.

2/ Someone planning to invade Syria, fairly imminently, or something very similar to that.

3/ Former American Intelligence Officers and Federal Agents who are profiting, directly or more probably indirectly, through property transactions, from the cocaine trafficking rackets which SOCA and HMRC have been busting with considerable help from GCHQ code-breakers.

Update:
Police now say:
Gareth Williams was seen out and about until the 15th of August. (Day before General Ivanov's body was found, but still some time before the Turkish Police knew who it was.)

He had been to the USA, on Holiday, up to the 11th of August. (This explains why no trip to Cheltenham. He apparently had an official second passport in a different name to ensure his personal safety when travelling.)

It begins to look more and more as if whatever comprised his personal security, happened from the United States end.

The police spokesman says he was found in an empty bath, the first officer on the scene reportedly said the bath was filled with fluid. Baths have plugs: this discrepancy may well sort itself out in the wash.

A man and woman, of "Mediterranean" appearance were seen to enter his flat some weeks before his murder. NB: this description often applies to any tanned or olive-skinned person with straight black hair and it mustn't be taken as a precise geographical origin. It could easily mean a South American person, given that many Argentinians have Italian (as well as Spanish) ancestors and many Brazilians have Portuguese ancestors.

When police entered the flat, they got the lettings agent to come with a spare key, so talk of iris recognition systems are far fetched. This means, though, that it's possible that someone could have copied the agent's key. If someone had been in while he was away before, they might have been able to enter while he was asleep and drug or overpower him. Given his physical strength, this might have been the only viable plan.

Nothing of substance in the above article is really changed by this, except that it's clearer why, if he was planning to move back to Cheltenham, he hadn't actually been there earlier in his leave.

The New Jackals: Identity Farmers

2010-08-15T17:23:00.016+01:00

A generation ago, Frederick Forsyth's fictional assassin, The Jackal, showed the world how easy it was, in the sixties and seventies, to obtain passports and open bank accounts in the name of someone who had died in infancy. These days, it is unlikely that an identity obtained by the methods in that novel would stand scrutiny for very long, although it might still get someone through an airport on a one-way trip, or allow them to fleece a bank or supplier of a few thousand pounds.

Even in the nineteen sixties, when information technology was in its infancy, The Jackal's methods wouldn't have produced an identity that would stand up to any serious cross checking. If a person was vetted to work on a military installation, or even a County Court (in England, at any rate) it would soon be discovered that the birth certificate the identity was based on, matched a death certificate, somewhere, or that there was a gap or discontinuity in the person's documented history. Indeed, supplying equipment to carry out this kind of check used to help secure the computing businesses of both ICL and Ferranti, in the time before we heard of Microsoft.

The change that more advanced, and affordable, information technology has wrought on the false identity racket, is that false identities for many everyday criminal purposes need to be better crafted than those which the SOE created for agents infiltrating Nazi-occupied Europe. The modern criminal needs a false identity to match the standards of those produced by the GRU and KGB during the height of the cold war, but organised crime is big business and the number of such "legends" that a gang will consume is greater than that which the KGB was able to crank out, back in the day.

A cold war legend would probably be based on someone who either wasn't dead, or wasn't known to be dead by the country which issued their birth certificate. British subjects born outside the UK would be one favourite, UK-born globe-trotting adventurers another. If a US passport was required, things might be easier because two thirds of the American population never applies for one. Pick someone who is unlikely to travel abroad, but who now lives in a different State to where they were born, clone their identity, fill in the forms.

But it is becoming less and less possible to be sure that an ordinary US citizen won't suddenly apply for passport in their own name, which you may have quietly borrowed, and in the current security climate it is guaranteed that no-one will see this as an innocent mix up or other bureaucratic anomaly. Alarm bells will ring the moment the same individual appears to be in two places at once, and different national immigration computers talk to each other about this the whole time.

Another twist is required: the false identity must be a true identity, of someone who is not dead or whose death is a total secret (or utterly unnoticed) and that individual's life must be known in intimate detail by the gang exploiting their identity. The client using the identity must be assured that there is a very low risk that his alter-ego will do something untoward that reveals the theft, and he will need a guarantee that he will hear about it before the local police if this does happen or looks as if it might be about to happen. The client's use of the identity must also blend pretty seamlessly with the real person's use of their own persona.

None of this can be achieved merely with an unwitting owner of the real identity. They must be controlled and monitored, for a period of time before their identity is stolen, and for as long as it is being used, and probably for long enough thereafter for any trail to grow stone cold. Control is necessary, because whilst the criminals need the real person to be responsible for a normal level of traceable activity up to the point where the client starts to use their identity, the real person must then be stopped from travelling abroad, or applying for a mortgage, whilst their identity is in use.

When it was a case of the KGB needing a couple of dozen such identities, it was not impossible that the real people could be abducted, or murdered and their bodies disposed of without trace, but this would be fraught with difficulties, and cost, if done on the scale required by modern crime. Unless someone is homeless and living rough, it is actually quite difficult to "disappear" them without someone trying to report them as missing. But where people who are already homeless are concerned, it can be hell's own job establishing what their true identity is, before it can be stolen! And then it would be a challenge to create a suitable legend to explain their sudden rise from sleeping under Hammersmith Arches to a seat in business class.

However, if there is a market for false economies on an industrial scale, there is bound to be an industrial-scale solution, and it goes somewhat as follows:

Existing criminal networks are utilised: this process needs to be invisible if it can be, mistaken for something else if it is detected. It cannot be just any criminal network: it must be one that can be controlled with precision and authority. Drugs, or the harder side of the sex industry, means a dependence on ongoing supplies of dope or trafficked girls from international gangs. Internet banking fraud means a dependence on sources of "lists" of data. Any criminal network that's dependent on ongoing supplies from territory outside their control, can be controlled with some authority by whoever sources those supplies. In some countries, security and intelligence services may resort to the same basic methods as organised crime, in which case policemen and other officials will be found performing the same role as minor local gangsters. In the United States, expect to find both involved together.

People will be selected to have their identities used. This process is very much not to their benefit, it can be Hell on Earth, so there will always be an element of malice or revenge in the choices: it might work better if it were random, but it's always going to be malicious.

Those victims must first be studied: if the victim notices this at all, and most will not, it will resemble stalking by an unknown lunatic, or someone in petty authority, rather than a great conspiracy.

A proportion of the victims who are studied, will be selected for preparation: this basically consists of making it difficult for them to do anything that would spoil exploitation of their identity. Nearly all of the things they could do, which would create problems for someone else using their authority, require money. So, sabotage of career and finances are a prerequisite of anyone becoming a steer on the identity farm.

It is important that no-one really notices when the victim's difficulties become extreme. So their social circle needs to be whittled down as much as possible, and relatives driven off to a distance. But ties must not be broken so abruptly that anyone goes to the police, asking for a well-being check on the victim!

This has to be done with patience, and there will be dropouts and failures. Therefore, it has to be done to a large number of victims, that number constantly refreshed, in order to be economically viable. However, the more people who are being harassed and controlled, the fewer criminals or officials it takes per victim to keep all of this on the boil, and the more viable and profitable it becomes.

When the victim's identity is actively being exploited, the pressure on them must either be intense, or their life circumstances must make it all but impossible for them to do any of things which a normal person would do without thinking. One victim of this has likened the experience to the Robin Cook's novel (and Michael Crichton's film) "Coma" in which abductees and people supposedly having died during routine medical procedures, are stored, in a warehouse, in an induced coma, until such time as their organs are required for transplant. It is a telling simile.

Making a victim homeless, rather than starting with a homeless person from the off, is a good way of obtaining an exploitable identity long-term. But homeless people are apt to die, or suffer violence, and no-one can guarantee that their identity won't rise to official attention and clash with whatever scam is being worked by the alter ego.

The victim must go on living an ordinary life, but under paralysing pressure.

The most troubling question is this: what happens when their identity is no longer required, and when there's no ongoing income stream from a criminal client to pay for keeping them under paralysing pressure? Is that the point at which it might even be convenient for that identity to generate a death certificate? Because then, if a search for the criminal who'd exploited that identity did start, investigators would find all the loose ends tied in neat bundle at a graveside, somewhere.

Is there anything that can be done about it?

Well, the United States government requires travellers to that country, to complete a special clearance form on the internet at least 72 hours in advance. They are also going to charge $14 for doing this. But you can do it in advance, and you don't actually have to go to America if you get the clearance. Going through this tiresome procedure is bad enough, and paying $14 to do so sounds like madness. But it might just alert the American authorities to the fact that someone else was travelling on your identity, and if you're the one who cannot travel, and your alter-ego is the one living the life of Riley and breezing through US Immigration and Customs in your name, the bad things will be concentrated on them. And if you are approached by American officials, wherever you might be, that is your chance to say "I think my identity has been, not just stolen, but actively farmed, by criminals or an intelligence agency wanting covert entry to your fine country." They may not react very effectively the first time, but somewhere around the eighth or ninth times, the penny will drop.

Identity farming has another, even more sinister twist:
In the former Yugoslavia, when thousands of people went into mass graves amidst the chaos of civil war, it was normal practice to harvest identity documents from the victims. This wasn't just to stop the bodies being identified: the identities of people who are definitely dead, but whose deaths are undocumented by any lawful authority, have a considerable black market value. Given the connections between Serbian militias and Russian Organised Crime, and between Kosovan Freedom Fighters and Albanian Organised Crime, Medawar thinks that nearly all of the mass killings made a healthy profit. Yes, the UN and EU forensic scientists have identified a lot of the bodies, but it has taken ten years, and who knows what adventures the identities of the murdered had in that time?

DOS Attacks, one of the Guilty IPs

2010-07-31T10:15:00.002+01:00

The following IP seems to be closely associated with denial of service attacks:

Domain Name netvision.net.il ? (Israel)
IP Address 212.143.134.# (NV1378-RIPE)
ISP NetVision
Location Continent : Asia
Country : Israel (Fac ts)
State/Region : Hefa
City : Haifa
Lat/Long : 32.8156, 34.9892 (Map)

Should there now be a DOS attack against blogspot, Google's anti-hacking crew will know exactly where to start looking, as will NETCU and SOCA.

Deepwater Horizon: Medawar's Last Word

2010-07-31T09:46:00.005+01:00

Now that it seems as if the "greatest ecological disaster in American history" was largely politically-motivated hype, see link, then one must return to Medawar's comment at the outset of the saga, which was that the real tragedy was the eleven men who died, and that it was amazing that American public and political opinion was outraged about something else.

And it has to be said, that actions by Transocean, particularly turning alarms off to keep things nice and quiet at night, and disabling automatic mechanisms that closed vents to stop explosive gases getting inside inhabited and control modules, will have contributed, hugely, to the death toll. And none of the lessons learned by British authorities from the Piper Alpha disaster, were paid any heed at all either by Transocean or by the American regulating authority, the MMS (see post below!)

And, yes, the governor of Mississippi was completely right to say that the political reaction to the "disaster" was doing more economic harm than the oil spill itself. And it's not just economic damage: the hype, hysteria and witch-hunting has completely degraded America's reputation in the United Kingdom and caused pure rage and fury in other countries where American firms have been the author of huge and genuine disasters, such as Bhopal, from which American culprits have walked, or run, away with the active assistance of the American government.

Richard Silverstein: Censorship by DOS Attack

2010-07-31T07:24:00.010+01:00

The following is reproduced from Richard Silverstein's blog, "Tikun Olam" simply because it would appear to be the trigger for a sustained denial of service attack against his site. Reproduction shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of all of Mr Silverstein's views and actions (Lord knows: he might have done all sorts of bad stuff that Medawar doesn't know about.) But DOS attacks, particularly when it seems as if Israeli police computers may have been hacked or infected in order to launch it, are as threatening to modern society as piracy on the High Seas and Cash in Transit Robberies. Medawar hasn't reproduced any of the comments that were on the blog, because it is impossible to assume the commentator's permission and some of them were obscene.

The article was headed by a picture of an alleged Israeli torturer, which was obtained by Mr Silverstein in the pixellated condition you see below. A lot of the embedded links below seem to work now: presumably the URL information got copied across with them? Medawar is a bit surprised, but not complaining!

Identity of Former IDF Torturer Exposed, ‘Captain George’ is Doron Zahavi

Alleged Arab torturer Doron Zahavi aka 'Captain George' (Haaretz)

Yesterday, I reported here on a Haaretz story about the notorious “Captain George,” an IDF military intelligence interrogator accused in 2004 of sodomizing a Lebanese kidnap victim in order to secure information about the location of IDF officer, Ron Arad. Among the things I wrote was my complaint that Haaretz was protecting the real identity of George even though he no longer served in military intelligence.

With the help of a diligent Israeli researcher, I can now expose George’s real identity. He is Doron Zahavi, currently the Arab affairs liaison for the Jerusalem police. His job, as I noted yesterday, is to direct community relations and liaison efforts between the police and Jerusalem’s Arab residents.

In discussing the parameters of Zahavi’s job, a police spokesperson told Haaretz:

“The adviser must be an accepted and welcome figure in the Arab community, with excellent interpersonal skills – someone they feel they can trust, otherwise he cannot succeed in the job,” a senior police officer said.

ACRI complaint identifies Doron Zahavi by name

Apparently, Zahavi has performed his job so well he’s garnering rave reviews right and left from his Arab interlocutors. One, Jouad Siam, complained that in a February, 2010 interrogation, Zahavi threatened to destroy his home (Hebrew source) unless he disbanded a Silwan information center Siam had founded to counter the building efforts of settlers in his neigborhood. Here is how the ex-torturer now conducts himself. I’ll let you be the judge whether the leopard has changed his spots:

He [Zahavi] told us we were making problems and we had to close the center. I told him: “I thought we are in a democracy.” This raised the ire of ‘George,’ who said: “We Jews are fools. We treat you too well. I thought you would behave yourself.” ’George’ threatened that he would draw up a demolition order for his home if he refused to close the center.

According to Siam, “The entire conversation was conducted in shouts. He didn’t let me speak. He would ask and answer his own questions [without allowing Siam to respond]. At the end of the discussion, he told me to go home and behave myself.

Last February, the Association for Civil Right in Israel registered a formal complaint against Zahavi for his outburst. Among the claims listed was that Zahavi called Siam a “criminal” and said that the latter would be held responsible for everything that happened in Silwan. The interrogator asked about the source of Siam’s income and told him he would intervene with his boss. At the end of the meeting, Zahavi attempted to enlist Siam as an informant.

