Common Purpose versus News International

The Daily Mail has published an in-depth report (the printed edition is several pages long) into the way that front organizations for a group called "Common Purpose" have been seeking, not just to impose statutory regulation on the Press in the UK, but also to ensure that their own people would be the regulators. They also created a "non-profit" organisation, the "Centre for Investigative Journalism" which they intend one day to be funded by a levy (tax) on newspapers. In effect, they are proposing that the State should conduct all necessary investigative journalism. Needless to say, the CIJ's first major outing, to produce a report under contract to the BBC's Newsnight programme, managed to create a completely false impression that a senior conservative politician, Lord McAlpine, was a paedophile. Not just libeling him, but also creating a smokescreen and a great deal of covering fire for some other political figures, against whom such an accusation would be a great deal more supportable.

The Daily Mail's report is here.

However good and thorough this report is, and the investigative parts of it are indeed good, the Mail insists in interpreting the assault by Common Purpose on News International, as if the accusations against News International and the rest of the Murdoch Empire were as spurious and unfounded as the smear against Lord McAlpine. Unfortunately, it isn't all unfounded, and indeed is sometimes an understatement of the truth. (Especially when News International has pulled a stunt which is too close to home for Common Purpose to be safely exposed...)

Medawar has published several articles about News International, and especially its Israeli sister company NDS, involving multi-billion pound fraud and possible murder. (Too many to link, just search this blog for NDS and it'll get you started.)

Other bloggers have documented, carefully and at great length, numerous links between the operations of News International, the murder of Daniel Morgan, intimidation and smearing of some senior officers who tried to investigate this, and repeated and outstandingly successful efforts to pervert the course of justice in this case. That in turn links to alleged corrupt activities by the former senior police officer, Ray Adams, which links in turn to the notorious gangster, bullion-thief, money-launderer and murderer, Kenneth Noye.

See the Brown Moses blog, here.

(You will need to go through the archives, because many articles are about Syria at the moment.)

And the "Daniel Morgan Murder" blog here.

Medawar does not write either of the two above blogs and does not know the people who do. (Some of the contributors to Brown Moses do seem to be closely connected to past investigations into the corruption surrounding the Daniel Morgan case, and have useful information.)

Furthermore, the Mail is a Johnny Come Lately with regard to investigating "Common Purpose" and here is a source of deeply-researched information, upon which the Mail seems to have drawn without acknowledgement.Common Purpose seeks a communitarian state, and seeks to bring this about by almost any means other than open statement of their aims and the democratic process, which makes them subversive in the strictest definition of the word. Here is Medawar's view of communitarianism, from 2009.

The best way to describe the battle between "Common Purpose" and all its spurious pressure groups, and News International, is not a battle between good and evil, but a battle between two competing evils with the same objective: control of all news investigated and reported in the United Kingdom and beyond. In one case by political scheming, rigged regulators, bogus pressure groups and Common Purpose members planted in official positions, in the other case by abuse of a multi-media monopoly, itself built often by illegal means, such as the hacking campaign to eliminate On Digital as a rival to News International's BSkyB broadcasting arm.

Not Michael and his angels fighting in the sky with Satan and his angels, but Al Capone taking on Bugs Malone in an underground garage.

A Security Breach Waiting to Happen: Serving Officers as Consultants

Last week, Sam Hallam was acquitted by the Court of Appeal, after serving eight years in prison for a murder he couldn't have committed. Counsel for the Crown seems only to have read the full case files about halfway through the hearing, because that was the point where the Crown suddenly withdrew its opposition to the appeal without any public explanation. Interestingly, Mr Hallam uses his first major interview, with the Mail on Sunday, to express, not merely his indignation at the way he was treated by an inquiry team led by then-Chief-Inspector Michael Broster, but also his concern that the conduct of the now-Superintendent Broster in the Gareth Williams case may have fatally compromised what is now and always should have been, a murder inquiry. See several articles in this blog about the Williams case, below.

Mr Hallam rightly observes that the Gareth Williams case was "really important" and mistakes were unacceptable, let alone near duplicates of the kind of mistake which led to his own wrongful conviction and the escape from justice of the real killer. (Broster and his team ignored compelling evidence against one Tyrone Isaacs even as they ignored compelling evidence supporting Mr Hallam's claim to innocence.)

Above all, Broster failed to keep a  "policy book" which is a document designed to allow their superiors or any future inquiry team, or those working on a parallel case, to understand their reasons for taking specific actions, interpreting evidence in a particular way or why they should have pursued one line of inquiry whilst abandoning others. Without a policy book, other records reveal almost nothing about why an investigation went wrong. The only time anyone benefits from a policy book not being kept, is when the reason why an investigation went wrong is itself unacceptable: i.e: something more sinister than a mistake.

The action which, above all others, cries out for explanation, is why Broster's team actually gave back a stick that had been taken from Tyrone Isaacs as a potential murder weapon. It's simply impossible to see why an essentially valueless possession should be returned when it might still have yielded forensic evidence of value if subjected to the most modern techniques. It's almost as if Mr Isaacs had a kindly sponsor.

