Johnny Marbles – Waste of Oxygen Or Valid Protest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/20/why-i-foam-pied-rupert-murdoch

Marbles tells his own story at the Groan above.  He’s served some purpose in bringing security at Parliament into some relief bit otherwise served little purpose other than to highlight problems with eye-witness observation.  Unlike all the others involved in the hacking nonsense, Marbles has at least told the truth without massive and costly processes needed to drag it out.  Wendi Deng, on the evidence of the eye, did not leap in to protect her husband, yet this quickly became the media account.  What is scandalous about this is that she did not get the same treatment someone in a similar ‘street incident’ might well get – an assault charge.  I wouldn’t wish this, but it seems to sharpen my feeling that the ‘new toffs’ are not living under the same law as the rest of us.

It’s hard to judge Marbles.  We need a strong protest movement because politics is dead and it’s clear we aren’t forming one.  The underlying problems concern the difficulty with getting a modern form of public dialogue and even a public interested in such.  This has been a problem since the Greeks issued slaves with whips covered in purple dye to shame citizens into democracy events.  In the absence of sensible public dialogue I find it hard to condemn Marbles and ‘direct action’.  I’m afraid I now think our society isn’t worth being bothered about.  The problems will unfold into war and to a considerable extent already have.

The people in the hacking scandal telling us they didn’t know what was going on are all clearly lying.  We knew, even as serfs, that the media, law and politics were bent long before any of this, and yet people at the heart of it all are laying claim to no knowledge.  Marbles at least spares us this.  In the end, I would rather share the planet with him than these other gassers.  Maybe the only language worth a spit these days is the custard pie and Wendi Deng’s right hand?

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Who knew what when is not about micro-managing.

Many of the questions being pointed at senior managers in the hacking charade seem to lack much understanding of what senior management is and to make assumptions that they are expected to “micro-manage”.  It’s hard enough as an SIO in a criminal enquiry to get a full-picture – indeed this often is not achieved even in successful investigations.

We had an allegedly full public investigation into the Iraq farce and yet Andrew Gilligan, castigated over telling us the blatantly obvious fact that the WMD nonsense was nonsense, revealed recently that senior MI6 officers are now contradicting evidence given by the “figures of great integrity” to Hutton.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewgilligan/100097068/iraq-dossier-mi6-concerned-about-its-claims-from-the-outset/

Gilligan points out that this is much more important than the current hacking performances.  The story emerging is that the security services did feel pressurised to support the case for war.  One could reasonably conclude the “people of integrity” colluded and lied.  I think this is true – but the obvious issue is why the people coming up with evidence now were not those giving evidence then.

Stephenson, Yates and all others paraded on hacking are all giving Nixon’s famous line about not knowing at the time – sadly there are no tapes with the expletive deleteves.  There are, of course, others down the food chain who know who they told what and what was being talked about in the system.

As I write, ‘Bill the Burglar’ is being nicked across the road – there are indeed police officers doing what we pay them to do.  Peter Fahey no doubt does not know what they are doing and is not present.  It’s a ludicrous to suppose GMP’s CC should do everything himself as it is to suppose Stephenson or Yates should not have been able to trust officers like the guys doing their job across the road.  These lads might miss a bin bag full of evidence and we could not blame that on Peter Fahey.

Any senior manager is entitled not to take the fall for wrongdoing by others in her organisation on the grounds you can’t and should not have your fingers in all pies.  This isn’t the point.  You can always say you did not know what was going on because of delegation.  A crime boss can say this on jobs he has organised but others have been caught doing.  Generally the blaggers don’t blow our Mr.Big.  The point is that our general organisations are behaving like the criminal ones – that is as though there is something to hide from public scrutiny.  The truth is not enough because this might give the wrong impression.

The farce with the Murdoch’s has just ended with a ‘custard pie’ and an apparent assault by a woman on the perpetrator.  Only one has been dragged away in chains.  Had my neighbour rushed out and dealt such a blow to Bill the Burglar (who has done her far more harm than shaving foam) whilst he was being carted off, I would hope the cops granted her such immunity,  I would certainly have given an ‘I saw no assault’ witness statement had she done the deed.  “Integrity”  is such a difficult thing!  And I would have blanked my security camera.  It appears that Rupert Murdoch’s wife Wendy is allowed to break the law on camera and take the law into her own hands in a manner not allowed us mere serfs.  The press has not noticed.  Before thinking of the perpetrator as scum, we should wait and see if he brings charges.  He should not have to as Wendy has contributed to an affray.  No doubt the Met will ignore this – they have form for selecting crimes they do process!  The law is the same as for a pub fight.