The police replied formally to the complaint claiming laughably that Zahavi had merely invited Siam to a “get to know you” meeting in which the police advisor sought to discover what issues particularly troubled the local Arab population. In the course of the meeting, Zahavi felt it necessary to inform his Arab interlocutor about activities in which he was engaged that violated the law. No mention in the police reply how founding an information center was a violation of law.

The publicly available ACRI complaint lists Zahavi’s real name. In that case, why would Haaretz not be able to use it? The whole situation baffles me. At any rate, thank God we’re not bound by any such nonsense and we offer the real Doron Zahavi to the world in all his glory. If a reader has a picture of Zahavi, please let me know.

Minerals Management Service

2010-07-29T15:59:00.004+01:00

Although as far as the oil industry is concerned, the Minerals Management Service performs the same safety regulation function in the United States as the Health and Safety Executive does in the United Kingdom, the two bodies are subtly different.

Without wishing to appear too moralistic, inspection and regulation of highly complex oil rigs undertaking drilling operations in very deep ocean waters, requires concentration, persistent attention to detail and good judgment. The consumption of copious quantities of Cocaine and Methamphetamine, albeit provided at no cost to either the inspector or the taxpayer, interferes with all of these mental functions in such a way as to entirely neutralize an inspector's value to industry and the wider society.

It is difficult to entirely suppress the suspicion that some of the blame for the Deepwater Horizon disaster lies with the remarkably complete failure of the Federal Government to provide competent regulation of a complex and inherently hazardous industry subjected to strong competitive pressure. In such a business environment, it is much easier for companies to spend money, and more importantly, management time and effort, on safety, if they know that government will do its job and ensure that rivals do the same.

Medawar also has a little prediction: BP's much scorned initial estimate that the costs of the disaster would be somewhere around $3bn, will turn out to be pretty accurate once legal costs are stripped away and one counts only the money actually spent on the physical cleanup and compensation actually received by injured parties. What BP didn't realize, is that in America, for every dollar one pays to an injured party, the legal profession will take nine dollars for itself. And if one attempts to avoid this, by paying money straight out to the injured party so they don't even have to take one to court, an enraged legal profession, many of whose members have political posts and even Senate seats, will simply set up a whole slew of "inquiries" which will eventually cost nine times as much as the compensation paid out without the payment of Shystergelt.

Since Thatcher, successive UK governments have foolishly attempted to run an economy based almost entirely on the banking sector. This hasn't been too successful an idea in practice. America's folly is to try and make the legal profession the backbone of the economy as well as the controlling force in society. It is difficult not to prophesy a certain amount of doom at this point.

Improving Transocean

2010-07-28T21:14:00.009+01:00

The UK's Health and Safety Executive has confirmed to Medawar that:

"In the UK Continental Shelf, the operator of a drilling rig has a general duty to control the risk of major accidents and comply with statutory provisions. It is most likely that the stated alarm systems will form part of a duty holders major hazard risk control measures. If these control measures are inhibited, in by-pass, or in silent logging modes during operations with risks of major accidents without other effective measures in place then it is likely they would be in breach of health and safety legislation."

Bad news for Transocean and the company's worldwide policy of turning safety alarms off at night to make things quieter in the control room! Deepwater Horizon had alarms that would automatically close vents to stop explosive gas mixtures penetrating to habitation and control modules of the rig. They turned them off. Mr Obama still thinks that BP is solely to blame for everything.

This link is to Transocean's Improvement Notices on the HSE website. They range from being told to make it possible for people to move around a rig without breaking their necks, to a more serious and pertinent issue regarding their failure to ensure that Blowout Preventers were correctly interacting with their control panels before installing them on the sea bed. (Some of the reported problems with the Deepwater Horizon BOP could have been in the control panel and they'd have looked the same. This is why it's so much better to test it thoroughly while you can still see both ends rather than having to make too many assumptions.)

The range of notices, too, indicates a progression from something major with a risk of wide-ranging catastrophe, to smaller (but potentially lethal to individuals) faults with walkways. This suggests that the regulator was regulating, and that his inspections were thorough and persistent enough to uncover the small details as well as the headline-grabbers. Even when the HSE found a headline-grabbing fault, they still went on looking for little faults as well. It would be a pity if the new Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, were, in his zeal to increase the frequency of oil rig inspections, to inadvertently force the inspectors to be less thorough and persistent.

The whole process, in the UK, is geared towards improvement rather than blame. It is not only more thorough than historical American regulation, but decidedly more constructive, too. Transocean shareholders might also note that they are almost certainly paying less compensation to widows from their North Sea operations than from their Gulf of Mexico operations, which is why only an idiot lobbies and bribes against reasonable regulation.

Meanwhile, it seems that BP, despite being "British", has stemmed the flow of oil in about half the time it took to cap the Ixtoc I oilspill which was in significantly shallower water.

The flow of oil continues, however, as an American tug has skillfully decapitated another well, abandoned two years ago by an American company. Something to spend BP's $20bn on now that "America's worst ever environmental disaster" seems to be petering out with a fraction of the predicted damage.

In fact, the amount of oil reaching the shore is less, so far, than the Amorco Cadiz disaster, which an American court eventually valued at $200M, Amorco paying nothing whatsoever in the twelve years it took to reach this decision. BP paid out ten times as much in the first month -and was fiercely condemned from every side of the American media and politics for its penny-pinching tardiness.

For the record, no oilspill in history has ever done anything like as much environmental harm as the US Department of Agriculture did when it told farmers in Oklahoma to plough their pastures, sow wheat and await prosperity. This resulted in a dustbowl which caused one of the biggest forced migrations of the 20th century, as American farming communities had to leave their now uninhabitable homes.

For all those who think this was a PR disaster for BP: America has done herself no favours whatsoever, not just in the UK, but worldwide, as the gulf between what America demands and what America does becomes ever more painfully apparent.

Gagging the Strasbourg Geese

2010-07-24T10:56:00.006+01:00

This one is almost beyond belief: Transocean not only inhibited alarms on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, it would appear that all of its rigs, all around the world, are routinely operated in a similar state. This would imply that their rigs in UK waters are in breach of the law and that they should be prosecuted forthwith, regardless of what comes out of the current American Federal Blamestorming process. (President Obama said before it even started that the inquiry was going to find "British Petroleum" solely responsible for everything.)

It really is time we were told who owns Transocean's voting stock; BP's shareholdings and accounts are a matter of public record. (Although based in Houston, Texas, Transcoean is registered in Switzerland and this means that most investors will own what UK law would call debenture stock or preference shares, which do not come with a vote at board meetings, or even the right to attend these. Holders do, however, get paid before holders of voting shares if the company is liquidated -and the accounts are straight. It can be a criminal offence in Switzerland to even try and find out who the voting stock holders are, let alone what their holdings are worth and what their voting record on company policy has been. Swiss industrial equities are for investors who get a thrill out of wearing blindfolds.)

More on Sheffield Forgemasters

2010-07-22T23:10:00.005+01:00

This is interesting:
It seems that someone who wanted to force Sheffield Forgemasters to accept investment (ie: yield control of their company) from/to him, donated money to David Cameron's campaign and then "advised" the new Prime Minister that government loan guarantees to the firm were a breach of EU law. (Which doesn't appear to be true.)

This week, Mr Cameron has already shown himself to be profoundly ignorant of British history, claiming that the UK was a junior partner to the USA in 1940 in the fight against the Nazis.

In 1940, the USA was not fighting the Nazis -and the State Department and many other very powerful people, were still trying to get the White House to join the war on Hitler's side. President Roosevelt was apparently very tempted, because he saw an end to "British Imperialism" as an essential goal of American policy. Britain's main American ally at the time was J. Edgar Hoover, whom many liberals might call a "Nazi" but he saw the Nazis as America's deadliest possible enemy when the Kennedys and Harrimans (and Bushes) saw Hitler as a GOOD THING.

If that's the proof of Cameron's hugely expensive and prestigious education, then it's possible that he really is too ignorant to know when a chancer is lying to him for his own ends. He has just completed important negotiations with President Obama.

Compassion and Appeal

2010-07-21T12:03:00.005+01:00

It may help some US Senators to understand that one reason why the Scottish Executive was so keen to grant compassionate release to the Lockerbie Bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, was that this was the only certain way of stopping him from mounting an appeal against his conviction, which would almost certainly have succeeded due to the poverty of evidence left if two key pieces are challenged. The consequences of such a successful appeal would have been disastrous for the United States, as it would have made the US Government (and probably Scotland) an absolute pariah in Europe and the Middle East. It would have caused huge problems for the United Kingdom, as a whole, as any criminal, anywhere, would have been able to resist extradition on the grounds that he wouldn't receive a fair trial in the UK. Short of dropping a bomb on a Chinese Embassy somewhere, there's nothing worse that could happen, diplomatically speaking.

Pan Am 103 was more probably destroyed by Palestinians working freelance for the Quds militia unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Any Libyans caught in the net may simply have been conned into providing a suitcase full of clothes for someone they thought to be working undercover for Libyan intelligence, which apparently happened all the time with the Libyan mission in Malta. It's very easy to exploit a system where people are trained not to ask awkward questions! So, no, the Libyans still aren't telling the truth, but they didn't do it.

As for Tony Blair giving the appearance of lobbying Libya on behalf of BP, it would be typical of him if appearance was all this was, and in fact he was lobbying on behalf of a far less reputable oil company, Taci Oil, which was able to use a below-market-price supply deal with the Libyans to undercut its competitors and gain a complete retail and wholesale fuel monopoly in Albania, now set to spread to neighbouring countries. The people behind this one are very grateful to the Blairs indeed.

How to Trigger a Full Review of the David Kelly Case

2010-07-12T19:23:00.003+01:00

There has been a lot of public pressure recently, attempting to "force" the new Coalition government of the United Kingdom into holding a review into the case of David Kelly.
There have even been some allegations that incoming ministers are somehow colluding with Tony Blair to keep everything secret.

From Medawar's own contacts with the Ministry of Justice, a subtly different picture emerges.

Relevant papers in the David Kelly were highly classified by the outgoing government, as, incidentally, was the report by a Sergeant Hughes, into why Scottish Authorities missed dozens of chances over twenty years to prosecute Thomas Hamilton prior to the Dunblane Massacre. When this level of classification is invoked by a given government, they have the option to seal all relevant papers from that government's successors. This would appear to be what has happened: incoming ministers wanted an inquiry, but the civil service simply cannot let them see the sealed papers until something in the legal situation changes to make it the official business of the new Coalition. Ministers are effectively stymied from even saying in public what their problem is. They are in a legal bear-trap of Tony Blair's devising, and this may not be the only matter on which papers which the new government really ought to see, are barred from it.

Here is a little hint:
Ministry of Justice Officials refer to "recent publicity" about a group of doctors having prepared a application to the Attorney General under section 13 of the Coroner's Act 1988, to reconsider the decision made by the coroner, to adjourn the inquest under section 17A of the same act. However, the ministry finds that the application has not been formally submitted.

The Daily Mail has also published evidence from Mai Pederson, about Dr Kelly's physical frailities which would have prevented him from committing suicide in the manner presumed by Lord Hutton. (Like Lord Cullen's inquiry into Dunblane, Hutton's official remit made it impossible for him to ask the relevant questions, so no blame can really attach to them for any omissions. In Cullen's case, the omissions are very largely made good by Sergeant Hughes' now highly classified investigation and report.) But Ms Pederson seems to have communicated her evidence, separately and informally, to the Attorney General, where it is probably trapped by Mr Blair having apparently given the Cabinet Secretary formal notice that this is a matter which he considers necessary to keep secret from the new government.

If Ms Pederson were to send her evidence to the group of doctors, and if they were to formally submit their application under section 13 of the Coroner's Act 1988, to the new Attorney General, then the matter would cease to be an historical case on which the Blair administration is given protection from its successors. The new Attorney General would see the papers which, currently, he probably has less chance of accessing than he did as an opposition MP!

That would remove the principle barrier to progress on this issue.

As for Timothy Hampton:
The Ministry says that it has been unable to determine whether or not his remains, (or any part thereof,) has been returned to England and Wales. If they have been (or if they were), then the presence of the body in his district must be reported to the relevant coroner and then, since Dr Hampton apparently died in a fall, an inquest would normally be held, in accordance to the appeal court decision of 1983 in the case of Helen Smith.

There may be an equivalent legal challenge in Scotland, that would have the same paper-releasing effect on Sergeant Hughes' report, but Medawar cannot at the moment say what this is, only that Mr Blair went to even more extraordinary lengths to keep something secret there, than he did over the death of David Kelly.

So, if this blog is read by any of the relevant personnel:
It's not a matter of a legal battle against the new government, merely a need for a formal legal initiative to make this their business in the eyes of a Cabinet Secretary who is obliged, by laws meant for somewhat higher purposes than Mr Blair's shenanigans, to respect the confidentiality of anything that Mr Blair chose to designate a private matter for his own government.

The ball is currently in your court. The Coalition Government need you to pass the ball into their court, before they have any power to do anything with it. Do this, and who knows what they might find!

Vocational Stalkers

2010-07-02T09:52:00.006+01:00

Any UK and near-Continent victims of stalking, whether ostensibly Animal Rights related or not, should take a look at the faces in this Daily Mail Article. (Most stalking victims have no idea why they are being stalked, those stalking them are usually so deranged as to believe that the victims are so "knowingly evil" that they not only understand why they are being stalked, but secretly accept that they deserve it.)

Medawar would be interested to hear from anyone who's seen any of these faces in stalking incidents, regardless of what cause, if any, the stalking seems to be in aid of. Should it transpire that any of them are paid money for stalking, and this is not unknown, then, as far as the Unemployment Service are concerned, they have a job, and action could be taken against them. One is reminded of the hapless individual, described by George Orwell, in Wigan in the 1930s, who fed his neighbour's chickens when they were away and was reported to the dole office by another neighbour as "having a job feeding chickens". Medawar wants to avoid that kind of petty injustice, but if someone is using state benefits to sustain themselves whilst spending each and every day skipping along the edges of the criminal law to make someone's life hell, there's not a taxpayer in the land who wouldn't want to see them stopped.

Obama's Rhetoric Reaps an Inevitable Harvest.

2010-06-21T21:50:00.007+01:00

Rather as Medawar expected, the Obama-led lynching of "British" Petroleum and its chief executive has not been lost on any of the very many countries around the world where all-American companies have caused far worse disasters and walked away, protected from repercussions by the US State Department.

