Mark Williams-Thomas Agenda

"Child protection expert Mark Williams-Thomas" If you say so.

Mark Williams-Thomas

Mark Williams-Thomas, a former policeman and managing director of WT Associates, a PR company specialized in child protection, media handling and advice for high profile cases, urged Portuguese police to ditch the case against the McCann – a case that he classified as “ludicrous” – and follow another lead that he thinks could take PJ to the real kidnapper.
The managing director of PR company WT Associates, who is usually introduced to Sky News viewers only as a “child protection expert” or “crime expert”, criticised Polícia Judiciária for not paying attention to “such a strong line of inquiry”. The PR expert referred that, even if “over 90% of murders are domestic-related”, he can’t “accept that Gerry and Kate as parents of the child could have been involved in her murder.”.................
...............The fact that one of the officers accused in Chief-Inspector Gonçalo Amaral casts “huge doubt” to the managing director of WT Associates, who believes that Mr. Amaral should be ousted from the investigation of Madeleine’s case: “”Even if we work on the basis that he is innocent, given this allegation against him, he shouldn’t have anything to do with the Madeleine investigation”, the PR expert told to Sky News.
Questioned yesterday, September 14, about his business relationship, as a expert also in media handling and advice for high profile cases, Mr. Mark Williams-Thomas initially confirmed that his company had a contract to provide services to the McCann. Asked to confirm some details of that business relationship, he changed his initial answer and denied any relationship, admitting only that he has “been in contact with the press officers for the family.” more Paulo Reis

Ink: A Mother's Tale

It was only two months ago that I ran a post on tattoos where I had this to say:

There's No Taste Like Bad Taste - No Regerts: Insane Ink

To say I am no lover of ink, would, I have to admit, be putting it rather mildly.

Given that 99.99% don't pass the acid test, 'would you hang the same thing on your wall?' then I suppose it's hardly surprising.

I think the wearing of cringe-worthy tats must surpass any other single human activity in the world, but I think I reserve a special place, a special abhorrence, for those that adorn the bodies of young chicks.

To see the most beautiful work of art that exists in the world bar none, the body of a young female in her prime, desecrated by some ghastly tattoo or other, really makes me want to weep. What a travesty, to turn something so lovely into something ruined forever. More

So it will hardly come as a surprise that the author of this piece, a mother of a twenty one year old boy, has my fullest understanding and sympathy.

Just one little tattoo
Tess Morgan
11 August 2012

When Tess Morgan's son came home with a tattoo, she was griefstricken. She knew her reaction was OTT (he's 21) but it signalled a change in their relationship

Put out the bunting, crack open the beers, stand there in the kitchen smiling from ear to ear, because he's home – our student son is home and the family is together again. And after supper, after the washing up is done, the others – his younger siblings – drift off to watch television, and he says: "Would you like to see my tattoo?"

I say, "You're joking."

He says, "No, I'm not."

But still I wait. Any minute he's going to laugh and say, "You should see your faces" because this has been a running joke for years, this idea of getting a tattoo – the hard man act, iron muscles, shaved head, Jason Statham, Ross Kemp. He's a clever boy. Maybe during his school years he thought a tattoo would balance the geeky glory of academic achievement.

His father says, "Where?"

"On my arm," he says, and touches his bicep through his shirt.

His lovely shoulder.

In the silence, he says, "I didn't think you'd be this upset."

After a while, he says, "It wasn't just a drunken whim. I thought about it. I went to a professional. It cost £150."

£150? I think, briefly, of all the things I could buy with £150.

"It's just a tattoo," he says, when the silence goes on so long that we have nearly fallen over the edge of it into a pit of black nothingness. "It's not as if I came home and said I'd got someone pregnant."

It seems to me, unhinged by shock, that this might have been the better option.

His father asks, "Does it hurt?"

"Yes," I say, cutting across this male bonding. "It does. Very much."

For three days, I can't speak to my son. I can hardly bear to look at him. I decide this is rational. The last thing we need, I think, is an explosion of white-hot words that everyone carries around for the rest of their lives, engraved on their hearts. In any case, I'm not even sure what it is I want to say. In my mind's eye I stand there, a bitter old woman with pursed lips wringing my black-gloved hands. He's done the one thing that I've said for years, please don't do this. It would really upset me if you did this. And now it's happened. So there's nothing left to say.

I know you can't control what your children do. Why would you want to, anyway? If you controlled what they did, you'd just pass on your own rubbish tip of imperfections. You hope the next generation will be better, stronger, more generous. I know all you can do as a parent is to pack their bags and wave as you watch them go.

So I cry instead. I have a lump in my throat that stops me from eating. I feel as if someone has died. I keep thinking of his skin, his precious skin, inked like a pig carcass.

My neighbour says, "There's a lot of it about. So many teenagers are doing it." I stare at pictures of David Beckham with his flowery sleeves, Angelina Jolie all veins and scrawls. Tattoos are everywhere. They seem no more alternative than piercings these days. But I still don't understand. Sam Cam with her smudgy dolphin, the heavily tattooed at Royal Ascot – these people are role models?

"My niece had doves tattooed on her breasts," says a friend, "And her father said, you wait, in a few years' time they'll be vultures."

It's the permanence that makes me weep. As if the Joker had made face paints from acid. Your youthful passion for ever on display, like a CD of the Smiths stapled to your forehead. The British Association of Dermatologists recently surveyed just under 600 patients with visible tattoos. Nearly half of them had been inked between the ages of 18 and 25, and nearly a third of them regretted it.

I look up laser removal. Which is a possibility, I think miserably, that only works if you want a tattoo removed. And I'm not in charge here. My son is.

My husband asks, "Have you seen it yet?"

I shake my head. Like a child, I am hoping that if I keep my eyes tightly shut the whole thing will disappear.

"It's his body," he says gently. "His choice."

"But what if he wants to be a lawyer?"

"A lawyer?"

"Or an accountant."

"He'll be wearing a suit. No one will ever know. And he doesn't want to be a lawyer. Or an accountant."

I know. I know.

I meet a colleague for lunch. "He knew how much it would hurt me," I say, tears running down my face. "For years I've said, don't do it. It's there for ever, even after you've changed your mind about who you are and what you want to look like. You're branded, like meat. It can damage your work prospects. It can turn people against you before you've even opened your mouth."

She says, "Tell him how you feel."