Bill was subject to an attack in the street last week – by an accomplice’s munter.  There was much shouting along the lines of ‘don’t you f****** (ten) well get my man involved in all this’ (she was even less literate).  Cops will now be hearing claim and counter-claim.  What they won’t do is parade these claims – they will investigate and try to find the convincing evidence.  This is what is so unconvincing about the current parade.  Plenty of investigation could have been done, but we are getting is equivalent to stories put up by chummies.  All of them have been shown not to have been telling the full truth and are now relying on stories they did not tell before.  None of them have come forward voluntarily and laid out what they knew in any straightforward manner.  The pattern throughout is giving limited information, bringing into question problems under PACE – relying now on information not given then.  They are all giving excuses no chummy would get away with.

What is plain is that the chiefs are all responsible when things go right – as though the changes they make or their brilliance networks right down, say, to the nicking of Bill today.  This network evaporates as soon as something goes wrong.  More than 80% of oirganisational communication is informal, and what is not presented to us is any notion of this ‘structure’.  Without this, and I have built many such structures, the proceedings are child-like.  All the worthies seem to have been wandering about in dubious networks wearing a shield of innocence.  This is nonsense.  And it’s not what people claim in other forms of communication.

I think we may have learned more from the shaving foam and Wendy Murdoch’s treatment in comparison with what happens to ‘ordinary folk’ who take a pot at someone being arrested.  There’s one law for them and another for the rest of us.  If I was sure my treatment would have been as lax as Wendi’s, I’d have nipped out, jumped over someone’s back and landed one on Bill for all of us.  Not only has Wendi got away with it, none of our press seem to have noticed she broke the law.  Perhaps this is why they find it so hard to think of bank bonuses (£14 billion seen, another £20 billion hidden) as stealing.  My left hook is much better than Wendi’s and Burglar Bill so much more deserving than the security breach chap.  I’d just be seen as a thug, even though ‘Saint-like’ I’d face him square on and not from behind.  The clown may try and bring these matters up at his trial.  Look again at what Wendi did.  Whilst 99% of us would have approved of letting her give the clown a kicking, she contributes to affray.  That’s if it is Wendi in the pink top – she may have a defence of mistaken identity.

When we nick blaggers and tea-leafs we hit hard, quick and seize evidence – this is also the case in fraud and tax evasion.  This lot are being tipped-off and allowed to destroy evidence and create defences.  Very sloppy.  And we always expect crooks to make claims about not knowing.  This lot all seem to know nothing about anything that matters.  We should never have asked them before ensuring they couldn’t erase traces.  Perhaps we should now be treating them as having gone ‘no comment’ and treat the baffle coming out now as unreliable?

There was and is a cover-up and conspiracy at the Met

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/interactive/2011/jul/15/letter-from-the-guardian-to-dick-fedorcio

Senior Met figures have a long history of wining and dining with News International.  There’s a spreadsheet at the Grauniad.  When the same figures meet Guardian staff it’s at the office.  It’s clear from the letter published (link above) in the Groan that the Met tried to put the arm on Nick Davis and stop the truth coming out.  Now they won’t answer fair questions from the Guardian using standard PR damage limitation techniques to give them time to get a story together.  They should be read the PACE guidance on what they may rely on in the future.

The IPCC should already not be giving the Met hierarchy time to collude.  Taped interviews should have been taken instead of half-assed stuff led by the dubious Vaz.  Police officers lie and some of this is justified.  A reasonable account can be found here:

http://deadlyforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Lies-and-Deception-PQ.pdf

That matters are out of hand can be seen in George Monbiot’s referenced piece here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/12/police-truth-blair-peach-tomlinson

I doubt Gadget subscribers would do the required reading, but the complex lying behaviour cops enter into is fairly standard across organisations now.  What’s needed isn’t sackings, but an opportunity to come clean and identify the real bad guys.  This clearly doesn’t happen in our public enquiries – even the WMD farce was not admitted.  In the absence of coming clean I would sack a random few Admiral Bings to encourage the others.