Thing is, in 1984, when the Bhopal disaster killed thousands of people directly and shortened the lives of tens of thousands more, India was not a superpower able to kick the US President's "ass" in the way he has made such a point of doing himself in the past several weeks. India is much, much more powerful now than it was then, and Mr Obama, and especially Mr Weiner, have, through their own high blown rhetoric, made it politically impossible for the Indian government not to press for the extradition of Union Carbide executives to face criminal trial.

Perhaps American politicians will finally understand why British politicians made the Piper Alpha inquiry a rhetoric (and pomposity) free zone. Or perhaps not, in which case the next few months will be excruciating.

Update: No, American politicians and Obama in particular, do not get it, and India gets more furious. Medawar would advise Obama to avoid Brittany, too. And Nigeria, and Genoa.

Sheffield Forgemasters and Other Solutions

2010-06-21T12:20:00.010+01:00

The new Coalition Government of the UK (the "Lib Cons") has recently made several fairly controversial spending cuts, mostly focusing on items which the outgoing government decided to spend in the last few weeks of its existence. Some of these were indeed pure pork barrel or "scorched earth" items, but one or two were booby traps, in that something bad would genuinely happen if they were cut, as an incoming government (and Labour was expecting it to be pure Tory) could be predicted to do.

One of these was a loan of £8oM (not strictly spending, therefore) part of an overall £140M finance package to enable a company called Sheffield Forgemasters to build a 15,000 ton press capable of forging very large steel castings. (One cannot simply cast steel as if it were bronze: to have strength, the casting has to be heated up and walloped a bit.) Currently, the only firm that can cast and forge single steel components of the size required for the new generation of nuclear power stations, is Japanese. The previous government judged it to be in the public interest (and not just in the UK public's interest) for there to be more than one place in the world that could make this kind of thing. The present government doesn't think they can afford it, and are openly suspicious of all the arguments in favour of the development. (The new energy secretary is openly suspicious of anything to do with nuclear power, too.)

However, even if the government cannot play a part in funding the press, it's still in the public interest for it to be built, and if it is built and Forgemasters then have the capacity to make steel parts bigger than have ever been seen before, Medawar has no doubt that applications outside the nuclear power industry will swiftly emerge. For example; one of the green alternatives to nuclear power stations, are offshore wind turbines with a turbine diameter approaching, or even exceeding, five hundred feet.

This will require several very large steel components: the turbine blades may be carbon and glassfibre composites, but they will need to meet in a hub of quite spectacular strength and integrity, and there will need to be a corresponding bearing, too. The whole turbine mounting and generator housing will need to track the wind, which means there will have to be a mounting ring many yards wide. All of this will be on top of a steel tower, which can be fabricated by shipbuilding methods without a 15,000 ton press, but where this tower is fixed to the concrete-filled foundations at the base, there will be another high-integrity component.

Perhaps all of these things can be fabricated out of several smaller forgings, but there might well be strength added and weight saved if they can be done in one forging each.

A similar trend applies to wave and tidal power schemes: to become efficient enough to compete with nuclear power, some of them will need the benefits of scale, our existing manufacturing capacity will struggle, globally, and thereby our solutions will be shaped by the limits of what we can fabricate, and not by what we need to do to achieve our goals. Sometimes this forces people to invent better solutions, but it can equally block access to simple and straighforward solutions.

There's no real question that the steel industry has reached the stage where at least one company in the UK has to have tools of this scale, in order for them to move forward and offer designers new possibilities. The question is how, if the government won't help finance it, do we do this thing. And not just this thing, but any equivalent tooling job for the future?

In the 19th century, where a loan of taxpayer's money wouldn't even have been thought of as a solution, all manner of things were tried. Including public subscriptions to bond issues, and even just to charitable funds which had the building of a bridge or whatever as the charitable goal. The public was offered the chance to ride across the rigging being used to construct the Clifton Suspension Bridge, in return for a donation towards the ongoing building costs, and so on.

In the 20th century, public interest corporations were created for big projects, such as the building of Garden Cities at Letchworth and Welwyn. (Some purely commercial town-building efforts were total failures, others, like Jaywick Sands, got built, but without proper planning.) The most famous public interest corporation of this period, the BBC, is still with us. Although, the BBC was made possible by parliament granting it the right to extract a licence fee from any householder who received wireless or, later, television, signals. This makes the BBC a lot more independent of government than a typical state broadcaster, although it is not fully commercial. (And commercial broadcasters must either charge a subscription, or be subject to censorship by advertisers.)

More recent still, are umbrella organisations set up as companies limited by guarantee, which allow several competing companies to pool resources in their and the customer's interest, without forming a cartel that would be both unwelcome and illegal. Two noteworthy examples of this are: The London Internet Exchange and BUPA.

In effect, the former is a self-funding entity to make sure that the internet develops and keeps happening in the UK, the latter performs more or less the same task for private medicine. Paying no dividends, both have no alternative but to put any operating surplus back into the growth and development of the "business". Whoever put up the money to start this, did not get it back directly. But the members of the LINX benefit from the huge growth in internet activity which it has enabled, and members (and a lot of other parties, too) have benefited from the growth in medical practice that BUPA has facilitated. BUPA was originally set up to do the things which the state-run National health Service didn't offer. To a large degree, that's still the mission.

Although ideologically opposed by those who think that the NHS should be the only provider of health care in the country, it's hard to see how the NHS could possibly have survived the past sixty years without BUPA, because it would have had to do too many things and public finances would never have stood the strain. Although BUPA is seen as "private" medicine, it is still a public-interest company at heart and it certainly is not as rapacious as many American commercial healthcare providers.

Sheffield Forgemasters, meanwhile, is not the first British manufacturing company to face difficulties funding the new tooling needed to get from the products of the past, to the products of the future. BSA and other motorbike manufacturers were in the same bind in the nineteen seventies, because to compete with the new Japanese motorbikes, they needed, not just new models, but entirely new ways of making them. Other marques had the same trouble, the British Motorcycle Industry didn't so much "nearly die" as die. Yes, it exists again and a state-of the-art factory makes new Triumph bikes, but this is a rebirth, it was not a survival. Yes, every company involved should have anticipated change and put money aside, but there are two problems with this:

Money put aside within a profit-making company always gets used for something else, or it gets eyed up by the taxman.

Anticipating change is a full time occupation and the people running the company in the here and now, simply cannot also anticipate changes of this scale until they happen. The signs can be hard to spot, and those behind the changes may be keeping them secret for commercial advantage, as the Japanese were.

If there were a non-profit making company limited by guarantee, set up to ensure that British manufacturing industry gets the major tooling investment, research and development that it needs, then capital put into it won't come back as dividends, but it won't be taken by the taxman, either, as the investment vehicle is not for profit. And it can have "anticipating change" as an objective named in its articles and as the full time job of its directors. Charging companies a licence fee for using tooling that it funds, or helps with research and development, would in time give it an income stream to make it independent of direct funding inputs from its members. It might be called "British Industrial Tool Exchange" (BITX) or something similar.

Give people the tools, and they can do the job.
We face all kinds of environmental problems in the near future requiring engineering solutions, one immediate example is bound to be an oil well Blowout Preventer that is two orders of magnitude more robust and reliable than the existing types, which differ only in scale and ancillary equipment from those of the early 20th century. A Blowout Preventer is the way it is, largely to make all the components possible, preferably easy, to make (by the standards of East Texas around 1911.) Paradoxically, to make it simpler and more reliable, we will need ways of making components in one piece that are currently several, and perhaps in sophisticated cam shapes where currently they are simple pistons and cylinders. The Blowout Preventers of the future will be simpler in operation, but more complex in manufacture.

This Was The Week

2010-06-16T21:10:00.005+01:00

This was the week when President Obama, having got tougher with "British" Petroleum every day for a month, got so tough that America now has no goal except getting tough with BP.

This was the week when Exxon, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and Mobile all claimed that they never spilled any oil and even if they did, they had really brilliant plans for cleaning it up that were so much better than BPs. A weary congressional committee chairman, possibly the only sane man left in American politics, pointed out that they had, in fact, practically identical contingency plans to BP. (Probably all commissioned from the same consultancy firm, if the truth were known.)

This was the week when an organised campaign to "seize BP's Assets" really took off, with millions signing up to it without asking if it was in fact organised by Transocean's publicists...

This was the week when blaming people for an accident took precedence over fixing the problem.

This was the week when an American president demanded, with menaces, a $20bn downpayment on a crisis that has cost $1.6bn so far and will probably actually cost, at most, $8bn.

This was the week when some Americans seriously started to believe that BP had managed to crack the Earth's crust open and that the entire Gulf Coast would be evacuated in consequence.

This was the week when America started a "war on oil slicks", using all the language of a Blitz which no American has known, to describe an accident that's being patiently fixed, when America's politicians allow, bit by bit, by the very people they are competing with each other to castigate.

This was the week when the managers of China's Sovereign Wealth Funds, calm and sober men more powerful than everyone on Capitol Hill put together, decided that Greece was actually a safer place to invest in than the United States, a conclusion that the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund reached last month.

Transocean, the Pointed Finger and Why The Blowout Preventer Probably Failed

2010-06-13T15:17:00.012+01:00

President Obama's jihad against BP, really got going when BP started to ask questions about how all four stages of a four-stage blowout preventer could fail. This was when they were accused of "pointing the finger" and have had fingers, not to mention the presidential boot, in their face every moment since then.

The blowout preventer was supplied and installed by Transocean, but made by a separate American engineering company. Probably, elsewhere in the world Transocean would have a Briitsh, Dutch or Malayasian company make this item to a common specification. It weighs 140 tons and no-one wants to ship one too far if a competent manufacturer is close at hand. The competence of the manufacturer in this and other cases seems not to be at issue.

However, despite having about half of the drilling contracts in the Gulf of Mexico over the last few years, Transocean account for around three quarters of the accidents, and more than one of those has involved the partial failure of a blowout preventer. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is remarkable because the failure was complete, and it led to a cascade of problems on the rig itself, which is what killed the (11) human beings. Better rig design could have avoided these deaths, if not the oil spill, and Medawar is still somewhat concerned that the oil spill is seen as worse than the cost in human life.

Another fact, with multiple pertinencies for Deepwater Horizon, is that in 2006, Transocean was served with an Improvement Notice by the UK's Health and Safety Executive. This link is to the HSE's page, explaining very clearly, exactly what an improvement notice is.

The HSE Inspector can only issue an improvement notice if:
The company is in some way breaking health and safety law (in a way that would allow it to be brought to a criminal trial if an accident had already happened.)
The Inspector can describe what it is the company must do, within a given time, to comply with the law and avoid prosecution.
It's a way of getting companies (and, incidentally, government departments and police authorities) to avoid accidents, before someone is hurt, rather than punishing them afterwards. Failure to comply with an improvement notice will lead to prosecution.

The notice in question related to Transocean's failure to test blowout preventers. Transocean appears to have complied with the notice within the time set by the Inspector and thus complied with UK law. The accident rate in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that this improvement in its performance was entirely local to UK jurisdiction. IE: the company now knew that its normal practice wasn't good enough for the UK, but took no steps to learn from the notice and make their American operation safer too.

Medawar will get onto the technical implications in a moment, but there's an important pertinency of jurisdiction here: The relevant American authorities have been complaining, but not loudly, because Mr Obama wants BP to bear all the blame, that because Transocean is registered in Switzerland and its ships and rigs are registered as maritime vessels in the Marshal Islands, they had no power to inspect them. Actually, they had no duty to inspect them annually, but the US Coastguard as the same powers as the UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency, to inspect any vessel, as the occasion demands, that is passing through their waters or visiting their ports, for basic seaworthiness. They have the same power to arrest any vessel, too, until defects are made good.

However, the transfer of responsibility for oil-rig inspections from the UK's Department of Energy, to the HSE, as recommended by the Cullen Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster, gives the HSE complete jurisdiction over any rig or vessel carrying out work in UK waters, or on a licence issued by a UK authority. If American authorities had paid attention to the Piper Alpha disaster, other than to assure themselves that no American faced criminal proceedings over the 167 dead, as per the State Department's standard operating procedure, then they would have had nearly a quarter of a century's grace in which to ensure that some Federal or State authority had the same jurisdiction over the offshore drilling industry in American waters as the HSE does in UK waters. That they didn't, may owe something to "industry lobbying" but there is no evidence that BP was a party to such lobbying. BP are not on record as having opposed any regulatory effort to improve safety in the UK or Norway (they have sometimes suggested more constructive alternatives to some ideas) and Medawar suspects that they wouldn't have opposed such efforts in the USA, had they ever seriously transpired, which they did not.

Transocean, on the other hand, has links to a very heavy lobbying outfit run by a former Democratic Congressman, Bill Brewster. This investment seems to have paid off for them, so far.

Now for the pertinent technical implications:

The 2006 improvement notice was over a failure to test blowout preventers. This cannot have been a failure to test that they had been manufactured properly, or the HSE would have served the notice on the manufacturer and not Transocean! However, it is impossible for the manufacturer to ship a blowout preventer to its customers, in a fully-armed state where it would function immediately on arrival. It could not be transported without incident in the "armed" state and it certainly couldn't be safely handled on the rig and installed on the oil (or gas) well in that state.

The installer, Transocean or their sub-contractors, must prepare the equipment for installation when it arrives on the rig, test that they have done this correctly, and then install it. Then they must prepare it for operation after installation, and again, test that this has been done properly and that the device will work. Not carrying out this chain of actions properly was what earned Transocean the improvement notice in 2006.

In practice, what happens is that the equipment leaves the factory with covers fitted over every hole, and with some kind of pin or bolt immobilizing everything that can move.
Some parts may be packed with grease to protect them in transit, some fluid reservoirs may not be filled. It leaves the factory in a state which allows it to be transported and which will protect all its working parts from corrosion or incidental damage.

When equipment is on the rig, as much of this stuff is taken off as can be done safely, and any working fluids are loaded, protective grease is removed and where appropriate, replaced by whatever working lubricant is required. This procedure is documented in detail, and although complicated, is no more complicated than it needs to be. Someone signs a worksheet to show that everything required at that stage has been done. There will be an agreed test procedure that verifies, as far as possible, that everything that has been released so far, will work as intended.