Medawar isn't going to draw the reader's attention to the ways in which all of this is an exact parallel with the ways in which Superintendent Broster and his SO15 colleagues systematically derailed the murder investigation in the Williams case, because they are quite obvious to anyone comparing the details of the two cases.

Medawar would like, instead, to draw the reader's attention to the ways in which Superintendent Broster's career trajectory parallels that of two former executives of "News Data Services", a News Corporation company which has been thoroughly implicated in a global hacking fraud designed to drive competitors to News Corp broadcasters, (On Digital, for example) out of business, causing News Corp to profit by billions of pounds and gain considerable global political power for its principals.

Superintendent (latterly "Commander") Ray Adams was the head of Scotland Yard's Criminal Intelligence Branch, SO11, and Reuven Hasak was a former deputy Chairman of the Shin Bet, Israel's security service. Like SO15, SO11 officers have a very high security clearance, which the unscrupulous can exploit to prevent other officers questioning or even knowing about, their activities, whether properly sanctioned or not. Especially not. The same goes for Shin Bet officers in general, let alone the deputy chairman.

In recent years, the high security clearance of SO11 and SO15 officers has led to their being given exclusive access to classified material, so that any senior investigating officer needing access to classified material, secure premises or military and intelligence personnel in order to solve a murder (or multi-billion pound fraud), have to channel all their requests via SO15 and simply accept whatever they are given or told, without question. Somewhere in the mind of successive Home Secretaries, this arrangement "serves national security". In practice, of course, it does the opposite:

Exclusive access to privileged information gives officers a very high market value. And being effectively beyond being questioned by their colleagues gives those officers the opportunity to exploit that market value for all it's worth.

Both Ray Adams and Reuven Hasak had top jobs at NDS within weeks of leaving public service, and it's simply impossible for them to have been up and running so quickly without overlap: they must have been briefed into their new roles, and had an idea of the (criminal, as it happens) large-scale enterprise they would be engaged in, even while between them they still had access to the most secret and sensitive files of both the UK's police and security services and those of Israel.

And since neither of them is exactly an ace programmer or experienced financier, what was it that made them ideal candidates for senior roles in News Corp's software arm, if it wasn't their security clearances and unfettered access to national secrets?

Now we learn that Superintendent Broster is due to leave the Metropolitan Police, later this year. But he is already advertising and presumably selling, his services as a "security consultant". This is precisely the same highly questionable overlap, which does not so much open the door to corruption as send hawkers round the streets, seeking out corruption and issuing invitations.

How in the world is this system more secure than simply allowing a senior investigating officer, whose investigation touches on military or intelligence matters, to go and talk to the relevant agencies and their officers on her or his own account? They would be in a much better position than SO15 or SO11 to judge what evidence was actually pertinent, and they would almost certainly occupy the attention of military and intelligence officers for less time in consequence. Not having a privileged "elite" position, their conduct could be scrutinised and any "mistakes" rectified. They could also benefit from the advice of peers and superiors in a way that "elite" officers never seem to.

Moreover, it wouldn't be possible for a foreign power or major criminal gang to predict which officers would end up having access to classified material, and when they did have access, it would indeed be limited to that pertinent to a single inquiry at a time. By reducing both the opportunity and the payoff for anyone corrupting an officer, in whatever way, national security -and the rule of law- would be strengthened.

Above all, allowing serving officers, with high security clearances, to enter private practice and advertise their services, is a suicidal practice in terms of national security and should be replaced with something like the quarantine period imposed on former ministers. Senior police officers have generous pensions, precisely to compensate them for all the opportunities for personal enrichment which they supposedly forgo in the public interest. So how come they need to be allowed to flaunt their security clearances on the internet and around City boardrooms -as if they were standing in a doorway in Soho with a set of  doorkeys in their hands and a look of bored acceptance, if not enticement, on their faces?

Well Schooled in the Black Arts?

One of Ray Adams' colleagues at NDS, during the company's worldwide pay-TV hacking campaign (circa 1997 to 2002) was Reuven Hasak, former deputy chairman of the Israeli Security Service, the Shin Bet. (Mr Adams was head of criminal intelligence at the Metropolitan Police Service, which makes them close colleagues even before they took the Murdoch shilling, assuming that Mr Murdoch was not paying them anything while they were both on the public payroll, which does seem to be an assumption that Surrey Police at least are willing to question!)

See post below, about the possible links between the Gareth Williams murder and NDS. And this post, about how the killer may have planned to remove the body from the flat, once forensic evidence had been destroyed by decomposition.

There's apparently a law against publishing photographs of Israeli intelligence chiefs. So here's an oil painting, of the three founding directors of an Israeli security consultancy, including Reuvan Hasak, Medawar assumes that Mr Hasak is front centre, but would be interested if anyone is able to offer (possibly anonymous) correction.

Residents of Alderney Street, or friends and colleagues of Mr Gareth Williams, might want to scrutinize this magnificent group portrait and see if it jogs their memory at all.