David Kelly: Application for Judicial Review

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

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

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

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

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.