Then the equipment can be lowered into the sea and installed, by divers or robots depending on how deep the ocean floor is. These days, robots are used more and more, even in relatively shallow waters, because there's no such thing as a completely safe deep sea industrial dive. Once the equipment is installed, it can be armed for operation and any remaining covers removed to allow pipes to be connected, etc. Then there's another test procedure before anyone can pack up and go home, or move the rig onto the next oilfield. (Transocean were apparently under pressure from their next customer to finish working for BP and move the Deepwater Horizon onto their oilfield.)

Because this happens towards the end of what may have been a months-long operation, even if the operation over-runs by just a few days, these final preparation and test procedures of the blowout preventer are more likely to be performed under pressure of time than the actual drilling work. This may explain why so many of Transocean's accidents have involved blowout preventers, not because these are necessarily flawed, but because they have to be installed with the end of the job in sight and management openly staring at its watch.

Now, the way in which the Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer failed, completely, in all its stages, isn't consistent with some of the normal causes, such as a foriegn body, defective parts, etc. There are four stages; two, or even three, defective parts do not cause all four stages to fail, and a foreign body would have to be many feet long to affect more than one stage.

If there was an environmental cause, such as temperature or pressure jamming the equipment completely, then this would have been discovered years ago when similar equipment was tested after proper installation at a similar depth. This is another reason why the HSE likes the tests to be done each time: to gather information on how far this kind of equipment can be relied upon in general, as well as to ensure that each installation is as safe as it can be.

Just about the only thing (short of highly competent sabotage) that can credibly immobilize all four stages of a blowout preventer, is something, the only thing, that is designed to immobilize all four stages: the safety devices (bolts) that are fitted at the factory to make it safe for transport and installation.

The blowout preventer failure was key to the whole disaster, and to any immediately effective remedy for the oilspill. Because BP had the whole power and fury of the US Government turned on them the moment they started to ask Transocean to account for this, BP have been working blind ever since, although there are ample circumstantial grounds for them to suspect, that if their supplier, Transocean, made an error, that was where it would be. BP may be held responsible, but it is deeply irrational to both deny them any right to inquire how other companies may have contributed to the disaster, and to make them fix it all none-the-less.

And even if BP have to guarantee that clean up costs will be met, it's not in the public interest to deny them the right to recover some of those costs from other companies that made mistakes, because that just gives those companies, however well represented they are on Capitol Hill, a free pass to commit mistakes and cause accidents in the future.

It is time for BP to act on suspicion, even if the White House is determined to deny them the evidence, and try, so far as is possible, to repeat the post-installation arming procedures for the blowout preventer, that Transocean should have done, regardless of what any surviving worksheets say was done or not. With the oilspill collection cap in place, not all of the stages are still accessible, but even if one stage could be activated, the amount of oil being spilled could be dramatically reduced.

And but for President Obama's heavy-handed, highly partisan and frankly bigoted intervention, that might have been possible a few weeks ago, which would have saved the vast majority of the oil that has been spilled, though sadly, none of the blood.

It is very obviously true that nobody in American politics now actually wants BP to succeed in stopping the spill, by doing something which they might have done a month earlier but for American politics.

Reality of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

2010-06-06T15:41:00.010+01:00

After weeks of unrelenting efforts by President Obama to pretend that the "worst ecological disaster in American history" is a British plot against the American people. (He pronounces "British Petroleum" the way someone in a pointy white hood would pronounce a word meaning "member of the African-American community".) Some more facts emerge:

There was a worse oil spill, Itxoc 1 on the Mexican side of the Gulf of Mexico in 1979, which American politicians, media and public appear to remain unaware of to this day. 150,000,000 barrels before it was capped, according to BBC Newsnight, which may have meant gallons, see comment below (they read off autocues: a BBC script would have the right thing written on it ) Other sources state something like 9,000,000 barrels over ten months. Flow rate estimated somewhere from the same as, to double that, of Deepwater Horizon, which has already been cut by more than half and should be sorted within another two months, so even if flow rates the same, it cannot be more than a third as bad as Ixtoc 1, which is rated as the third worst oil spill in history.

After the Amoco Cadiz disaster on the French coast, in 1978, the American owners didn't pay a cent in compensation until forced to, by legal action from the French Government, in 1990. BP were settling reasonable claims from ordinary citizens within a fortnight: Presumably, Mr Obama must think they should have paid in advance of the disaster? The Deepwater Horizon leak would have to go completely uncapped for 90-120 days to equal the amount of crude spilled by the Amoco Cadiz. Although the French succeeded in getting compensation, Medawar is not aware of anyone in the (British) Channel Islands getting any change out of Amoco at all, although Herm in particular suffered a lot of contamination. Medawar remembers that every shop on Guernsey at the time ran out of lighter fuel, as this was the only available solvent that got the stuff off people's skin. Most annoyance they'd suffered since the Nazi occupation.

19,000 barrels is roughly one sixth of the average daily amount of crude that American companies have spilled as a matter of routine (hence, no clean-up) in the Niger Delta for the past twenty years. It's only bad when the oil hits American beaches, not when it's in an African town's drinking water and soaking into their fields. The far right in America were trying to pretend, during the elections, that President Obama was rather more African than African American. If Obama was even 1% African at heart, this murderous hypocrisy would haunt him, but it does not.

All of these spills put together are smaller than the 1991 spill in the Arabian Gulf during the first Gulf War. The fishermen of Dubai, at least, were still in business the last time Medawar wandered past and someone attempted to sell him counterfeit mineral water. (Nice try.)

The Daily Mail reports that one television crew from New York sat in a bar in Louisiana bitterly complaining that they'd been forced to spend several days in a boat until they got an oil slick that looked scary enough to be broadcast. Which will put older British readers in mind of the TV Newsroom satire "Drop The Dead Donkey". (The clip is from : Series 2, episode 1. The relevant bit is 15-16 minutes in.)

America, meanwhile, is no longer an economic superpower, far less the "hyperpower" of some fevered political imaginations in Washington DC, and it will do well to even survive the rest of this very troubled century without allies. Having the President go on TV every other night to reiterate his contempt of the ally whose soldiers have been fighting along side America's in Afghanistan for nine years now, is sending a clear and strong message to ALL of America's allies that it's probably best not to bother.

Update: The Governor of Mississippi has stated that so far, the press coverage , and Federal Government hype, of the oil spill has done his state more economic damage than the spill itself.
People may argue with him, but the presentation has indeed been more in the spirit of Damien Day than Lord Reith.

Transocean, the Invisible Culprit

2010-05-31T10:39:00.003+01:00

At least someone is beginning to realize that there's something profoundly fishy about a company, based in Houston, Texas for all practical purposes, being registered in Switzerland for tax and administrative purpose, and having its rigs registered in the Marshal Islands. But Obama still thinks that BP is the only permissiable culprit, which must take all the rage, all the blame, all the hate, all the while it is expected to do all the work necessary to actually rescue the situation. BP are trying all the possible options in logical order of preference: why not stop sreaming dementedly in their ear and threatening them while they get on with this? Meanwhile, Transocean is doing nothing except trying to melt into the shadows....

Could it be, that Mr Obama knows that Transocean is probably mostly to blame, but that it's so much easier for him to grab the assets of a British company than a Swiss one? Especially when the shareholders, hidden behind all the Swiss secrecy, are mostly Americans.

If a company has something to hide, it doesn't generally register in London or Cardiff.

Chains of Containment, Chains of Evidence and the Broken Chain of Expertise

2010-05-30T11:57:00.008+01:00

The failure of BP's "Top Kill" procedure to stem the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, does have one positive aspect, because of what the next option on the list entails (they are working through the options in the order of "time taken to get ready for them" so that the leak will eventually be stopped by the quickest means that work, no matter how often Mr Obama leads the nation in a ten-minute hate of BP in the meantime.)

That next option is to cut the existing well head and blowout preventer clean off the well, lift it clear (it weighs about 140 tons) and clamp a replacement over the clean-cut pipe. This will, hopefully briefly, result in a much increased flow, so doing it after trying the top kill is probably sensible as at least some of the heavy mud may still be in the well to slow the flow. This is essentially what was eventually done (in shallower water) with the well under the Piper Alpha platform. So it shouldn't be scorned: this is a standard procedure, novel only by virtue of the depth, which is true of everything that's been tried so far.

This procedure removes that 140 tons mechanism from the chain of containment and transfers it to the chain of evidence. However, this equipment was supplied by Transocean and may remain their property, so BP doesn't necessarily have a legal right to do anything other than lift it clear of the immediate area in which they are working. Since the current political and legal situation: BP paying all the bills, taking all the blame and being hated by everyone in the United States, is preferred by Transocean and Halliburton executives to anyone remembering that they had a role in all this, if it is left up to Transocean and Halliburton, that evidence will either stay on the seabed, or it will be removed to Transocean's yard in Houston and never see the light of day again.

There needs to be a court order waiting for the moment that the blowout-preventer ceases to be part of the containment chain and becomes available as evidence. If the Federal and State Governments don't want the key evidence to break surface, Medawar suggests that the families of the thirteen men who died, get their lawyers on the case.

It isn't just about blame, liability or even justice: proper forensic and technical examination of the apparently-failed equipment is vital to understanding how and why it failed, and without that, there is no possibility of conducting this kind of operation safely in the future. And if American offshore oil reserves cannot be exploited at all, which seems to be the political mood if safety cannot be guaranteed, then America's near future is one of subservience to Moscow, where the Russian president is already gleefully talking to the Russian press about BP going into liquidation. BP, by remarkable coincidence, owns the only significant part of Russia's oil and gas industry not already under direct ownership by the Russian state, or oligarchs connected to United Russia.

Whatever failings this episode has exposed in BP, the evident weaknesses of the US Government are more glaring and more serious. The defining characteristic has been officials asserting their authority and politicians exercising their power. And absolutely none of them know what they are doing. America may hate BP, but BP has some clue as to what to try and in what order.

In the absence of expertise, power and authority lead swiftly to humiliating farce. Which brings us to the broken chain of expertise:

If someone wanted to destroy the major Western powers, or make them subservient to something more Eastern in nature, it could be a viable strategy to simply chip away at the availability of expertise to the American, British, French and Canadian governments over a period of years. In America, this could probably be achieved by persuading conceited officials and politicians to "shoulder aside" the experts, in Britain and France there seems to be an astonishingly high death rate amongst specific kinds of expert, and in Canada, one or two very rich men with obscure agendas are engaged in making phoney, doctored, "expertise" available to Federal and Provincial governments, particularly in the area of anti-terrorism and subversion.

Which brings us back to the crying need for a proper inquiry into the death of Dr Timothy Hampton, and so many others. And there must be an objective, technical examination of the apparently-failed equipment from Deepwater Horizon. Things have reached the stage where any call for objective consideration of the evidence is scorned and denounced by the Whitehouse as a weaseling attempt by BP to shift the blame. The truth matters a lot more to the future than the President sounding fierce. If the Obama administration continues to wield power and authority without expertise, America has only a few years left.

Deepwater Horizon and the Unlearned Lessons of Piper Alpha

2010-05-28T19:55:00.007+01:00

The Piper Alpha oil and gas platform disaster in the North Sea, which killed 167 men, was largely the product of two things:
1/Badly-planned maintenance, so that two components of the safety chain were being worked on at the same time. (You don't necessarily make things safer by doing lots of maintenance: the Royal Navy Icebreaker, HMS Endurance, was nearly sunk by a sea valve being improperly refitted after unnecessary "maintenance". You make things safer by careful and intelligent planning of maintenance, so that necessary things get done in a safe sequence, by people with the right expertise and the correct tools.)

2/ Mid-life modification of a simple, albeit large, oil production platform, into a mixed oil and gas production platform also acting as collector for other fields. This is what turned a small fire into a sequence of explosions leading to the total destruction of the platform (and a fast rescue boat launched by a standby ship).

This is where lessons were learned in the North Sea, but, surprisingly, given that the disaster cost an American company more than a billion pounds, those lessons seem not to have been even heard of outside British jurisdiction.

As first built, the Piper Alpha rig was as safe for its intended purpose as the technology of 1976 (when it was floated) allowed. There were four modules, with the most dangerous activities happening in the module furthest from the "populated" module which contained crew quarters, and the control room. There were also firewalls in all the right places, but these were intended to contain oil fires, and were not blast walls, which are needed where gas explosions are likely.

The modifications, to allow for gas production and the gathering of gas from other rigs for onwards transfer, brought pipes and control valves next to the rig's control room. The first relatively small fire and explosion effectively took out the control room, which meant that the only damage-control action taken was to activate the emergency stop. This shut off, for a while, most of the flow of gas and oil from its various sources (and this was complicated as there were lots of sources coming onto the one rig) but emptying the pipes near the fire would have required a complex series of actions, and an authorizing intelligence to command them. The control room had already gone. Fairly quickly, the fire burst these various full pipes, releasing more fuel to the fire and causing further bursts and explosions, one compared by witnesses to a tactical nuclear explosion. All of which was happening immediately next to the populated module. Although described as a "blowout" by the media, the sequence was the reverse of this, with an accidental leak on the rig leading to a chain of damage that eventually took the cap off the well as the rig sank.

It isn't known for certain what happened on the Deepwater Horizon, but whatever happened, the President of the United States has been from the outset adamant that BP are completely and solely responsible for it. BP did not own the rig and were not, therefore, in complete control of its configuration and equipment. Most of the permanent equipment being installed from and for the rig, including the blowout preventer, were supplied by the rig's owners, the Swiss company Transocean. Unlike Piper Alpha, this was an exploration rig, intended to be used at many different sites, to set up for a production rig to follow. This is why it was owned by a subcontractor and not an oil company.

Even a company as big as BP, does not have enough work to occupy such a rig full time for its useful life, and there would be competition concerns if BP owned and had control of, an asset also used by its competitors. To a large extent, BP using a rig it didn't own and didn't fully control, was the product of America's cherished anti-cartel laws, (copied in Europe) which were originally designed to curb the power of Standard Oil, Standard Bank and the Rockefeller family.

It is still possible that the truth of the "blowout" and catastrophic oil leak on Deepwater Horizon, is that the pipeline between the rig and the blowout preventer on the sea bed, was damaged when the rig sank, as with Piper Alpha. The big and frightening oil leak, is probably the consequence of the accident and not its cause. The cause was most probably something smaller; a surge of high pressure gas in the drillpipe, which burst into the air and made the same sort of initial explosion, in the same sort of place, as that on Piper Alpha.

The cause of the gas release is different, but the scale probably wasn't all that different at all, and Transocean had nearly a quarter of a century to read the Cullen report on Piper Alpha and ensure that their rig wouldn't succumb to a similar chain of cascading failures. Which is precisely what it did do.