Police officers tend to get hard-boiled and think no one understands the complexity of their situation.  There are many explanations of their behaviour that are complex and do explain much of what I knew to go on as a cop.  I found a dozen academic papers on police lying and a hundred more on administrative lying in the space of a couple of hours.  Some are pretty good and public argument should shift to their more intelligent focus.  The following snippet gets to some of the enigma at the heart of being a cop.  There’s more actually, but I’m reserving my paper for publication.

This is standard material on police lying from ‘academic cops’:

‘

Police officers often tell lies; they act in ways that are deceptive, they manipulative
people and situations, they coerce citizens, and are dishonest. They are taught,
encouraged, and often rewarded for their deceptive practices. Officers often lie to
suspects about witnesses and evidence, and they are deceitful when attempting to learn
about criminal activity. Most of these actions are sanctioned, legal, and expected.
Although they are allowed to be dishonest in certain circumstances, they are also
required to be trustworthy, honest, and maintain the highest level of integrity. The
purpose of this article is to explore situations when officers can be dishonest, some
reasons that help us understand the dishonesty, and circumstances where lies may lead
to unintended consequences such as false confessions. The authors conclude with a
discussion of how police agencies can manage the lies that officers tell and the
consequences for the officers, organizations, and the criminal justice system.'
However complex the situation we can't have cops trying to prevent the publication 
of stuff they don't like and must know is true when they try to can it.

False accounting is our problem

The media is carried away with the ScrewsNews scandal.  I’m well past having had enough.  The stories emerging are not very significant.  The banks continue not to do anything like full disclosure on much more important issues.  Prescott is moaning on about morality and responsible journalism as I write and describing Murdoch as a ‘gangster’ under Parliamentary privilege.  Dickiebo has an interesting summary of ‘Honest Keith Vaz’ who is chairing one of the important committees.

The problem, broadly, is that we aren’t interested in real news and want to consume soap opera, whether in tedious television productions or Fox News.  Meanwhile we live in a kleptocracy that the press doesn’t penetrate – and we need it to be able to and for society to show interest.

For all the revelations in this story it’s really only worth a tenth of the focus on it.  We put relatively minor phone hacking, some clown Met policing and a ‘boy’s club’ well ahead of financial scandal that has depressed wages for 30 years and now leaves us holding the baby, and probably is leading us to war.

What all the stories have in common is false accounting.  The answer, and one we have technology for, is greater transparency and to understand this has nothing to do with our demand for salacious soap and private lives.  Much that should be public is not and purposely hidden.  Milly Dowler’s father was subject to ludicrous court disclosure, yet all kinds of ‘Swiss’ banks hide money that should be subject to taxation and this is the tip of the warped iceberg of transactional banking that steals capital based on work and the ground from under tenant farmers’ feet.

The false accounting is manifold – our own lives as ‘free people’ are a lie and the false accounting can only take place on the basis of claims to personal integrity or even, as with Blair, appeals to God.

Met, Press and NoPolitics All Dire – But Public Interest Fades

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/12/us-newscorp-detective-idUSTRE76B1BD20110712    (contributed by Colin)

If News International lied to cops in the ‘investigations’ into hacking crime, where are the arrests and charges of those responsible?  Or is this an investigation the Met can’t resource – or would rather not look into because it might remove a convenient excuse for its own failings and expose more about them?  Just like the last one …

11,000 bits of paper evidence is not a massive amount.  Less than a week with only 2 working on it would be enough to sample it pretty rigorously.  In the Morgan case, 750,000 bits of evidence were collected, but presumably not digitised and sorted into levels of disclosure.  The case collapses because material cannot be disclosed to the defence.  Decent detectives can and do do better than this these days.

I got the impression watching the ‘evidence’ given to some Parliamentary duck-eggs that actually doing detective work is far too difficult, much as a lot of decent coppering.  I can’t say I’d have been happy busting my chops over phone hacking either.  What we need to know is how much time this enquiry really needed in the first place and we have been given nothing to work on.  The duck-eggs needed to get some of the leg-people in and have Ms Akers tell them how she would have done the original work if given to her.

The whole mess looks like it may disintegrate into a series of civil proceedings and pay-offs as in the link above.