But I can't. For a start, I know I'm being completely unreasonable. This level of grief is absurd. He's not dying, he hasn't killed anyone, he hasn't volunteered to fight on behalf of a military dictatorship. But I feel as though a knife is twisting in my guts.

I get angry with myself. This is nothing but snobbery, I think – latent anxiety about the trappings of class. As if my son had deliberately turned his back on a light Victoria sponge and stuffed his face with cheap doughnuts. I am aware, too, that I associate tattoos on men with aggression, the kind of arrogant swagger that goes with vest tops, dogs on chains, broken beer glasses.

Is this what other women feel? Or perhaps, I think, with an uncomfortable lurch of realisation, just what older women feel. I stand, a lone tyrannosaurus, bellowing at a world I don't understand.

Tattoos used to be the preserve of criminals and toffs. And sailors. In the 1850s, the corpses of seamen washed up on the coast of north Cornwall were "strangely decorated" with blue, according to Robert Hawker, the vicar of Morwenstow – initials, or drawings of anchors, flowers or religious symbols ("Our blessed Saviour on His Cross, with on the one hand His mother, and on the other St John the Evangelist"). "It is their object and intent, when they assume these signs," says Hawker, "to secure identity for their bodies if their lives are lost at sea."

Tattoos, then, were intensely practical, like brightly coloured smit marks on sheep.

Perhaps even then this was a fashion statement, a badge of belonging. Or just what you did after too much rum. Later, the aristocracy flirted with body art. According to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (they know a lot about tattoos), Edward VII had a Jerusalem cross on his arm while both his sons, the Duke of Clarence and the Duke of York (later George V), had dragon tattoos. Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston's mum, had a snake on her wrist.

But you can do what you like if you're rich.

On day three, still in a fog of misery, I say to him, "Shall we talk?"

We sit down with cups of coffee. I open my mouth to speak and end up crying instead. I say, "You couldn't have done anything to hurt me more."

He is cool and detached. He says, "I think you need to re-examine your prejudices."

I think, but I have! I've done nothing else for three days! But I don't say that because we aren't really talking to each other. These are rehearsed lines, clever insults flung across the dispatch box. (This is what comes of not exploding in anger in the heat of the moment.)

I say, "Why couldn't you have waited until you'd left home? Why now when you're living here half the year?"

"It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. There didn't seem any reason to wait."

Which makes it worse.

"I'm an adult," he says. "I paid for it with my own money. Money I earned."

But we're supporting you as well, I think. As far as I know, you don't have separate bank accounts for your various income streams. So who knows? Maybe we paid for it. "If you don't want to see it, that's fine," he says. "When I'm at home, I'll cover it up. Your house, your rules."

In my head, I think, I thought it was your house, too.

He says, "I'm upset that you're upset. But I'm not going to apologise."

"I don't want you to apologise," I say. (A lie. Grovelling self-abasement might help.)

He says, "I'm still the same person."

I look at him, sitting there, my 21-year-old son. I feel I'm being interviewed for a job I don't even want. I say, "But you're not. You're different. I will never look at you in the same way again. It's a visceral feeling. Maybe because I'm your mother. All those years of looking after your body – taking you to the dentist and making you drink milk and worrying about green leafy vegetables and sunscreen and cancer from mobile phones. And then you let some stranger inject ink under your skin. To me, it seems like self-mutilation. If you'd lost your arm in a car accident, I would have understood. I would have done everything to make you feel better. But this – this is desecration. And I hate it."

We look at each other. There seems nothing left to say.

Over the next few days, my son – always covered up – talks to me as if the row had never happened. I talk to him, too, but warily. Because I'm no longer sure I know him.

And this is when I realise that all my endless self-examination was completely pointless. What I think, or don't think, about tattoos is irrelevant. Because this is the point. Tattoos are fashionable. They may even be beautiful. (Just because I hate them doesn't mean I'm right.) But by deciding to have a tattoo, my son took a meat cleaver to my apron strings. He may not have wanted to hurt me. I hope he didn't. But my feelings, as he made his decision, were completely unimportant.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

I am redundant. And that's a legitimate cause for grief, I think.

Tess Morgan is a pseudonym Gruniad

Julian Assange In Conversation With John Pilger

This took place before the Swedish debacle, but don't let that distract you from what is still a very interesting seventy minutes.

John Pilger in conversation with Julian Assange

An extended interview with Julian Assange recorded during filming of John Pilger's latest film 'The War You Don't See' johnpilger.com

Justice China Style

It kind of brings a whole new meaning to the old adage: There ain't no justice in this world.

And if you think page one is a bit of an eye-opener, wait till you get to 'executions' on page two. Granted it is now a thing of the past, but, greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for . . . .

I'm trying to focus the memory box at the moment, because this practice of a stand in to serve jail time, or take a flogging for another, has a very familiar ring to it, and in a place far removed from China. In fact it might be a whole lot closer to home if my memory serves. Which of course it doesn't, well not at the moment it doesn't.

Double Jeopardy

In China, the rich and powerful can hire body doubles to do their prison time for them.
By Geoffrey Sant
Aug. 2, 2012

In May 2009, a wealthy 20-year-old was drag racing through the city streets of Hangzhou, China, when his Mitsubishi struck and killed a pedestrian in a crosswalk. The car was traveling so fast that the victim—a 25-year-old telecom engineer of a modest, rural background—was flung at least 20 yards. Afterward, bystanders and reporters photographed the driver, Hu Bin, as well as his rich friends, who nonchalantly smoked cigarettes and laughed while waiting for the police to arrive at the scene.

These images, soon posted online, provoked a public outcry. Anger over the callous behavior of these wealthy Chinese youths was followed by accusations of a police cover-up. First, the local authorities admitted that they had underestimated the speed Hu’s vehicle was traveling by half. (Incredibly, the police had first suggested that Hu was going no more than 43 mph.) Public furor rose again when Hu received a three-year prison sentence, an exceptionally light punishment in a country where drunk drivers guilty of similar accidents can receive the death penalty.

But the most stunning allegation was that the man appearing in court and serving the three-year sentence wasn’t Hu at all, but a hired body double.
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The charge isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound. The practice of hiring “body doubles” or “stand-ins” is well-documented by official Chinese media. In 2009, a hospital president who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to “confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so common that there is even a term for it: ding zui. Ding means “substitute,” and zui means “crime”; in other words, “substitute criminal.”