There's no way that anyone can build a rig to withstand the sort of near-nuclear event that finally destroyed the Piper Alpha platform. But that was the biggest of a cascading sequence of fires and explosions, that could have been contained nearer the beginning. It is possible to build rigs that preserve the control room equipment and staff for long enough to fight back (which is why the control rooms in nuclear power stations are well protected). It is possible to design rigs where the personnel are not concentrated near the area of greatest risk. It is basic common sense to concentrate thought and investment on containing failures as near to the start of the chain as possible.

In this instance, BP didn't do any of this, because it was quite literally not their business. It was Transocean's business, as a rig designer, owner and operator. But in his zeal to punish BP to the utmost, the President of the United States is effectively absolving Transocean of all liability and all blame. Which means that Deepwater Horizon won't be the last rig to re-enact the Piper Alhpa disaster, because he's removing the incentive to do something about it, from the people who have the capability and the opportunity to provide safer rigs, and transferring it to their customers.

One of the lessons learned a quarter of a century ago in the North Sea, was to transfer responsibility for safety issues in the industry from the Department of Energy to the Health and Safety Executive. A screamingly obvious move, which has just been half-copied by the US President, a quarter of a century late, largely as an exercise in lining up the existing safety authorities as alternative scapegoats in case attempts to pin it all on BP should fail.

It is baffling and worrying, to British observers, to see all the rage and anger about the Deepwater Horizon accident, centre on the oil spill and not the thirteen men who died.
Thirteen dead is a disaster, one hundred and sixty-seven dead is a catastrophe.

Medawar would also like to debunk one particular bit of hype about the Deepwater Horizon accident: it is not the worst ecological disaster in American history, not by miles:
the Oklahoma dust bowl was the worst ecological disaster in American history, and it was caused by US government policy to encourage farmers to convert permanent pasture into arable cropland. (Wheat is better for speculating with than beef and dairy products!) There is now pressure from so-called "environmentalists" to revive this policy, supposedly because cows cause climate change. The University of Cranfield has recently published a study showing that pasture is one of the most important carbon sinks in agriculture, and the UN has determined that species protection is more important than fighting climate change. But the real argument against any systematic conversion of pasture to cropland, is contained in the Woody Guthrie song about the dustbowl, genuinely America's worst ecological disaster of all time:

"So Long, it's been good to know yer".

Serial Murderer Nicknames

2010-05-28T12:24:00.005+01:00

This morning, a Mr Stephen Griffiths referred to himself as the "Crossbow Cannibal" when politely asked for his name by the clerk of Bradford Magistrate's Court. There need be no complicated analysis of his motives for vile murder, then: it was all a calculated attempt to gain the world's attention.

The media, if they have any sense, will restrain themselves and never, ever, call him by the name he has invented for himself. Neither should they refer to him as the "Pathetic Twat" because his kind of oxygen thief is capable of deriving glory even from that.

The only proper and safe way to refer to this man is as "Mr Stephen Griffiths" and with a careful and polite emphasis on the "mister". Anything else will feed the fantasy he inhabited when he allegedly killed three, and possibly many more, defenceless young women.

And when he is in prison, only the parole board needs to remember his name at all. And the fact that "Outraging Public Morals" normally carries a life sentence in its own right and not merely as an aggravating circumstance to murder. If there is even a fragment of substance behind Mr Griffith's self-assumed nickname, then that charge is inevitable.

David Kelly and Timothy Hampton, No Democracy Without Truth

2010-05-11T11:10:00.007+01:00

Before the Liberal Democrats started to flirt with Lord Mandelson and Alistair Campbell to keep the Labour Party in power, they had promised, like the Conservatives, to order a full and properly-constituted investigation and formal inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly. All we really know about this is that the public has not been told the truth and that many senior Labour figures, including Alistair Campbell, have more to hide, and more to fear, on this issue than any other. The so-called "Coalition of all the losers" will guarantee that the truth about David Kelly remains hidden, and the Liberal leadership will find that gagging any voice of conscience on their backbenches is the price of their part-share of power. Dr Kelly gave good service to the United Kingdom and to the world. He deserves a lot better than this!

And if we're not being told the truth about the death of Dr David Kelly, we are still not being told anything about the screamingly suspicious death of Dr Timothy Hampton, (who trained as a biochemist and worked with Dr Kelly before moving into the field of geophysics and nuclear weapons testing). What we know, but were evidently not supposed to discover, is that the Austrian Police have tried so hard not to discover the truth, that they must surely already know what it is and that their political masters will not like it. Their attempt to burn all the clothes and personal possessions from Dr Hampton's body: the main repository of evidence about what happened to him, was both suspicious and contemptible Yet no British official, so far, has attempted to secure a proper investigation into the matter. The United Nations, in whose building he died, is also remarkably averse to any sort of truth coming out.

Although a lot of people expect that truth to be that Dr Hampton had discovered something important about nuclear tests in Korea, Iran, or Israel, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that the UN is the world's most corrupt bureaucracy and that there might be a much baser reason for Dr Hampton's murder than life or death global issues to do with nuclear weapons tests. Either way, only the truth can defeat the purposes of those who conspire in secret.

Deepwater Horizon and Obama's Misdirected Lynch Mob

2010-05-08T11:04:00.002+01:00

Long before any of the facts about the Deepwater Horizon accident became known, President Obama led the American people in pinning all blame and liability upon British Petroleum Plc, who had leased the rig to drill on a site they had a licence for. (The process of getting a licence involves paying money to Federal and State governments).

The rig was owned and operated by the Swiss company, Transocean, and the actual work directly involved in the accident was being done by the sub-contractor, Haliburton, a name that ought to be recognized by anyone who has an interest in political scandal and corruption in the United States, or Iraq.

Under American law, BP carry all the liability, because they own the licence on the well. Placing the moral blame on them as well, is typical Chicago politics. But if anyone is actually looking for the intrinsic cause of this and other oil-industry accidents in the United States, it is precisely this:

The liability for the environmental and economic damage caused by an accident, is carried by the exploration licence holder and not the owners and operators of the massive and specialized equipment being used, or their sub-contrators. This takes a powerful incentive to be careful, vigorously enforce safety regulations and invest in the very best equipment and training -and places on the company that doesn't directly own and control the men and equipment at risk of accident. Those who actually are responsible for the day to day operations of the rig and long term investment in its structure and equipment, are sheltered, by their paying customer, from the consequences of careless, cost-cutting and incompetence.

There does not appear to be a single public figure in the United States capable of understanding why this is not merely unjust, but exposes the American economy, environment and people to risks which equal or exceed those so horribly realized by placing liability and responsiblity in the banking system in the wrong places.

If you want things to be done right, you have to get the responsibility and liability in exactly the right place.
At the very least, when companies such as Transocean and Haliburton mislead their customers over safety, (to the extent of hosting a party onboard for the customer's executives to celebrate the alleged safety record on the day of the accident) they should lose the shelter against liability provided, under American law, by those customers.

And if you want to learn lessons from complicated accidents involving equipment a mile down in the Ocean, it really is best not to allow politicians to stand in front of cameras and proclaim the conclusion of any investigation before it even starts.

President Obama is going to destroy BP as a lesson to others, if he can. And then some other company, possibly even an American-owned one (as the wiser foriegn investors all flee) will suffer a similar or worse accident because the intrinsic cause in the liability environment is neither understood nor addressed by American lawyers and politicians.

Is Electoral Reform a Smokescreen Issue for Electoral Fraud?

2010-05-04T10:02:00.005+01:00

The Daily Mail reports, that there are no less than fifty criminal investigations ongoing across the United Kingdom, into abuse of postal votes and other fiddles relating to this Thursday's election.

And yet, all the comment forums are full of blather about different voting systems, and whether anything but "proportional representation" can be considered democratic. Medawar wonders whether all of these voices are knowingly trying to draw our attention away from a much more basic issue: is someone, nationally (or even on a European scale?) organizing all the separate little voting fiddles? Because someone adding an extra seven fictitious electors to a single household, doesn't affect the price of fish in the slightest. Even swinging one whole constituency, doesn't avail anyone of anything very much. But an organized programme to sway fifty key constituencies, is quite another matter.

No doubt, it will be impossible to link this to the national organization of any political party. But unless one is involved, somewhere, it is not possible to see how the necessary coordination could be achieved, and it's even harder to see how any benefits could accrue to those committing a very serious crime, for which Crown Courts do not fail to hand out custodial sentences.

This link is to an article by the Independent reporter mentioned in the Mail articles, as being assaulted when trying to locate and interview one of those involved in this.

Strategic Stalking

2010-05-02T10:15:00.005+01:00

This link is to the MoD's Global Strategic Trends page, which allows you to download the current issue of that report (and fill in a feedback form if you wish.)

It's about one hundred and sixty pages, although not exactly small print, so it's not a casual read. But it does give some insight into why some groups might want to target and harass other groups in society.

The report predicts both resource wars and ethnic conflicts, although it's pretty clear to Medawar that the main driver of ethnic conflict is when a powerful elite tries either to harness an ethnic group in order to control a natural resource, or to destabilize and perhaps deport or even exterminate an ethnic community in order to remove them from control of resources. This could well be the sort of thing that's behind the organized stalking of native American leaders, journalists and artists that Terri Hansen has reported. It definitely is what's behind the relentless ethnic persecution of non-Burman ethnic groups in Burma, especially as the Karens control some areas of the countryside, despite enormous pressure, and other deceased ethnic groups had a strong presence on geographically-viable trade routes into neighbouring countries. (The extraction route is as important as the resource in many cases, nowhere more so than in Burma. Burma only looks small on the map because it is between India and China: it's a large country with an awful lot of natural barriers in it, so a small tribe living on a navigable river will inevitably become a target for the regime's genocide programmes. Venuzaela's (unfounded) claims to territory in Guyana are motivated as much by the need for routes to extract natural resources as the resources themselves, Guatamala's claims to Belize are entirely so motivated, as Belize has less of everything than Guatamala, save for access to the Caribean and therefore the Atlantic.)

In some cases, parties wanting to exploit resources may attempt to boost the position of an ethnic minority that happens to live in the right region, or is in the process of moving into it. But in the long run, this is as hostile to that community's interests as immediate persecution, because whoever is displaced or disadvantaged by this now has a reason to cooperate with some rival power-broker who wants the favoured ethnic community out of the way.

So, if one political grouping seems very hostile to the Saami people in Northern Scandinavia, for example, and their rivals seem "sympathetic", the attentions of both political groupings are probably unhealthy in the long run.

In any case, a read of the strategic trends document, and it is frequently updated, may help Cornflakers develop the right kind of insight to understand why some really bizarre things are being done, by the authorities or powerful persons unknown, in a number of countries.

The 2007-2036 version of this document was more focused on the risks posed to global stability by very rich individuals than the current draft seems to be, but that's a change of emphasis not a change of fact: that sort of "Goldfinger" oligarch is a real risk, and it's interesting to see that even the MoD recognized that risk, albeit nearly forty years after Ian Fleming and Len Deighton!

Strategic understanding is an essential part of any sort of intelligent activism against genocide and other human rights abuses. Know why, know who, know how, and perhaps you can make an effective case against it all.

Slavery and Stalking in Luton

2010-04-23T14:02:00.009+01:00

This isn't a very pretty subject, so avoid these links if you're having a really good day.

The Watt family have been variously convicted of murder and familial homicide in the case of Michael Gilbert, who was kept as a slave by them from the age of sixteen, for ten years. Medawar will not use quotes or the word "virtual": they kept him as a slave.

The photograph the prosecution issued to the press, of Michael Gilbert, shows him in a sports shirt with a St George's flag on the shoulder. The jury returned their verdicts on St George's day. In doing so, they had to decide between murder and familial homicide for several of the defendants, and in effect, the verdicts directly reflect how much each family member was under the influence of James Watt. It is an interesting lesson in how a group of people, in this case a family, can collectively exhibit psychopathic behaviour, although perhaps only one key member could be individually diagnosed as a psychopath.

Throughout the trial, Medawar was constantly reminded of how like an organized stalking gang the Watt family was, and wondered if there might be some insight into the way such gangs work. Then, once the verdicts were returned, the press were free to report all the things that the jury could not be told, foremost amongst them being that the Watt family were indeed a stalking gang. Organized stalking is a force-multiplier for psychopaths. A rich psychopath might have hundreds at his disposal, a poor psychopath might have only his family and their partners to control. But the outcome, unspeakable cruelty, and in this case it really is difficult to speak about what was done, is the same, differing merely in detail. It's just that a wealthy psychopath can use hundreds of stooges to inflict similar levels of misery on scores or hundreds of victims. And they are less likely to face justice for it, even on a perfect St George's Day.

Sentence update: Life with a thirty-six year minimum tariff for James Watt. See link for details.

Also, this link is to a video, by James Reeves, showing the children's home where James Watt and Michael Gilbert met, together with one of the female defendants. The video was made before Michael's plight was publicly known, and about a year before he was killed. A longstanding weakness in the state-run care system was the abrupt cut-off of social work supervision and support when children were old enough to leave children's homes. In the more distant past, many children from Luton needing such care went to a home in Harpenden, run by the (methodist) charity National Children's Homes. NCH did sometimes manage to go on helping some "children" through college and even university, which local council homes never seem to manage. Medawar doesn't think that NCH would have let a vulnerable client such as Michael, come under the control of a psychopath like James Watt. But that would have required somebody to exercise initiative, which isn't allowed to happen in local government in the UK anymore. Local government is actually conducted in a more repressive manner than national government at the moment.

Mr Eden and the Holocaust

2010-04-15T20:35:00.004+01:00

This link ought to quash, absolutely and forever, the conspiracy theory (ie: in this case, malicious fabrication) that the British Government attempted to cover up the Holocaust. Mr Eden made a very complete statement, in response to Mr Silverman's question, on December the 17th, 1942.

In fewer words than a modern politician uses to say "hello, I am Tony, trust me", Mr Eden gives an essential history of the holocaust and the methods used, barring "gas," which, at the time of his speech, was still being used experimentally on handicapped German children rather than Jews. Mr Eden's statement is notable for the information it gives, rather than what it hides.