The public interest is in a cleaner press empowered to investigate more strongly than before as a ‘fourth estate’, a more sensible legal system and so on.  In fact, it looks as though the whole shebang is now caught up in compensation claims, with plenty of time being given to shred and collude on stories in the Met and elsewhere.  Plus revenge on the Dirty Digger.  Brown now seems to be muddying the waters with a sob story about as genuine as his emotions.

And why does anyone think a judge-led enquiry will help after the farces on Iraq, no inquest on Dr. Kelly or 20 years in clearing two decent pilots flying helicopters known to be wonky?

Murder Underlying the News of the World Scandal

 

 

 

 

 

 

This man is Jonathan Rees, a former Met officer and private detective jailed for trying to frame someone as an unreliable witness in divorce proceedings.  He was also suspected of a 20 year old axe murder – that of his partner back then, the body found in the car park of a South London pub.  Details at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/11/jonathan-rees-private-investigator-tabloid

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/mar/11/news-of-the-world-police-corruption?intcmp=239

The murder remains unsolved.  The CPS offered ‘no evidence’ after 19 months of legal wrangling.  The case raises some interesting issues on just what a ‘reliable witness’ is, given ‘supergrass’ evidence was intended to be presented.  On what I’ve read, I would not have been convinced by the ‘evidence’ and am more inclined to see it as yet more evidence that police and prosecution investigations need more active scrutiny than we give them.

Rees was caught out through the use of a wire put in his office – this in respect of framing the woman.  One has to wonder why this was not possible in 1987 when his partner Daniel Morgan was murdered, especially as both Rees and Morgan had been suspected of working with corrupt Met officers.

Rees may well be innocent of the Morgan murder and is calling for a public enquiry himself, as are Morgan’s relatives.  I’d call for one too, if I believed they weren’t just another part of the clown secrecy establishment’s white-wash weaponry.

In Stockwell, there blatant facts were first of dire cock up, then interference with the already laggardly IPCC along with the leaking of a pack of lies, then the cover up of officers being allowed to collude, the dumb story of shouting warnings that 17 members of the public didn’t hear – all not evidence of utter stupidity and lying, apparently – but never put to a real jury.  The Tomlinson evidence is again obvious and again there was severe reluctance to put it to a real jury.

In this case it appears a senior Met man has lied to Parliament and all sorts of assurances given by worthies are turning to dust.  Bent Met people seem all around as much as when I worked there before the alleged purge.  As ever, I see the police as no special case – there is now widespread corruption in politics, the press, finance and the law.  Everywhere there is self-regulation it fails.  By the time cops start trying to discredit people trying to get them to do their jobs and our courts turn evidence of innocence to that of guilt (Nico Bento) and what 17 people actually don’t hear is not good enough evidence that something was not shouted, it’s hardly surprising our Prime Minister hires a sleazy media magician.

There are ways to approach these matters without judges, public enquiries and the kind of stuff that eventually tells us a sexed up dossier wasn’t sexed up and that an ice cream cone in the possession of an Iraqi is a shaped-charge WMD; or that the Met is institutionally racist when the real problem was that some bimbo in uniform didn’t do what she could have for a poor guy who’d been stabbed.  Something is very rotten in the State of Denmark.  It’s a rotten orchard and we need a much wider focus than blaming individuals or cops.

What are we not getting while resources are wasted on 20 year old cases making fortunes for lawyers, what news do we not get as the Dirty Digger’s functionaries turn down the expenses scandal, and how corrupt are our politicians that they just have to be better at spin rather than tell the truth directly?  There is a bigger story we are blind to as this muck unfolds.  Why is our Parliament so quiet on how the very rich are getting richer?

Screws News

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/10/whistleblowers-rupert-murdoch-nhs-nick-cohen

I tend to like people who tell the truth.  Very few can hack its presence though, which may be why we have so much schmaltz in film, television and ‘literature’.  We don’t want to live in interesting times and we show little sign of wanting to change the human condition.  My guess is this condition is that of the pack animal.  Our public argument is constrained to the noises of such.

One of the great organs of schmaltz has just been slain, ostensibly by its owner.  The News of the Screws may be interesting to historians as evidence of the height of our dumb society.  Its editor turned down the story on Parliamentary expenses sleaze because there wasn’t enough ‘sex’ in it.  If only the duck house had been a little bigger and found to have a bed in it!  The ‘Screws News’ will be back, cheaper to produce, and with the same old stories.