The ability to hire so-called substitute criminals is just one way in which China’s extreme upper crust are able to live by their own set of rules. While Occupy Wall Street grabbed attention for its attacks on the “1 percent,” in China, a much smaller fraction of the country controls an even greater amount of wealth. The top one-tenth of 1 percent in China controls close to half of the country’s riches. The children and relatives of China’s rulers, many of whom grew up together, form a thicket of mutually beneficial relationships, with many able to enrich themselves financially and, if necessary, gain protection from criminal allegations.

A police officer in central China agreed to discuss the phenomenon of “replacement convicts” with me so long as I didn’t refer to him by name. “America has the rule of law, but China has the rule of people,” the police officer told me. “If somebody is powerful, there’s a good chance they can make this happen. Spend some money and remain free.” According to the police officer, hired stand-ins are “not common but not rare either.” As examples, the officer listed several high-ranking mafia figures whose underlings serve time in their stead. The mafia cares for the substitute’s family and pays a bonus for the time served.

Sometimes, family members cover for each other. This is especially true in cases of traffic accidents, where the police may be able to identify the vehicle involved in the crime but not the driver. In one case, as seen in this highly graphic television segment showing a drunk driver plowing through an old man, the driver’s son admits he falsely “confessed” to the crime to prevent police from testing his father’s blood-alcohol level. The police officer told me that in cases of drunk, unlicensed, or uninsured drivers, it “often happened” that a slightly more sympathetic substitute—someone who has insurance, a license, or is at least sober—would confess in the driver’s place. An adopted daughter stood in for her father after a deadly accident; in another case, because witnesses took down the license plate of the car involved in a drunk-driving hit-and-run, the deputy director of the Xuchang County Forestry Bureau sent his wife to appear as his substitute.

Where photographs or video of the criminal at the scene of the crime have been widely circulated, however, it is necessary to use a body double. “The most successful instances are the ones nobody ever knows about,” the police officer said. “You need a powerful trick to pull it off.” Even the wealthy and influential may be unable to cover up an outrageous public crime—such as a horrific traffic accident—where there is widespread public outrage and online cries for criminal charges.

In October 2010, a young man driving drunk on the Hebei University campus struck two college women on rollerblades, killing one. The driver—the son of the deputy chief of the district police—continued on, dropping off his girlfriend. When security guards and students finally stopped him, he shouted: “Charge me if you dare. My father is Li Gang.” This scandal seemed to encapsulate China’s problems with corruption and abuse of power. Accusations of an attempted cover-up included conspiracy theories about a body double. Because Li Gang’s son was known under two different names, Li Yifan and Li Qiming, rumors spread that one of these names belonged to the hired substitute. One Internet poster wrote sarcastically: “Even if he had received a life sentence, he could still find someone to be his stand-in!” Go to page two.

Why Don't Scientologists Burst Out Laughing and Walk Away?

I wondered, when I dropped on this third article by Tony Ortega, if it would go some way to explaining the same question that I asked when I earlier ran two previous articles by fellow. Basically, how can people be so fucking gullible when confronted with this tripe that is at the core of Scientology? Or as Ortega asks the very same:

Why don't Scientologists, when they've been in the organization long enough to reach the legendary material in "Operating Thetan Level Three" -- the stuff about Xenu the galactic overlord which made for a great 2005 episode of South Park -- bust out laughing and walk away?

One way of answering the question, would be to take the easy way out and dismiss it as simply the stupidity and gullibility of your average Yanky. Given that around half the population of America think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old and was willed into existence by a supernatural entity, I could be forgiven for thinking this. It may well turn out to be the case, for try as I may, and reading the accounts below, and doing so in all seriousness, I'm still at a loss as to the why of it all.

Is Ortega right in downplaying: their critical reasoning skills were so eroded, they would accept anything in favour of something else, something quite simple in fact:

. . . but by the time they learned it (the Xenu story) they had already spent so much of their lives invested in Scientology, they really had no personal will to walk away -- at least at that point.

Human nature being what it is, and considering how much time and money these people had invested to reach this level of enlightenment, OT3, it is not I think, an observation without merit.

Why Do Scientologists Accept the Xenu Story?
By Tony Ortega
July 21 2012

For going on 17 years I've been writing about Scientology, and over that time there's one question that has come up again and again.

Why don't Scientologists, when they've been in the organization long enough to reach the legendary material in "Operating Thetan Level Three" -- the stuff about Xenu the galactic overlord which made for a great 2005 episode of South Park -- bust out laughing and walk away?

Tom Cruise and John Travolta and thousands of other Scientologists have moved on beyond the space opera stuff in OT 3 (Cruise, for example, has moved up to OT 7), and for some reason, they accepted the Xenu story and never looked back.

When I've been asked that question, I had a ready answer that I'd put together after talking to many ex-Scientologists who told me their own experiences.

But now, I realize that the answer I was giving was wrong. The reason why Scientologists accept the story about Xenu and disembodied alien beings infesting this Earth is actually much simpler, and much more mindblowing, than I ever realized.

In the past, Scientologists had convinced me that their long, gradual indoctrination was so insidious, by the time they were allowed to read L. Ron Hubbard's strange OT 3 story -- which has a galactic overlord solving an overpopulation problem by bringing billions of disembodied alien souls to this planet 75 million years ago -- their critical reasoning skills were so eroded, they would accept anything.

I remember Jason Beghe, for example, telling me that other religions have their angels and demons, so was a story about alien spirits from another solar system really all that harder to believe? I could see what he was saying, but after spending so much money and time -- hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years of dedication to reach OT 3 -- wasn't it a shock for Scientologists to learn that this was what their religion is really all about?

Some ex-church members I met did admit that they had negative reactions to the Xenu story, but by the time they learned it they had already spent so much of their lives invested in Scientology, they really had no personal will to walk away -- at least at that point.

But then, recently, I had a new realization about what church members go through before they get to OT 3.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed a man named Dani Lemberger, and he made me understand the "whole track" and auditing better than anyone else had before. (In auditing -- Scientology's spiritual counseling -- a subject holds onto the sensors of an e-meter while an auditor asks questions prescribed by Hubbard, encouraging the subject to remember events earlier and earlier. The purpose is to remember and then disarm traumatic memories that happened in your past lives, and helps you move toward becoming "clear." As you do so, you gain a view down your entire "whole track" of existence as an immortal spirit, called a "thetan.")