Mr Eden was interviewed (between 5:00 and 7:30 on this clip) on this matter, years later, for "The World At War" and although he didn't doubt the intelligence, he knew that something this awful and incredible would be attacked as crude "Hun-hating" propaganda unless he was very sure of his ground, but over the course of a few months, persistent rumour became a flood of mutually-consistent eye-witness accounts.
(There were also photographs smuggled out. It is always worth trying to document this kind of thing, even if it seems hopeless. This is why more people believe in the holocaust than in the German massacres of civilians in Belgium in 1914: both atrocities were all too real, but the latter was (and mostly still is) perceived as propaganda. Hence Mr Eden's wariness, but also his determination.)

There was also a need to protect MI6 sources in Nazi Germany, some of whom were very highly placed and of war-winning importance, as well as an equivalent need to protect signal intelligence sources such as "Ultra". In this context, Mr Eden seems to have made as complete a statement as he possibly could have done, just as soon as verification and the physical safety of his sources would allow.

There is no way in which this can possibly be described or honestly presented as any sort of "cover up." But readers will doubtless find a hundred posts elsewhere on the internet telling them another tale. This, however, is the one with the link to an article which any interested party can verify via the contemporary printed copies of Hansard, and the link gives all the references needed to accomplish this.

(All you really need is Mr Eden's name and the date of 17th of December, 1942, but there are "column numbers" on the link, which is how Hansard references work.)

The Nazi holocaust did not commence in a vacuum: the Japanese occupation of most of Burma (there were always large areas that they did not control) was accompanied by the rapid and almost complete disappearance of Burma's Hindu population, apparently at the hands of the Burmese Nationalist Millitia rather than the Japanese themselves. This occurred almost concurrently with the first wave of the European Holocaust, against Jews in the Baltic States. If there's a hidden truth anywhere, it may lie in that synchronization and the inscrutable motives for ethnic cleansing in Burma, which remains an appalling work in progress, sixty-eight years on.

NB: this above post has been updated to include a link to Mr Eden's World at War interview, he was by then (1973) Lord Avon. Thanks to Richard for help in finding this: the series is on You Tube in something like 140 clips! This link is to a database of the relevant episode's contents, Medawar is not sure if there's a database for the whole series.)

A Hung Parliament

2010-04-12T14:16:00.006+01:00

First:

The Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru (their Welsh counterparts) have agreed a joint strategy in the event that the UK General Election on May the 6th fails to give a major UK party a working majority in the House of Commons. That is, they will support the legislative programme of whichever UK party agrees to increase central government funding to the Scottish and Welsh administrations by a minimum of hundreds of millions of pounds, even though whoever wins, they will need to reduce overall UK government spending by tens of billions of pounds. They have not said that this is conditional on the legislative programme being good, bad or indifferent: if they are paid, they will support it and thereby make the paying party the UK government.

Medawar's question to these two parties is simple: if you propose to start from a position of complete moral indifference, where on Earth do you expect to end up?

Second:

The Liberal Democrats, amid a shower of trite counsels of perfection, cheap shots and solutions that threaten to cost a great deal more than any problem, are effectively promising to support a minority Labour government, on the sole condition that the Labour leader, Gordon Brown, steps down and is replaced by someone else.
So, they propose that instead of a Prime Minister that only a minority (but just short of a majority) voted in the expectation of getting, they will work to ensure that we get a Prime Minister whom none of the electorate even knew to be a possibility at the time they voted. The Liberal Democrats like to say that the British electoral system is flawed, and it may be that it is, but no electoral system on Earth is as flawed as the moral logic here.

The Conservatives are staking everything on winning an outright majority and do not have a credible, or any, plan for a hung Parliament. This is probably why the SNP and Plaid Cymru have put themselves up for unconditional sale to the highest bidder, because they calculate that the Conservatives will have no option but to buy.

The trouble with either the Conservatives buying enough Nationalist votes to govern, or Labour making a blood sacrifice of its leader to gain Liberal Democrat support for a government led by, well, it could be almost anyone, is that in both cases the resulting coalition will legislate as if it had a genuine working majority, ie: very badly indeed.
Over the past thirty years, fully half of the UK's avoidable problems have stemmed from slack draughting of proposed legislation going uncorrected as bills are forced through by a big majority, followed by cries of woe and denial from the party supposedly in charge when the courts proceed to interpret those bills, now law, in almost any manner except that advertised and expected. Our problem hasn't been with Labour or Conservative ideology, but from the almost illiterate manner in which both have put pen to paper when making laws.

The best possible outcome, for the country, would be a hung parliament with the balance of power held, not by self-prostituting nationalists or opportunistic Liberal Democrats, but by a good tranche of independent members of Parliament.

If, say, there's a twelve seat difference between Labour and Conservatives after the election, and twenty to thirty independents, all with differing ideological positions which will tend to cancel each other out, then those independents will have to be convinced by each piece of legislation on its merits. It is most unlikely that any of them will support legislation written, as by both John Major and Tony Blair, with the express intent of concealing its true purpose, nor will they support legislation written on the assumption that Prime Ministerial intent will communicate itself into law by sheer willpower rather than by careful and articulate phrasing. (See Margaret Thatcher, Gordon Brown and quite probably David Cameron.)

In other words, a balance held by independents will indeed be a balance, and it can swing on any bill that doesn't do something that's actually clearly necessary, sets out unambiguous measures for doing so and contains no hidden loopholes or flaws. This is the very definition of good government and it's what we have not seen, regardless of ideological positions, for a generation.

And Medawar's other thought on the forthcoming election is this, debate on whether or not the Labour Party is fit for government begs a more interesting question: is the Labour Party even less fit for opposition than for government?

The Party has considerable internal tension between different factions ideologically (and also between personalities who simply hate each other) and the Party's huge financial problems have been kept at bay only by massive and cynical donations from vested interests, who have nothing to gain by throwing money at a party not in power. It is clear that in many ways, the Labour Party is held together by being in government, and as soon as it is not in government, it will splinter in all directions.

A Conservative government, whether with a working majority or some sort of coalition for hire, will probably not be a wholly good thing (it never has been before) and the national interest will require it to be constantly checked from folly and held to account for mistakes. This duty, and the British Constitutional system relies on political opposition rather than tolerating it, as in Russia or the USA, cannot be performed by a party in the throes of its own private civil war.

Labour voters should vote Labour if, as polling day approaches, it still looks as if their party has a chance. But if it doesn't look as if Labour can come anywhere near governing in its own right, and bearing in mind that its only likely coalition partner wants a destabilizing change of leadership as the opening payment for its support, then Labour voters have a duty to consider how much worse a Conservative government can be if it is not held in check by an effective opposition. That might be UKIP's moment, because although it's a huge stretch for a brand new party to become a government, a new-born party might make an effective opposition, whilst a dying one cannot.

British politics depends on the opposition to work, and it's the failure of opposition that has enabled the failure of government over the past two to three decades. For example, our current economic woes are largely the result of John Major, as Chancellor, effectively biasing the housing market towards "buy to let" speculators instead of first time home owners, who might have stabilised things. But the Labour opposition didn't oppose this measure with any energy, and when they came to power themselves, in 1997, they did nothing to correct his mistake, and it took them until 2004 to admit even to themselves that something bad was happening, by which time the bubble had grown so big they were terrified to prick it. In 2008, it burst of its own accord. But the cause, tax breaks for speculators, still hasn't been addressed and the process could yet be repeated in every bloody detail.

Whether Labour voters think they like UKIP or not isn't really the issue. If their own party still looks in with a chance, they wouldn't and shouldn't dream of voting for UKIP instead. But if their party has clearly blown it by about May the fourth, their best option, logically but not emotionally, is to vote for a party that will constructively oppose the Conservatives from the word go, rather than spend the next ten years fighting itself to the death. After eighty years on the sidelines after giving us the most corrupt government in our history, it's a bit unlikely that the Liberals are going to suddenly move centre stage and act constructively.

Does Not the Thorn Have Flowers?

2010-04-12T14:14:00.001+01:00

Documenting a Stalker's End-Game

2010-04-05T14:12:00.004+01:00

This blog is the author's attempt to keep us informed as a wealthy Canadian stalker attempts to use his minions to eliminate her. In secret, he hopes.

This, This is Spring!

2010-04-02T10:32:00.007+01:00

Both river and season start with bright sunshine belying the brisk, eye-watering gale and soil still numbed by four months of unrelenting cold. But water is once more a liquid and it flows, from here to the North Sea, through millstream, river and navigation. Perhaps, too, the coming election will provide a fresh start for Britain, but not if any of the three "mainstream" parties have the least thing to do with it. Though, for all their skill and polished sophistry, they no more control the electorate than mankind controls the seasons.

Liberty, Independence and Prosperity

2010-03-25T20:14:00.011Z

(Not only has our Kodachrome been taken away, so has our AGFA XRS.
Above is a scanned example of what you could do with the latter.)

The best way to know the state of England in any age, is to look at what her people are putting in their gardens. Under the reign of Elizabeth the First, English gardeners adopted the exquisite "Rosa Mundi", whose very name evokes the world view of a society that had indeed just discovered the concept of a world view, rather than accepting their alloted place at the edge of a Vatican-controlled Europe, as if this were the edge of the known world. Breaking free from Europe under "Gloriana's" reign was to transplant and transform England, from the edge, to the centre. It was under her reign, too, that geographers started to talk of "Britain", even if the act of Union was still a century away.

Under John Major and Anthony Charles Linton Blair, two leaders passionately determined to bury the British nation back under every shackle that Europe might propose, plus quite a few of their own devising for good measure, English gardeners opted for "decking" and covered their gardens in fairly flat (until something warped) areas of sawn and routed Finnish timber.

The emerging trend, under Gordon Brown, is for the decking to be removed to expose the soil once more, to grow vegetables for simple survival. The decking is found in short lengths, stacked ready for a million wood-burning stoves to consume.

Grim times, indeed. But what hope is there, for the future?

Well, grim times bring grim necessity and some very lucid moments.

That is precisely the formula that transformed an uncertain, actually quite frightened, country, whose Queen and whose freedom was hated by the rulers of Europe, into one that fought for her survival because there was nothing else to be done. She won, she survived. Europe remained closed to her, she turned elsewhere -and discovered both Scotland and the world.

The best thing that can happen to Britain now, whether Scotland is still along for the ride or not, is that Europe will once again try and squeeze her out. This will dismay and humiliate Britain's political elite, who will explore alternatives to subjugation only if forced. (Rather like the Hebrews under Pharaoh.) But they will be forced, and the alternatives will be found. And a new political elite will emerge, like Elizabeth's captains, to whom freedom will be exhilarating rather than uncomfortable.

When the Russian people had their taste of freedom, Vladimir Putin was able to persuade them to spit it out. What Gordon Brown, Nicholas Clegg and David Cameron have just six weeks or so left to do, is somehow persuade the British people not, on any account, to put freedom anywhere near their mouths. If they fail, Britain will once again realize that freedom and prosperity are the same thing.

Canvassing, Stalking and the Pimps of Political Corruption

2010-03-08T10:20:00.006Z

The recent scandal over Members of Parliament and their expenses claims, and lesser scandals (involving much bigger amounts of money!) over funding contributions to political parties at the national level, has served to protect the real core of political corruption in the United Kingdom from public attention. The people in the British Political system who are best placed to improperly enrich themselves are neither ministers nor backbench MPs: it is the Constituency Agents and Constituency Party Chairmen who are in the best seats. Very few laws and regulations specifically apply to them, and those that do are focused on the conduct of elections in the first place and the practical management of the constituency party and any associated clubs in the second. As long as these functions are conducted within the letter and broad spirit of the law, the agent and chairman are almost invisible to the electorate, the returning officer, and electoral commission. Not that returning officers and the electoral commission are really anti-corruption bodies in any case.

MPs and Ministers, on the other hand, are under the public eye, and the eyes of their peers, the whole time, which is why an unwarranted expenses claim of a few hundred pounds is not merely a scandal, but one which can destroy a career. In such an environment, the scope for really serious, million-pound corruption would seem to be almost nil. It is the invisible men who have the freedom. And that's not their only advantage.

Traditionally, there has been one constituency party per constituency, so a 1:1:1 ratio between agents, chairmen and MPs. But with parliamentary boundary changes and a desire to save costs, in some cases one agent may cover two or three constituencies, and the constituency party apparatus itself may be based on the traditional, and not the current, boundary. But assuming that the traditional situation is still normal, and there's one Agent, Party Chairman and MP per constituency, it is almost always the case that the Agent and Chairman have a dozen or so County Councillors and perhaps a couple of dozen District or Borough Councillors under their wing. If one likens the constituency party to a Roman Galley, the Chairman is setting the course, the Councillors are working the oars, the Agent is walking up and down the gangplank, fondling his whip in an overt sort of way -and the MP is the beautifully carved figurehead on the bow script. The vessel is propelled by the wind and the graft of councillors.

The MP may propose, debate and vote on, laws which are of some concern to property developers, public service contractors and the like. But that's only creating an environment common to the vested interests and all their competitors. They might have a desire for this to move in one direction or another, but it's hardly worth a big investment of cash, unless a limited number of MPs are in a position to deliver a drastic change in the outcome of the legislative process. This isn't the normal situation, especially when, as has been the case since 1997, a single party has enjoyed an overwhelming Parliamentary majority.

The Councillors, however, take weekly decisions that implement existing legislation. An MP may be asked to nod through, or vote against, a Parliamentary order that requires local education authorities to designate approved suppliers for schools to purchase consumables from, a Councillor on the LEA gets a vote on which supplier gets that approval. Who do you think a potential supplier will want to bribe? The Councillor? Correct!

MPs vote on the general shape of planning laws, Councillors vote on specific planning applications. Even the limited number of ministers who have a say in planning matters, generally only have authority over outline planning permission for very big or very sensitive developments, and County Structure plans. The minister does not decide whether Mr A gets permission to build a particular trading estate on a particular field next to a motorway junction or not, but the appropriate local Councillors do!

The difficulty facing any vested interest who wants to bribe a councillor, is that councillors are ordinary citizens, often with full-time day jobs, and they are indeed local, whereas the vested interest may be a big developer or a big company, operating nationally. It would be very difficult for such a vested interest to always identify the right councillors to approach: who were on the right committee, didn't already have a strongly-held view on the development, and were the sort to accept an inducement. Unless they work through the Agent and local party Chairman, that is.

The Agent and Chairman know, not only which councillors are on the appropriate committee, which is after all a matter of public record (if you've got time to look!) but also which way they are likely to vote if no inducement is offered. They will know which councillors are corruptible, and which are not. They can advise, firstly, on whether or not the vested interest needs to corrupt anyone to achieve its aim. Then they can advise on how many votes need to be swung, because it never does to overdo things, and it certainly saves the client money if he corrupts the smallest possible number of Councillors on any one issue.