What we won’t get is any form of intelligent journalism.  Criticism is more or less killed off in our society through ejukation and the ruling “Politburo”.  This term evokes Sino-Soviet experiment madness, the Gulags and such matters as 45 million deaths in the ‘Great Leap Forward’.  It needs this tinge, though I feel it combines ‘politesse’ and ‘bureaucracy’ rather well.  My take on Politburo is that which constrains what we can say and how we can say it.  Unlike those of the Sino-Soviet experiment, our Politburo is hidden as a “secret society”.  The model I have in mind here is that of the ‘stilted Devils’ of west Africa and its focus on conjuring up power and Juju.

The first issue in free speech is probably the feeling that one wastes one’s breath.  The second that the content of what one wants to say will merely establish the speaker as a target in the pack.  The third that one wants to speak of a ‘different world’ that the rest of the pack does not want to acknowledge, making the speaker an ‘alien’.  The fourth is the weight of having to protect one’s own economy.  The fifth that of bring down power, almost as conjuring the Devil or the angry, spiteful alpha on the argument.  Somewhere in this, one also knows the listeners are more interested in their versions of the ‘Screws News’.  This can be anything from the actual ‘Screws News’, through detective novels, the Royal Family and on to counting Angels on pin-heads.

As I write, BBC News is running pap coverage of our Royal Family in Canada.  Kate is cute and this coverage ‘BBC Screws News’.  Murdoch’s own news is actually discussing something closer to the criticism of Newscorp.  Touched on here is that Murdoch is still responsible for media diversity by killing off the print unions.  This, of course, begs the big questions on how the ‘Politburo’ rakes away our ‘cash’ as surely as any union, only in spades.  This doesn’t make union bargaining right, but why the focus on that and not the massive rents we pay to doctors, lawyers, senior managers, banksters, sport tars and other celebrities and all the tollbooths rich interests are erecting on our public services.

The News of the World is over, but fear not – the gossip-wanking will resume normal service in the Sexy Sun on Sunday. The Groaniad will try to match the Telegraph’s ‘drip-drip’ tactics on MPs’ expenses on this story, for this is its version of Screws News.

In the meantime, organised crime has re-established itself in our leadership in ways we dare not speak of.  This is what Cohen would be writing about if he had balls.  Like News Screws, he merely addresses an audience he thinks will ‘pay’.  So did the Foucault he lauds (now he was a Screws News story!) on speaking truth to power.  Strangely in all this news scew, we are being fucked over and it’s all as serious as the circumstances that took Hitler from 4% to 40% of the German vote in a few years.

One cannot address the NuPolitburo directly.  It’s power is not in few hands, but translated into govern-mentality amongst the pack.  These ‘alphas’ can rely on ordinary members to rip apart or shun anyone ‘truth-telling’.  The story Nick Davis has opened on our dirty press and its dirty political links and techniques merely feeds titillation.  Would only the redhead in the middle turn ‘happy hooker’ and we’d all be satisfied!  Especially if one of her clients turns out to be the cop who didn’t investigate because at his high rank one doesn’t involve oneself in ‘detail’.  Yet another chief executive ‘worth his salt’ knowing nothing when caught out without the protection of his own ‘performance management accountants’.

Around the world there is a need to break the NuPolitburo.  We need the direct accounts and can nowhere trust we get them.  China is in as bi a mess as the rest of us and for similar reasons.  No one can get this story into the news in the way that the expense scandal and phone hacking become ‘fashion’.

The current reality is a combination of Emperor’s New Clothes and the Jabberwock.  The Banksters have created a financial blackhole and spread the story for financial instruments only they can manipulate and of the great Devil (Jabberwock) that will consume us if we give up on them.  The financial instruments (CDOs etc.) are the application of science jargon in the same manner as clown rip-offs like ‘quantum jumping’ to personal development (long known as Ponzi schemes) and the Jabberwock plays on our fears of not being able to cope ourselves.  These are secret society routines as surely as any stilted Devils.  The madness involved is the same as in any culture in denial of impending ecocide.  The instrument of torture is to shun the very truth we need and to starve anyone promoting it of more or less everything – for to make the claim is the profanity that we are all morally corrupt and our religion once again just a pack of lies.  The real claim concerns being able to do much better and even have something approaching real democracy.