For my story about Dani and the mission in Israel that is splitting away from the official church, I interviewed Lemberger for hours and sat, mesmerized, as he told me about his whole track auditing, during which he saw himself millions of years ago, leading groups during different lifetimes and on other planets. Over the eons, he said, he had lived lifetimes during which he had a tendency to get his head chopped off when his people rebelled.

Dani was serious. (And he's also a successful businessman with an MBA who characterizes himself as a "skeptic.")

Lemberger made me realize something very basic about Scientology that, for some reason, had never really sunk in before. And it is this...

The reason Scientologists accept Hubbard's bizarre story about Xenu is that by the time they reach OT 3, they have been "remembering" their own outlandish space opera "whole track" stories during auditing, perhaps for several years.

Why question Hubbard's tale about mass alien genocide 75 million years ago, when you've been "seeing" yourself as some kind of Buck Rogers fighting enemies and bedding beauties from one end of the galaxy to the other?

With this new realization, I went back to some of my ex-Scientology sources to put it to them: had they been holding out on me a little about their own Star Wars-like adventures?

Several of them admitted that yes, even ex-Scientologists long out of the church can be somewhat reluctant to discuss the wild things they "remembered" about their past during auditing. But I pressed them -- tell me about your adventures from millennia past.

"I blew up a water dam that destroyed a third of the cities that were downriver of it. That would be about 300 million years ago -- but you would say something like '346,767,813 years ago' to your auditor. I think it was on some planet that started with the letter 'V'," says Chuck Beatty, and he laughs, knowing how ridiculous it sounds.

Even after I had explained what I was asking, it took me some while to pry that answer out of Chuck, who is, just about anyone will tell you, the most forthcoming and talkative source of information on Scientology in the world.

Tiziano Lugli was the same way. He spoke to me at length about his own auditing and the entire progression of the OT levels. But I had to keep pushing him until he finally coughed up one of his whole track events...

"It was 250,000 years ago, in a space ship, and I'd gathered all these people from these planets, and I'm implanting them with mental pictures and then throwing them down to the earth, a prison planet," Lugli said. "I was the guy in charge, and I'm responsible for this prison planet. The feeling of that responsibility and what I went through freaked me out for a year."

And that's really the purpose of "remembering" such material -- Scientologists believe that if they can recall and "handle" things that happened to them eons ago, it will solve whatever problems they have going on in their current lives.

"At the end of a session you feel invincible," Lugli says. "You've been having planets built and destroyed. After that, you come out into this normal world and you feel like the most powerful person around because you've been traveling through space and time."

Marc Headley pointed out that if you're having those kinds of experiences, Hubbard's story about a galactic overlord is just not very surprising.

"OK, so there's a galactic overlord named Xenu. Big deal. That's not the craziest thing you're going to hear on your way to spending three hundred thousand dollars," he says, referring to the ballpark figure for what it takes to get through the years of services to get to OT 3. At the upper levels, such counseling reaches about a thousand dollars an hour.

But during their journey to OT 3, not everyone has such outlandish "memories," they all pointed out to me.

Amy Scobee, for example, told me a pretty mundane story about seeing herself in a scene from about two centuries ago (which, even though it was rather tame, she asked me not to share). Other memories she worked with were almost contemporary.

She just didn't have wild space opera experiences the way some others did. So when she she reached OT 3, I asked her, how did it hit her?

"I did wonder if it was true," she says. But when she then ran the auditing routines involved in the level, the e-meter's needle seemed to indicate that what the material proposed -- that disembodied alien souls were hovering around her -- seemed to be confirmed. "It's weird. I don't know what to say. I didn't feel like I went through that incident, but the needle was going wild, so I had to assume that someone had."

I also called Jefferson Hawkins, who I've always considered one of the smartest, most level-headed of the ex-Scientologists who speak out about their experiences. He laughed as soon as I explained why I was calling.

"I ran a lot of that stuff, as anybody does, and people don't want to talk about it because it's kind of silly when you get out. But when you're in it's very real," he says.

And Jeff's "whole track" auditing memory? "I was a navigator on a space ship, and it had this very complex navigation system that I was in charge of and I could describe it in great detail," he says. "It was just very vivid. I could see the equipment and could describe it."

He points out that Hubbard had suggested these kinds of stories in his books and lectures, talking about waves of "invader forces" that had colonized the solar system.

"As a kid I was a real science fiction fan. And the idea that this stuff had actually occurred millions of years ago -- it was crazy, but in a good way," he says.

So these Scientologists, in their auditing sessions, were "remembering" pretty mindblowing stuff. But there was a catch -- they weren't supposed to tell other church members about it.

Lugli describes the scene to me: "You would go to the restaurant at the Sandcastle Hotel in Flag [Scientology's spiritual mecca in Clearwater, Florida], and everyone is out of session, saying things like, 'Wow, this really blew me away! I've never handled more charge in one session!' But you can't actually say what happened," he says.

However, people would violate the rules and spill secrets about their past lives, they tell me. Some folks just couldn't help themselves.

"It was a status thing," Hawkins explains. "I knew probably four or five Scientologists who told me confidentially that they were Jesus."

And in the 1980s, he remembers, "there was this fad for a while that people were all remembering that they were Nazis in World War II, and that's why things were so screwed up in their present lives," Hawkins says. "That's why they had to be so active in Scientology, to atone for what they had done in past lives."

I also pointed out to Jeff that there seemed to be another status thing going on -- the better Scientologist you were, the farther back in your whole track you could go, retrieve incidents, and handle them. Hubbard himself seemed to promote this idea, that if his followers could travel back hundreds of millions of years, he was so advanced he was going back trillions of years. (Astronomers tell us the universe itself is only about 14 billion years old, but that didn't stop Hubbard.)

Hubbard claimed that he'd visited Heaven 43 trillion years ago and then a trillion years later. And, as we pointed out (and Beatty gave us credit for being the first ever to do so), when Hubbard died, Pat Broeker showed a number with 347 digits on it to the audience when it was announced that Hubbard had merely left his body in order to continue his research on another plane.

That number, Broeker told the audience, represented in years the farthest back in his whole track that Hubbard had been able to go at the end of his life.

We did the math, and here's what that number represented...

24 billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years.

That's some time travel!

So you see, 75 million years ago is not really such a big deal, and Xenu and his alien overpopulation problem isn't going to scare off your average spacefaring Scientologist.

