Christopher Shale

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

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

(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

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

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?

Bent American Police & Federal Agents: How to Report Them

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.