Then they can advise on who to approach, or they can act as intermediaries if direct contact is inadvisable, and they can advise on what sort of inducement each selected Councillor is likely to need. This might not be a cash bribe, but could be help with a pet project. In extreme cases, the Agent and Chairman are well-placed to bully a resistant Councillor into line.

Where the MP is involved in this process at all, will be to create the right climate of opinion for the vote to be swung, or as what the Russians call a "roof" against investigation by central government or other interest authority, such as the police. Again, no matter how moral the MP is, it's unthinkable to go into any election without the Agent and Chairman completely on your side, so they will toe the line, provided that they are never asked to do anything too outrageous. And the way things are structured in the United Kingdom, it never is necessary for the MP to do anything very much, for corruption to thrive in his constituency. All he really needs to do, is stand on the bow script and feel the wind and spray on his wooden features.

The consequences of this can be small, but corrosive. Medawar recently listened to a minor rant from a nice Irish lady who works on the domestic side of a special needs school in East Anglia. The system of preferred suppliers meant that she was obliged to buy food for school dinners, from a "preferred supplier". In a market town surrounded on all sides by market gardens and farms growing vegetables, she was forced to accept battered, tired produce that had travelled from Holland and Spain and looked as if it had already been rejected by supermarket buyers. She was forced to pay £19.95 per bag for potatoes of unknown provenance, when there were half a dozen farms within a five mile radius of the school that would have sold a bag of fresh, undamaged spuds for £5. "I'm being forced to buy shite for the children, at four times the cost of decent food!" was the entirely justified, furious, complaint.

Bribes are not just paid for planning permission to be granted, but for it to be refused, so that a small developer will be forced to abandon his plans and sell on his site to a larger developer. Houses will be built on land prone to flooding, business parks will be built with lorry access straight onto a major road at an awkward junction, or where there are no adequate sewerage works or the power grid is already overworked.

All of this creates problems, and sometimes fatalities, and therefore it creates anger and unease, which some articulate and public spirited citizens might transform into protest and a widespread demand for investigations and a clean-up of local politics. This leads us to the second area where Agents and local party Chairmen have the edge over Members of Parliament:

The Agent and Chairman, at election time, organize the troops and mastermind any canvassing in a constituency. 90% of the work involved in organized canvassing, is identical to the work involved in organized stalking. Much of the information gathered in canvassing, is useful to stalkers. The methods used to find out which way a citizen is thinking of voting, can be used to look into other aspects of his life. A proportion of the people who are willing to go out canvassing at election time, will be willing to go out stalking between elections. That proportion will usually be tiny, but the Agent and the Chairman will know who they are -and what sort of a payoff they will need.

So, when the corruption leads to inappropriate and damaging actions, that annoy the public, the Agent and Chairman can organize campaigns to suppress the leaders, or potential leaders, of any protest or grassroots campaign. They can bully the whistle-blowers on the Council's permanent staff: they can protect the vested interest from the consequences of getting something that is not in the public interest. A member of Parliament is a chancy and potentially useless target for corruption, but his Agent and Chairman may, in some cases, offer a one-stop shop service.

Fraud and Stalking

2010-03-02T14:03:00.009Z

There seems to be a consensus, amongst animal rights activists in the UK, that most, if not all, of the stalking being done by persons associated with that particular cause, is actually being undertaken for money, or to silence/punish some activist who's got in the way of making money by this means, or out of personal spite by the same people who stalk for money. The Animal Protection Party and elements of "SHAC" being the main alleged culprits. Their clients may even be rival "animal abusing" businesses to those being targeted, or millionaires with their own deeply unsavoury personal obsessions, but all that matters is that they are willing to define a target and pay for his or her destruction.

It is very aptly described as "basement-level organised crime."

In other words, people being stalked by animal rights activists, are not necessarily even imagined to be animal abusers, although lies being integral to stalking, this assertion will inevitably be made: they have just been named by a client who wants them stalked for some criminal purpose.

Medawar wonders if this might apply in North America, too, and more especially in Australia and Germany, because in both countries, a famous international animal welfare charity (much given to threatening people to silence criticism) has been accused, by mainstream animal welfare groups and activists, of raising money under false pretences.

There is no-one on Earth more sadistic and relentless than a pathological liar whose lies have been exposed and rejected. Fraud, impure, dirty, nothing but greed, fraud for money, may actually be the underlying "cause" of many a "cause-stalker" or gang-stalker.

From stock adverts of post-earthquake donkeys (actually in Kobe, Japan, in the eighties not Chile, not Haiti, nor Italy,) dragged out to extract funds from a caring public the world over after every natural disaster, to the utterly sickening "SAGE" fraud run in the wake of the Dunblane Massacre, where a con-man from New Jersey, just released from Norwich jail, managed to persuade many of the bereaved parents to become patrons of his "Swiss-based anti-gun crusade", enriching him by at least £4M in the process, society's compassion has regularly been milked by those who have no compassion for anyone, or anything.

Pathological liars are sadists, and they are not compelled to tell outrageous lies, so much as to use emotional manipulation to force people to believe the irrational. (Such as an anti-gun campaign based in a country which makes gun ownership compulsory for adult male citizens!) The lies are mental sadism, but if they are resisted, physical sadism quickly follows, and will not stop until the perpetrators are incarcerated. Using toxic chemicals on people, to undermine both their physical and their mental health, is so sadistic that most policemen and doctors find it much more comfortable to believe that the victim is deluded; which in itself, worsens the victim's plight and is gleefully factored into the stalker's plans for their slow destruction.

Medawar would welcome comments (anonymous, for your own sake) from anyone who can cast light on the people doing this, in the UK, in North America, and, most particularly at the moment, in Australia.

Is the reason for some fairly middle of the road, worthy and utterly inoffensive, animal welfare workers in Australia being hounded by unknown stalkers, anything to do with their having made a justifiable fuss about a certain "charity's" fraud over the donkeys and the Kobe Earthquake in Japan?

This isn't the whole story about all organised stalking, but there is an emerging consensus that it IS the story where supposed animal rights activists are doing it. And it is interesting that Keith Mann gets named, by his fellow animal rights activists, in this connection, because his brother, Andrew, based in Northampton at the time, was , just a few years ago, jailed for a UK-wide government-funded training allowance fraud, where just about everyone in the UK animal rights movement was supposedly receiving "training" through his little scheme. Was this to fund the cause, or the Mann dynasty's lifestyle? Either way, fraud is fraud, is theft. Theft is even harder to justify in a political cause than violence.

PS: When the infamous Kobe donkey advert was run in Australia, not by the genuine Japanese charity that first created it, it raised roughly A$3M. The international animal welfare "charity" that re-ran the advert, without the Japanese charity's prior permission, donated about A$35,000 of this (less than 2%) to the genuine Japanese charity. Since when, the image has been used time and time again, all over the world. You do not save donkeys, or dolphins, by sending money to the box numbers on these adverts. The only charity that actually was helping earthquake-stricken donkeys shown in such adverts, was in Japan, and it never actually wanted to raise funds from outside Japan.

What Stalkers Want to Stop

2010-02-22T17:12:00.003Z

Medawar would like his readers to see the sort of work that "Gangstalking-Australia" is being stopped from producing anymore, by stalkers. Their reasons are unknown and quite possibly incomprehensible anyway. What matters is that all stalker inflict similar destruction: the victim is very often someone of an artistic temperament, but it can be a journalist, community leader or an engineer, too. And in every case, the stalking is notable for two things: the human misery that it inflicts, and the work that it prevents from being done.

Stalking is never, ever, noted for the good that it does. Stalkers have no virtue to their name, they are marked only by the voids they create in human culture, achievement and aspiration. They deserve only eternal oblivion.

Transport Infrastructure

2010-02-09T16:14:00.003Z

Very nicely restored railway signal box, a little way inland from Felixstowe.

The Guns That Didn't Bark

2010-02-08T10:29:00.005Z

The assassinations of Jill Dando (BBC TV Presenter) and Yitzhak Rabin (Israeli Prime Minister) actually have one, strikingly anomalous, thing in common: A .380" ACP calibre pistol that didn't make anything like enough noise.

When Mr Rabin was shot, in the middle of a large crowd, there was confusion, even amongst security personnel, because the shots didn't sound loud enough to be real. (And the Israeli public fires probably handguns more often than any other population, except, possibly that of Finland.)

When Jill Dando was shot, a man, working (at a drawing board?) at the front upstairs window of the house opposite, didn't hear a thing, even though he glanced out just before, and just after, the shooting. Gowan Avenue may be fairly "upmarket" by London standards, but it is not a wide boulevard with mansions either side with sweeping drives and acres of front lawn. The houses are Victorian Terraces, albeit fairly large, the front gardens are just a couple of paces wide, and the slightly-recessed front doorway of Miss Dando's house ought, if anything, to have focused the sound of the shot right at the man working opposite.

The .380" ACP (also known as 9mm Browning Short) does make a bang. Years of Gun Magazine articles comparing it against more powerful calibres, such as the 9mm Nato, .38" Colt Super and .357" Remington Magnum (revolver) cartridge may have created an impression of it being relatively less powerful, but it produces almost exactly the same muzzle energy as the .38/200 revolver round that was standard Commonwealth military issue duringthe second world war, and Medawar has never heard anyone describe that as "quiet".

The .380" ACP, in its standard form, projects a 95-grain bullet at 955 feet per second, the .38/200 fires a 200 grain bullet at around 650 feet per second: energy the same. If anything, the .380" ACP makes a sharper noise as the lighter bullet is moving more quickly. This helps to make the .380" ACP accurate, although the close-range "stopping power" of the heavier bullet is well established. The powder charge in a .380" ACP cartridge is between 3 and 4 grains of a fast-burning smokeless propellant.

(A grain is a unit of weight, common to both the Troy and Avoirdupois scales. A Troy pound is 5760 grains and a pound Avoirdupois is 7,000 grains. Troy pounds divide into twelve ounces of 480 grains, a pound Avoirdupois divides into sixteen ounces of 437.5 grains.)

Although the .380" ACP or 9mm Short was a common service cartridge during the Second World War and with European Police Forces thereafter, and has been used in quite a lot of crime over the years, especially in the past, it hasn't been used in all that many professional killings in recent years. To some extent it is being displaced as firearms manufacturers find solutions to the difficulties of making smaller pistols compatible with the higher-pressure 9mm NATO ammunition. After the NAZIs captured the Polish Radom factory, making an improved version of the Walther PPK of James Bond fame, the .380" ACP version of the Radom pistol became standard issue for the Gestapo and other Nazi intelligence agencies. The .380" Radom was about the most powerful, accurate and reliable handgun available at the time that would fit reasonably unobtrusively inside smart civilian clothes of the thirties and forties, although Savage, in Canada, made a similar pistol. (Bond's PPK would have been the smaller .32" version, the Metropolitan Police did issue the .380" Version to some detectives and protection officers in the seventies and eighties.)

So, a generic .380" ACP pistol is probably a sound enough choice for an assassination, mainly, normally, because it is powerful and accurate for its size. It is pretty loud for its size, too. The ammunition used to kill Miss Dando is known to have been customised in some way, presumably to reduce the noise. What was done in Mr Rabin's case isn't publicly known, but many witnesses didn't think the gun was real because the noise wasn't much at all.

Adjusting the ammunition in this way takes a certain amount of expertise (and Miss Dando's alleged and then acquitted killer is mentally retarded) and it's the specific expertise which Medawar sees as a link between two crimes with, otherwise, nothing much to connect them. Certainly not motive.

Unless, of course, one starts looking at Jewish Extremist groups (Mr Rabin's convicted killer was a Jewish Extremist) and what they want to achieve. Everything they, or their financial supporters, want to achieve.

Everyone knows, Jewish Extremist Groups are against any sort of peace deal that surrenders any territory to Palestinians in return for peace, but there is actually a much longer list of things, about which they have very rigid views. More work needs to be done, on what it is they are after, apart from being beastly to Arabs.

It would be bitterly ironic if any conspiracy to murder a prime minister of Israel, was able to hide behind claims that any investigation or debate about it was anti-semetic. Mr Rabin's murder, and with it the denial of any chance for the peace that so many Israeli jews crave, was one of the most anti-semetic acts for a generation.

Who Needs the Aegean?

2010-02-01T12:15:00.003Z

Brilliant sunshine, lake a deep turquoise; all the characteristics of a nice winter holiday in Croatia. Except that this is East Anglia and the sparkling expanse is not exactly fluid...

Frank Olson, The Original Faller From A Great Height

2010-01-29T14:32:00.011Z

Anyone wondering if Timothy Hampton or David Kelly were murdered, and it seems very likely that Dr Hampton was, should consider the case of Colonel Frank Olson, who very probably was murdered, although that only became known following a second post-mortem more than twenty years after his death.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories about Frank Olson, many of them, to Medawar's knowledge, wrong to a greater or lesser extent. So here goes with what Medawar believes to be the true story, as briefly as possible.

Frank Olson was a US Army researcher, whose main career goal was to improve the protection of American soldiers against unconventional weapons on the battlefield. Anyone who has studied the history of unconventional warfare, including chemical and biological warfare, knows that it is military suicide to deploy, let alone use, unconventional weapons unless you first have some form of defence against them for your own soldiers. Failing to do this, with poison gas, was one of the mechanisms by which Imperial Germany helped defeat itself during the First World War, and it's also how the US Army Chemical Corps came dangerously close to inflicting similar disaster on American soldiers and particularly the US Marine Corps, in the same conflict. (The Americans were hastily loaned effective British and French gas masks until the Chemical Corps caught up with reality and started to produce adequate protective gear and training as well as huge amounts of offensive gas munitions.)

Imperial Germany, after lobbying at the highest levels by the Nobel Laureate Fritz Harbur, was the first to use poison gas in the First World War. British troops somehow held on, had improvised protection within about a day, and then later counter-attacked with hastily-produced gas weapons of their own, against which German troops still had no effective protection of any kind. Because the British devised a more effective method of delivering poison gas accurately onto enemy positions, Germany always suffered more than it gained from gas warfare, throughout the war. Some historians describe Hitler's reluctance to use the "vastly superior" nerve poisons available to Nazi Germany in the second world war as "irrational" but Medawar sees it more as a case of a madman having a very lucid moment, based on his own nightmare experiences.