Someday, I'd love to hear Tom Cruise's whole track tales. They must be something. Update and two short clips

Again in all seriousness, I have upped this now infamous video of Tom Cruise, not to take the piss, which would be too easy, but to actually study someone who is so far off the wall, it's something to behold.

Scientology: More Contempt

Contempt for anyone so gullible as to swallow this nonsense, brainwashed or not. And a brief word below concerning the IRS.

. . . . And that’s when Wollersheim learned the secrets of OT III.

Hubbard claimed that he had nearly paid with his life learning the revelations of OT III, the third level of materials that Scientologists must master after going clear and becoming an “operating thetan,” or OT. The information in OT III was so explosive, Hubbard said, he believed its secrets must have been designed to kill anyone who discovered it. The danger those secrets posed to the uninitiated was one of the ways Scientologists justified not telling newer members about them. (Today they are available on the Internet for perusal, if you know where to look. This reporter suffered no ill effects from reading them.) Former members say that today the typical Scientologist must spend several years and about $100,000 in auditing before they find out on OT III that they are filled with alien souls that must be removed by further, even more expensive auditing.

“OT III totally shatters the core sense of identity. The central concept of mind control is attacking the core personality, the threat that you are not who you think you are. At OT III, you find out that you’re really thousands of individual beings struggling for control of your body. Aliens left over from space wars that are giving you cancer or making you crazy or making you impotent. The reason for every bad thing in your life is these alien beings,” Wollersheim says. “I went psychotic on OT III. I lost a sense of who I was.”

Years can be spent removing these aliens—called “body thetans” or “BT’s”—by talking to and about these supposed hitchhiking entities while holding onto a device called an “e-meter.” “You’re talking to thousands of beings. They have histories. And anger. They’re complex personalities. I started drinking heavily to drown out the voices. I was non-functional, irrational, filthy. I wandered the streets of L.A. for three days. Finally I came enough to my senses to get in touch with Scientologists I knew.” He was cleaned up and calmed down, but Wollersheim was told that the solution to his troubles was just more auditing.

It would appear the IRS resisted Scientology for years over granting it tax free status, but in the end, and hard as it may be to believe, Scientology just wore out the IRS and they subsequently folded on the issue.

. . . . . Hubbard organized Scientology as a religion in 1954. But in 1967, it was stripped of its tax exempt status by the IRS. For the next 25 years, the U.S. government repeatedly turned down Scientology’s appeals to regain its exemption on the grounds that Scientology was not so much a religion as a money-making venture benefiting one man, Hubbard.

Scientology retaliated in an extraordinary way. With Hubbard’s knowledge and direction, agents of his intelligence unit, the Guardian’s Office, began infiltrating IRS and other government offices in the mid 1970s. Dubbed Operation Snow White by Hubbard, the illegal operation netted stolen government documents by the yard, and went undiscovered until a 1977 raid of Scientology offices by the FBI. Eleven Scientologists, including Hubbard’s wife Mary Sue, were sentenced to prison. Hubbard himself was named an unindicted co-conspirator.

Scientology subsequently disbanded the Guardian’s Office, claiming that it was a rogue outfit. But its war with the IRS did not stop.

Even after Hubbard’s death in 1986, the IRS continued to deny the organization tax-exempt status, and Scientology fought back by siccing personal investigators on individual IRS employees and filing more than 2,000 separate lawsuits against the agency.

Despite the harassment, however, the IRS continued to win victories against Scientology in court. In 1992, A United States Claims Court upheld the IRS denial, citing “the commercial character of much of Scientology” and its “scripturally based hostility to taxation.” Tax exempt organizations, the claims court wrote, “simply do not exhibit the financial complexity or the phenomenal preoccupation with money displayed by Scientology’s management churches and organizers.”

By then, however, the IRS had already, secretly, caved. In 1991, under the first George Bush presidency, the IRS had reversed itself and began a process that wasn’t made public until 1993, under the Clinton administration, when the IRS revealed that it was giving nearly every Scientology entity the tax exempt status it coveted.

It was a stunning turnaround and one that, [more than] a decade later, still has tax experts shaking their heads. Article proper: Scientology's Crushing Defeat

Full list of articles by Tony Ortega

Previous: Scientology: Contempt Contempt Contempt

Scientology: Contempt Contempt Contempt

Contempt for any such organisation as sinister as the Church of Scientology, not to mention contempt for short arsed megalomaniacs who by comparison make the term Napoleon Complex seem almost benign.

Contempt for the United States of America, the FBI and the IRS, who not only allow such a cult to flourish unhindered, but recognise Scientology as a religion and bestow on it tax free status.

Contempt for anyone dumb enough, shallow enough or pathetic enough, to walk through the portals of, and embrace any organisation, that were it not so sinister, should be laughed and ridiculed out of existence, the brain-child of a third rate science fiction writer, L Ron Hubbard and his Church of Scientology.

Only in America! Only in America!! You better fucking believe it.

The only thing more I have to say is, after you have read the first account, an account the plot of which, wouldn't do justice to a bad B movie, simply because it's too unbelievable, please read part two, which has all the basics required for a half decent novel thriller.

For myself right now, I'm going to open a few more links and continue reading what at best can be described as bizarre, and at worst, a good deal more than sinister.

Scientology's Concentration Camp for Its Executives: The Prisoners, Past and Present
By Tony Ortega
Aug. 2 2012

This weekend, we published a two-part story about the rather amazing 32-year Scientology career of John Brousseau, whose adventures included driving for L. Ron Hubbard, spending time in the Sea Org's prison program the RPF, and working in the Cruise household with Tom and Katie Holmes.

What seemed to generate the most comments, however, was Brousseau's involvement in the creation of Scientology's notorious office-prison for its top executives, variably known as "CMO Int," the "A to E Room," the "SP Hole," and simply "The Hole."

It was Brousseau who was ordered to put bars on the doors and locks on the windows to turn a set of offices at Scientology's International Base east of Los Angeles into a prison that housed out-of-favor church executives from 2004 to the present day.

But over that time, Brousseau tells us, the conditions of The Hole changed, and so did the roster of people kept inside. After the jump, what we know about the place, and a list of people who spent at least some time there.

As Brousseau explained, it was after Scientology finally got out from under the Lisa McPherson wrongful death lawsuit with a settlement in 2004 that church leader David Miscavige's attention seemed to turn inward.

Suddenly, he says, Miscavige directed an unending fury at his own top executives, some of his most loyal and longest-serving officials in international management. And in 2004, he rounded up about 50 of these Sea Org members, locked them in a room, and then confined them to another building for three days. He then asked Brousseau to secure the CMO Int offices, and then the next day moved the executives down to it.

The Hole was born.

Harrowing accounts of what occurred in The Hole turned up in a 2009 investigation by Joe Childs and Tom Tobin of the Tampa Bay Times, in Marc Headley's 2009 book Blown for Good, and in Janet Reitman's 2011 history of the church, Inside Scientology.

Then, this year, we heard from two additional sources about conditions in The Hole -- Debbie Cook's dramatic court testimony this February in San Antonio, and Mike Rinder's Voice video interview in March. (At Cook's hearing in February, the church put out a statement denying that The Hole exists. But the attorney who uttered that denial was not, as Cook, under oath in a court of law. He's also outnumbered by numerous former Scientologists who have spoken about the church's concentration camp with utter consistency.)

Rinder estimates that he spent a total of about two years in the Hole -- first in 2004 as it was beginning, and then later in 2006-2007.

Debbie Cook was in for only 7 weeks in 2007, but her experience was brutal. She testified that Miscavige had two hulking guards climb into her office through a window as she was talking to him on the phone. "Goodbye" he told her as she was hauled off to the gulag. Like Rinder, she described a place where dozens of men and women were confined to what had been a set of offices. Cook testified that the place was ant-infested, and during one two-week stretch in the summer with temperatures over 100 degrees, Miscavige had the air conditioning turned off as punishment. Food was brought up in a vat riding on a golf cart. Cook described it as a barely edible "slop" that was fed to them morning, noon, and night. Longtime residents of the Hole began to look gaunt.

They had to find places on the floor or on desks to sleep at night. Rinder said there were so many of them they slept only inches from each other, and having to get up in the middle of the night was a nightmare of stepping over sleeping figures in the dark.

In the morning, they were marched out of the offices and through a tunnel under Gilman Springs Road to a large building with communal showers. They were then marched back to the Hole, and during the day would be compelled to take part in mass confessions.

During these, Rinder says people he had considered friends would put on a show for the officials overseeing them, trying to outdo each other with vile accusations against each other. Cook testified that Miscavige wanted Marc Yager and Guillaume Lesevre, two of his longest-serving and highest-ranking officials, to confess to having a homosexual affair. The men were beaten until they made some forced admissions. When Cook objected to what was happening, she herself was made to stand in a trash can for twelve hours while insults were hurled at her, she was called a lesbian, and water was dumped on her head.

She testified that she saw one man, Mark Ginge Nelson, beaten and then made to lick a bathroom floor for half an hour. [Note: Cook testified that she witnessed this punishment at a Scientology location in Los Angeles, not in the Hole. Nelson, she testified, received this punishment for daring to object to the way executives were being locked up in the Hole.]

Rinder and Cook both eventually got out of the Hole in 2007 when Miscavige needed them on projects elsewhere. But others have reportedly spent five to seven years locked up in the Hole.

In more recent years, however, conditions have improved, Brousseau tells me.

"'The Truth Rundown' caused conditions to get better," Brousseau says. The landmark 2009 Tampa Bay Times series featured several former executives accusing Miscavige of assaulting them and creating an environment of violence and incarceration. (The church vehemently denied the accusations.)

Brousseau says the publicity had an immediate effect.

"The mandate was to change the Hole's appearance," he says.

Over a two-week period, changes were made that were still in place when Brousseau left the base in 2010. (Through an intermediary, we've heard from Roanne Horwich, who left the base just a few months ago, that the changes are still in place.)

At night, the prisoners of the Hole were now allowed to sleep in actual beds, in one of several buildings on the south side of Gilman Springs Road which are collectively known as "Berthing."

Brousseau was never held in the Hole, but he observed the prisoners often and describes their day:

"They slept in Berthing. They got up, showered, then went to the dining hall at 9:30. They had 30 minutes for breakfast," he says. (No more bringing them a vat of slop on the back of a golf cart.)

"Then they walked up to the Hole. They sat down at desks. I have no clue what work they did," he says. "They worked until 12:30 or 1 pm. Then they were marched back to the dining hall and had 30 minutes for lunch. Then they were marched back to the Hole and were there until 6 pm."

The executives were then marched to the dining hall for a 30-minute dinner.

"Then they went up to the study hall. In the Qual building, the one with the big circular stained glass window," he says. More

Related and full of bizarre goings on: Mimi Faust's Mother, Olaiya Odufunke: Her Life in Scientology's Secret Service Maybe more links to come after more reading.

Full list of articles by Tony Ortega

The Murder of Shafilea Ahmed

I reported this story briefly in 2008. Now with the conviction of the parents four years on, I can, with not a small amount of sadness, put the thing to bed.

A young girl murdered, the parents jailed for twenty five years and the remaining kids scarred for life. All for what?

The judge hits the nail on the head I think, applying the same reasons to the murder of Shafilea Ahmed as applies to all the other horror stories one reads about concerning the fate of these girls unfortunate to be born of parents, and into families that can't, or more accurately won't, assimilate into a civilised modern society. Somehow thinking that they are doing the righteous thing by maintaining a village lifestyle, attitude and values, that are entombed in the dark ages.

Mr Justice Roderick Evans told them: "Your concern about being shamed in your community was greater than the love of your child." He went on "You chose to bring up your family in Warrington but although you lived in Warrington your social and cultural attitudes were those of rural Pakistan and it was those which you imposed upon your children."*

Shafilea Ahmed

Shafilea Ahmed murder trial: Parents guilty of killing

The parents of Shafilea Ahmed have been jailed for life after being convicted of her murder.
3 August 2012

The 17-year-old went missing from her home in Warrington, Cheshire, in 2003 and her body was found in the River Kent in Cumbria six months later.

Iftikhar, 52, and Farzana Ahmed, 49, had denied her murder but the jury at Chester Crown Court returned guilty verdicts against them both.

Mr Justice Roderick Evans said they would both serve a minimum of 25 years.

The judge told them: "Your concern about being shamed in your community was greater than the love of your child."

The couple suffocated Shafilea with a plastic bag after years of abuse.

After the trial. Det Supt Geraint Jones described the killing as a "vile and disgraceful act against someone they should have been very proud of".

He added: "For me this is not an 'honour killing', it's a clear case of murder."

The police and Crown Prosecution Service said they will review conflicting evidence that emerged during the trial and later make a decision on whether any further action will be taken.