Olson, therefore, for the most grounded, objective and rational of reasons, believed that there was no military advantage in novel means of warfare unless you possessed the means to stop the enemy using them to greater effect than your own side could. He was also active as a researcher during the early cold war period, when the US Army Chemical Corps set about repeating its mistakes of the first world war, on a scale terrifying not just because of the physical dangers of vast poison gas stockpiles, far outstripping progress in protective equipment, but also in the huge sums of taxpayer's money being wasted in the process. Atomic bombs, each costing about what it took to build, man and deploy a single B-29 bomber, seemed cost-effective compared to achieving the same results through carpet-bombing with a thousand or so bombers at a time, many of which might be lost to enemy defences or pure accident in crowded skies. What the chemical corps was doing in the late forties and early fifties, looked cost-effective only when compared to Caligula's palace construction programme.

Against this background, Frank Olson was seconded to work on project "MK Naomi" a sort of sister project to (but quite not the same thing as) the CIA's "MK Ultra". MK Naomi was intended to produce drugs and psychoactive chemical weapons, for battlefield use and for interrogation of enemy spies who might have time-sensitive information of the highest importance. Those at the top of both projects followed Chemical Corps tradition and massively oversold their projects to the newly-built Pentagon and to the White House. Almost from the outset, there was an unbridgeable gulf between what they were capable of achieving and what those voting the funds had been led to expect, and those funds were, by the standards of the day, very substantial. (The Truman and Eisenhower Administrations desperately hoped that throwing money at miracle weapons would save them from having to do a proper job of post-war re-armament with up-to-date tanks and jet fighters. A small legion of charlatans, including several German scientists who'd successfully conned the Third Reich into giving them carte-blanche and millions of Marks, promptly set up shop. American Intelligence Officers were baffled as to why their British counterparts had been so slow and unwilling to snap up all the hundreds of ex-Nazi scientists that were on the market in 1945-47, but there was a reason. The sole genuinely-competent aerodynamicist amongst them suddenly found himself working for Handley Page, the rest were mostly passed over in favour of home-grown British and Commonwealth talent.)

Once at MK Naomi, Olson quickly found that he was in a scientific bunko booth and that most of the work being done was either scientifically impossible, being falsely presented as successful when this was far from clear, or was a personal hobby-horse of one senior "scientist" (most of them were actually psychiatrists and not rigorously scientific at all) and thus perhaps of interest, but not at all obviously of military value. Olson could see enough unmet need for better chemical and biological warfare protection for American soldiers, to greatly resent the diversion of money and effort away from that need. He was not a subversive or a troublemaker, nor a faint-hearted pinko: he was a patriot who wanted the US Army and Marines to be properly, preferably superbly, equipped for the perils of modern warfare.

It has been stated that Olson was working with Porton Down to test psychoactive weapons. This is a serious misrepresentation:

He was ordered to work with some UK experimental psychiatrists, from the University of Sussex, not Porton Down, who had already been refused a licence by the Medical Research Council (in 1947) to experiment on mentally-ill patients with such mind-altering drugs as LSD. The independent experts (then at University College, London) who evaluated the toxicity of LSD in a report for the MRC, which led to the licence being emphatically refused, had worked at Porton during the war and subsequently returned there. They had, in fact, also recommended to the Home Secretary that possession and manufacture of LSD should be banned before anyone popularised its recreational use! They described it as a toxin rather than a drug.

The University of Sussex Psychiatrists got wind of MK Ultra and MK Naomi and realized, like all the CIA's ex-Nazis, that this was an opportunity to obtain funds and experiment at their whim, outside the control of the boring old Medical Research Council. In effect, they went to the Pentagon and the CIA over the heads of the UK's own research watchdogs and sought to use the secret military programme to recreate their own purely medical (but not very rational) research project, despite this having been banned by the proper authority as unethical, dangerous and unlikely to yield any medically useful result. The probability that it was equally unlikely to yield a militarily useful result, was ignored.

Because it was now a "secret" and "military" project, and because the farm that the University of Sussex had been using had no safe facilities for storing, let alone experimentally dispersing, potentially toxic gas, the team was granted access to facilities at Porton Down. This does not make their project a Porton Project, it's just that this was the only safe place for certain of their experiments to happen. (The same is true of most of the controversial tests of nerve agents on army volunteers. They happened at Porton, but were done by army doctors from elsewhere, who were often alarmingly inexpert and reckless. Porton's indigenous population had too much respect for nerve gas to be reckless with it.)

So, in the middle of a nightmare where he was surrounding by charlatans doing dangerous, unethical and, to his way of thinking, militarily useless, experiments, Olson had to make trips to Porton to use facilities that didn't exist elsewhere. In the process, he met genuine scientists who were doing precisely the work that he wanted to do, that would one day actually protect soldiers from all the nightmares that his erstwhile colleagues were cooking up in figurative, if not literal, witch's cauldrons. Now, Porton Down isn't a holiday resort, anyone who saw it as an escape route has to have been in a pretty desperate place! But Olson did see it as a way out of MK Naomi, and he asked the President to allow him to leave direct US Army employment and go to work there, on protective measures for soldiers, against everything from nerve gas and biological weapons, to, perhaps, the mind control and psychoactive chemical warfare of MK Ultra and MK Naomi.

Medawar knows for certain that in the months immediately before his death, Frank Olson was shown around the actual research laboratories at both sides of "Porton Down" that is The "Chemical Defence Establishment (Salisbury)" and the "Microbiological Research Department" which is what starred in Alistair Maclean's novel "The Satan Bug." He was introduced to researchers as "Frank, he is going to be working with us now" and he seemed very pleased to have found a new career home. At Porton, he was neither depressed nor in any way unbalanced, just relieved and optimistic. He was the first American ever to have been into some parts of the facility, perhaps the only one to this day. This would not have happened if his employment was not sought by the director and endorsed by the responsible minister, Duncan Sands. It's unlikely that the UK Cabinet would have let Sands employ a top American scientist from a highly classified project, unless the US President had approved Olson's request to leave MK Naomi and move to Wiltshire, outside nominal US jurisdiction. (Which is the legal reason why he had to ask, as a serving officer and not a private citizen.)

The rats (and their friends) must have objected to the cat jumping ship.
The charlatans running MK Ultra and MK Naomi, appear to have even had groupies, fascinated by the idea of mind control and forcing people to do things against their will. This is an inherently sadistic aspiration, simply not holdable by a normal, sane person. Faced by someone who was not only calling their bluff and blowing the gaffe, but was determined to demonstrate an alternative direction for the Pentagon's chemical and biological warfare research funding to take, the charlatans, and perhaps even more so their groupies, may have acted vengefully and murderously.

In New York, Colonel Olson was struck on the head, a high window was broken, and then he was pushed through it afterwards, with no glass lacerations to his body.

Blair's Mantra

2010-01-24T17:17:00.004Z

Whenever Tony Blair wanted to justify some erosion or outright demolition of liberty, he and the party members who used to be organised to write letters to newspapers, local and national, on his behalf, all used to chant variations on "if you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide."

So why are they hiding all the medical evidence about the death of Doctor David Kelly, then?

It behoves us all to be jolly careful whilst taking walks in the woods, or working in the UN buildings in Vienna for that matter.

Incidentally: anyone covering up a crime they were not responsible for, perhaps out of fear of uncontrollable political consequences, becomes an accessory to that crime, even if they do not share the original criminal's purpose and intent. They also commit the fresh offence of "perverting the course of justice" or "conduct tending to pervert the course of justice" if charged in their native Scotland.

Identifiable Nutters Behind Organized Stalking

2010-01-23T14:46:00.004Z

A Canadian lady suggests that a millionaire (and pathological liar) with intelligence and police contacts, has been in the organized stalking game for thirty five years. This, incidentally, makes her the first blogger on the subject ever to posit a timeframe that accorded with Medawar's experience of stalking. (Since in the early seventies, extreme right wing and animal rights groups tended to have many members in common, it's still hard to say exactly where it was all coming from.)

That would fit, in a way, because very often stalking involves the use of police and intelligence resources, but it is turned to such a destructive and destabilizing end as to be completely at odds with the reason and purpose of any institution of state security.

Intelligence and Security services are, if anything, reactionary. Now, Liberals have made the word "reactionary" a shorthand for all evil, but it does what it says on the tin, and persecuting people who do not break the law is not a reactionary act: it is subversive.

See also Medawar's Comment on Terri Hansen's Article.

It would be very nice to know if "Cyril R." has anything to do with animal rights groups, some of which have a great deal of power in Canada, although they are currently in retreat in the UK due to universal revulsion at campaigns including grave-robbing and arson as well as an awful lot of stalking. Medawar wonders if "Cyril R." has ever given money to SHAC, PETA or IFAW, for instance?

Medawar's Extremist Linkages.

2010-01-07T20:51:00.003Z

Medawar2 has now fixed the problem that caused readers of Medawar's Extremist Linkages to spend their precious time writing comments, only to have them obliterated by the (not-working) blogger default option comments page.

Please accept his apologies and please try again!

By the Strength of Their Character

2009-12-29T21:07:00.012Z

(Readers may know what a Liberal is, especially if they've ever been bitten by one, but a Transnational Progressivist (or "Tranzi") may require some explanation. So click here, although Medawar doesn't endorse every analysis and sentiment therein. Apply your own judgement to the new ideas, and see below for why that is good.)

It is nearly fifty years since a Southern Baptist minister stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and made a speech, listened to by something like three hundred thousand people in the flesh and millions more on radio and television, that set out a simple recipe for peace and justice.

Nearly always, the Liberal and “Transnational Progressivist” political elite and their media homeboys will refer to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King as a “civil rights leader” and pay some kind of patronising, creeping lip-service before attempting to append his legacy to what is effectively the opposite of what he recommended.

Because Doctor King had a dream, (dreaming a dream is a very Baptist experience), and that dream was that everyone, regardless of their race, should be judged on the strength of their character and not the colour of their skin. In a single sentence, Doctor King destroys the basis of racial politics. But he doesn’t merely destroy racism, or neo-nazism, or nationalism. He destroys the other side of racial politics -and most of liberalism, too.

Firstly, Doctor King did not say, and most definitely did not mean, that black people or any other “oppressed” ethnic group should avoid being judged on their colour, whilst members of the supposed “oppressor” races should still be condemned as oppressors by virtue of their whiteness, or anglo-saxon-ness. He meant that no individual should be judged by the colour of their skin, for either good or bad.

Secondly, he very carefully used words such as “every” and “each” and not “all”. It was very much the individual who should never be judged by the colour of their skin, and it was the individual who should be judged by the strength of their character.

There are two concepts here which Liberals and “Tranzis” will recoil from like a vampire in a crucifix factory: individuals, and strength of character as a measure of worth.

Doctor King’s speech was not just an “anti-racist” soundbite, nor was it merely a generic “Christian” platitude. It was a Baptist sermon of great passion and power and this means that there was far more to it than “anti-racism” or civil rights.

Doctor King wanted to set his people free, but “his people” are, potentially, everyone. And he didn’t just want to set them free from racism: he wanted to set them FREE!

Every and each, embracing the whole human race as individuals. In deciding to judge us by our strength of character, Doctor King requires each of us to have a character. We have to be our own person, form our own view, decide for ourselves what we believe. Ohhhh! That man was a Baptist alright! Being judged, fairly, is freedom. If we are truly slaves, we do nothing by choice, we cannot be judged.

But everything we can be judged on, is a choice we were free to make. If we are to be judged, we have to be free. There is more in that than race: race is the least of it!

We do not, and can not, make the world better by labelling some communities as “oppressed” and, by political machination, moving them around the world until they are living amongst an “oppressor” community who can be made to suffer by way of reparation. Bear-baiting is as deadly to the hounds as to the bear: yet the essentials of the “Transnational Progressivist” concept of racial justice amounts to bear-baiting with whole communities. Always communities, groups, races; Transnational Progressivists cannot see individuals, only masses. Yet they currently “own” (anti-) racism and social justice as issues, which is like Herod the Great owning childcare as a political issue.

No-one will ever find personal freedom in their racial or ethnic identity. Freedom is in their own individual identity. Racial identity is all very well, and perhaps a genetic reality, but unless it is firmly in second place, behind individual identity, it is a barrier to freedom.

If you are a white Liberal, genuinely concerned for the rights and liberties of your black neighbour, the best thing you can do is find out his name and stop thinking of your neighbour as black. If you are a black power activist and very much not a liberal, an equivalent exercise could be very healthy. If you are a Transnational Progressivist, seeing nation states as the source of all evil: you need to see that nations are mostly ideas, not races or geographical entities, and that individuals will stand first with those with whom they can share ideas. If you want an end to nations, it probably is necessary to suppress the individual at every level and in every area of life, and the “Tranzi” movement has set about doing that with a will, but in that case an end to nations means an end to humanity.

What Doctor King set out for us was not “ a way of life” but the way to life. We must see everyone as an individual and not as part of any group, racial or social. We must grant them every freedom as an individual, and we must also hold them to account as individuals. Not on the assumption that all will fail and all are corrupt: Doctor King would not have subscribed to the doctrine of original sin, but because being held to account, being judged for good or bad, is a privilege when it comes with the inherent freedom to be good or bad. And Doctor King spoke in such a godlike way, not because he held any schizophrenic or pathological delusions that he was God, but because he was an obedient servant of God, striving throughout his life to understand God’s will -and then speaking it with an eloquence, simplicity and grace that makes it hard for any but the clinically obtuse to doubt that he spoke as a man inspired.

It wasn’t just the Ku Klux Klan who had reason to be discomforted by Doctor King’s words: the Liberals, Tranzis, Black Power Leaders and almost every known species of extremist would, if they thought about it, find something to hate and fear in that speech from the Lincoln Memorial. Our assumptions, therefore, about what manner of sinister conspiracy must have been behind Doctor King’s cowardly murder several years after that speech, may need to be revisited in the understanding that his words smote a lot more widely than the racist extreme right. In fact, the delay of several years almost certainly means that his killing was commissioned, not by the first and obviously apparent target of his challenge, but by someone who needed to sit and think it through before they understood that here was a man with the power to destroy their movement just by opening his mouth and speaking a single sentence.

New Blog

2009-12-26T18:44:00.002Z

For those concerned with whether or not one extremist group might be infiltrating and manipulating another, this blog may prove helpful, but it's a long-term proposition as it depends on reader feedback.