The prosecution claimed she was murdered by her parents because they believed she brought shame on the family.

Shafilea went missing on 11 September 2003 and was reported missing by a teacher a week later.

After several police appeals to find her, workmen found her decomposed remains in February 2004 and she was identified by her dental records and jewellery.

Two post-mortem examinations failed to determine how she died but a verdict of unlawful killing was recorded at her inquest in 2008.

Police investigating the murder were so convinced her parents had killed the teenager they "bugged" the family home to listen in on their conversations.

The breakthrough came when Shafilea's younger sister, Alesha Ahmed, was arrested in connection with an armed robbery at the family home in August 2010.

It was in a police interview that she said she had seen her parents kill her sister seven years earlier.

During the trial, she told the court her parents pushed Shafilea on to the settee in their house and she heard her mother say "just finish it here".

She said the parents then forced a plastic bag into the teenager's mouth and killed her in front of their other children.

Taxi driver Mr Ahmed had claimed Shafilea ran away from home in the middle of the night and he never saw her again.

Mrs Ahmed had denied claims that they had attacked Shafilea, but during the three-month trial she changed her account, claiming she saw her husband beat their daughter on the night of the murder.

She also claimed he had threatened to do the same to her and their other children if she ever asked him what happened to Shafilea.

As the verdicts were delivered by the jury after two days of deliberations, Iftikhar Ahmed stood impassively. Mrs Ahmed wiped tears from her eyes with a tissue.

As Mr Ahmed was taken down to the cells, he swore at police officers.

Their children Junyad, Mevish and the youngest, who cannot be named for legal reasons, all broke down in tears.

During the trial, Alesha Ahmed had told the court how her parents repeatedly attacked and abused Shafilea.

She said Shafilea was torn between the allure of a Western lifestyle and their demands she wear traditional clothes and agree to an arranged marriage.

Speaking about the night her sister died, she said: "You could tell she was gasping for air."

Alesha went on to describe how the other children ran upstairs to their bedrooms in shock and she saw her father carry Shafilea's body to the car wrapped in a blanket.

The children were later told to say nothing to the authorities amid a fear that they would suffer the same fate as their sister.

Alesha's story was corroborated in writings her younger sister Mevish gave to her friend Shaheen Munir in 2008.

The writings emerged shortly after Alesha began giving evidence at the trial.

Mevish, who supported her parents' defence, said the writings were a "fiction" which Alesha used to base her story on.

Speaking after the verdicts, close friend of Shafilea Melissa Powner paid tribute to her and spoke about the pain of having to watch as her killers avoided justice.

She said: "We have waited for this day for many years.

"We have watched as her killers roamed free.

'Destructive and cruel'

"Yet today we heard those important words - words that have finally brought our friend the justice she deserves."

On sentencing, Mr Justice Evans told the couple: "A desire that she understood and appreciated the cultural heritage from which she came is perfectly understandable, but an expectation that she live in a sealed cultural environment separate from the culture of the country in which she lived was unrealistic, destructive and cruel."

He added: "You killed one daughter, but you have blighted the lives of your remaining children.

"Alesha escaped but she is unlikely to be able to avoid the legacy of her upbringing.

"Mevish, after a period of trying to live independently, was recaptured and brought home, and has since become compliant with your wishes."

He added: "As to Junyad, he remains supportive, especially of you Iftikhar Ahmed.

"Whether that is simply out of filial affection or the result of the warped values you instilled in him is impossible to tell.

"There is only one sentence that I can impose upon you and that is a sentence of imprisonment for life." BBC and two short clips

* Text taken from this report from Channel 4

Invited in for tea by Shafilea's murderers

As a court finds Shafilea Ahmed's parents guilty of her murder, Channel 4 News correspondent Darshna Soni recalls being invited into their family home - where no trace of Shafilea was on view.
03 August 2012 Report

2004 Interview: Democracy Now - Gore Vidal

Peerless.

Imperial America: Gore Vidal Reflects on the United States of Amnesia

In his latest book Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia acclaimed author Gore Vidal writes that, "Not since the 1846 attack on Mexico in order to seize California has an American government been so nakedly predatory." Gore Vidal joins us in our firehouse studio to discuss President Bush, elections and much more. [includes rush transcript]

Our guest for the program is a national icon. He is the author of more than 20 novels and five plays. He is one of the best known chroniclers of American history and politics and his works have been translated into dozens of languages across the globe. He once told a magazine interviewer, "There is not one human problem that could not be solved... if people would simply do as I advise." And for more than a half a century, he has done just that." I am talking about Gore Vidal.

He published his first novel, Williwawa, in 1946 at the age of 21. He began writing poems and stories as a young teen-ager and began his first novel while he was still in high school. His grandfather was a senator and his father worked for the Roosevelt administration. But rather than pursuing a family career of politics and privilege, Gore Vidal dedicated himself to writing and critiquing the injustices of American society. Following the publication of the first two of his latest trilogy of books examining the American empire, Vidal was described as the last "noble defender" of the American republic, America’s last "small-r" republican. The third and final book of the trilogy has just been published. It is called "Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia."

In his latest book, Gore Vidal writes that "Not since the 1846 attack on Mexico in order to seize California has an American government been so nakedly predatory." He describes the current president as being like "a man in one of those dreams who knows he is safe in bed and so can commit any crime he likes in his voluptuous dream. No one can stop him."

Gore Vidal joins us in our firehouse studio. Transcript

Follow up.

Gore Vidal on the "United States of Amnesia"

Acclaimed author Gore Vidal’s new book is called "Imperial America: The United States of Amnesia." We spoke with Vidal recently about the Bush administration, historical memory and 9/11. [includes rush transcript]

Gore Vidal is one of America’s most prolific and best-known writers. He has written more than 22 books and more than 200 essays. A collection of his essays won the National Book Award in 1993.

Vidal is the author most recently of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace and Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta. Taken together, the books constitute a comprehensive attack on America’s imperialist ambitions and the military-industrial complex.

Writing in The Scotsman, critic Gavin Esler called Perpetual War "the finest serious critique of America’s use and abuse of power in the 21st century that I have read."

I had an opportunity to speak with Vidal recently. We’re going to play some of that interview. He begins by discussing his thoughts about the United States post-9/11. Transcript

~ ~ ~

The A-Z of Gore Vidal
Stuart Jeffries and Stephen Moss
1 August 2012

He loved the Kennedys, hated Truman Capote and claimed he slept with 1,000 men and women before he was 25. We celebrate the life of Gore Vidal


A is for America

Vidal described his homeland as the United States of Amnesia. Throughout his life he railed against how he felt it had betrayed its founding principles. "The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country – and we haven't seen them since," he said once. "Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that's the end of the constitution as a working machine." He also had little time for the office of president, at least when that office wasn't occupied by a Kennedy, saying: "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so."

He told the Times three years ago that the US is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together." There was a gleefulness in Vidal's acerbic denunciations of the US: significantly, the New York Times's obituarist yesterday charged that he "presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilisation".

B is for Bush

It's no surprise then that he detested George W Bush. Indeed, Vidal claimed the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 occurred because the Bush administration was "incompetent" and Bush himself was "inactive and inopportune". Vanity Fair refused to publish an essay he wrote reflecting on the attacks. In another essay, published by the Independent, he compared the attacks to the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbour, arguing that both presidents Franklin D Roosevelt and Bush knew of them in advance and used the disasters to advance their agendas. "We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic."

C is for Capote

Not all Vidal's targets were political. He had a lengthy feud with fellow writer Truman Capote. Capote, perhaps, started it. He gave an interview saying that Vidal had been thrown out of the White House for drunkenness and quarrelling with Jackie Onassis's mother. Vidal took Capote to court for libel, where the two traded insults. Vidal suggested Capote had "raised lying into an art – a minor art". Capote retorted: "Of course, I'm always sad about Gore. Very sad that he has to breathe every day." After the pair settled out of court, their feud continued – even outliving Capote. After the death of his nemesis in 1984, Vidal insulted Capote one last time, saying his death had been "a good career move".

D is for democracy

Vidal was sceptical about democracy in general ("Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates") and its American incarnation in particular ("Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman president everything will be all right. But it won't be.") more

Paxo Offensive to Jesoids Rule BBC Trust

Jeremy Paxman religious comments were offensive, rules BBC Trust

Editorial standards committee says comments made in discussion with Richard Dawkins had no clear editorial purpose
John Plunkett
31 July 2012

Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman went too far when he talked about religious hogwash and stupid people who believe in the Old Testament, the BBC Trust has ruled.

Paxman made the comments in an interview with Professor Richard Dawkins, the outspoken author of The God Delusion, prompting one viewer to complain that the presenter of BBC2's Newsnight was biased and offensive.

The trust's editorial standards committee rejected the accusation of bias, but said Paxman might have unintentionally caused offence with the comments which had no clear editorial purpose.

Originally, BBC management rejected the complaint in its entirity, denying that Paxman had shown any anti-Christian bias and saying the presenter had played devil's advocate to Dawkins, who was on the programme to talk about his new book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True, on 13 September 2011.

However, the complaint then went to the BBC Trust editorial standards committee, which ruled that Paxman had a well-known interviewing style and viewers would have expected a lively discussion between the pair on the programme.

The committee said there was a clear editorial purpose for Paxman's use of the word myth in the item, and the Newsnight host was clearly referring to myths as hogwash and not all religion.

"However, the committee recognised that some Newsnight viewers were unlikely to have expected Jeremy Paxman's typically robust and confrontational interviewing style to extend to the use of the terms 'religious hogwash' when introducing the story of Genesis, and 'stupid people' when talking about those with a literal belief in the Old Testament in the context of the item about religious myths," the committee said in its ruling, published on Tuesday.

"Although the committee did not agree with the complainant that Mr Paxman's use of the terms 'religious hogwash' and 'stupid people' were intended to cause deliberate offence, particularly to those with religious views and beliefs, it nevertheless agreed that they were offensive to some of the audience and that there was no clear editorial purpose for their use in the context of this Newsnight item, taking account of generally accepted standards.

"The committee therefore concluded that the item breached the editorial guidelines on harm and offence. It added that it regretted the offence caused to some viewers by the use of the terms 'religious hogwash' and 'stupid people' on this occasion."

A BBC News spokeswoman said: "Newsnight notes the trust's finding that viewers may have found some of the comments offensive, but also welcomes the finding that the piece achieved due impartiality." Gruniad

Female Genital Mutilation: Shame on Britain

Notice. If you have arrived at this post via a search engine because, You Are At Risk Or Know Someone At Risk From Female Genital Mutilation, then please click this link to the Home Office help page. Please do not be afraid to do so because it is a government organisation, it is there to help you. Alternately, you can access the same information on this blog.

~ ~ ~

Hat tip to Richard Dawkins for both story and headline.

Tweet Richard Dawkins: FGM illegal in France and UK. France prosecutes. UK doesn't, out of "respect"/ "cultural sensitivity". Shame on Britain

Shame indeed, and shame all round. Shame on the mothers of these girls, who, has we have seen before, are instrumental in the perpetration and the continuance of this act of barbarity on their own children.

But if I am going to reserve special shame for one individual in particular, vis a vis the accompanying video to this article, then that shame must go to, Scotland Yard's specialist in child abuse cases, Commander Simon Foy.

I can't even begin to describe what the man has to say, but like myself, you will have to watch the clip (Simon Foy 11m20s mark) to fully appreciate his attitude and complacency regarding these girls, some little more than babies. Not given what a good part of the program is about I can't, the differing attitudes between ourselves here in the UK and that of France, and not least the safeguards France has implemented in order to protect these girls.

And how those attitudes differ, again, not for the first time, we hear this from across the channel: "It is very different in France. They have to integrate and they have to obey our laws." See previous: 'Your religious values are not superior to the laws of the republic.' And no prize for guessing which section of the community that particular can of worms related to.

I'm not particularly fond of highlights, I think they insult the reader, if not generally make a mess of the post along the way. But there are things that I feel I should highlight, if only to emphasise my sense of outrage. So I shall post initially without highlighting, but that may change once I've posted.

Hidden world of female genital mutilation in the UK
By Sue Lloyd Roberts
23 July 2012

Every year around 20,000 young women in the UK and France are "at risk" from female genital mutilation (FGM), but the way each country's authorities deal with those who carry it out are very different.

Twenty-three-year-old Ayanna, herself a victim of FGM, stands against the rain-lashed window of her home on the 19th floor of a Glasgow tower block in the Red Road district of the city - home to a new wave of refugees under the government's dispersal programme.

"I am so happy here," she says, clutching her 11-month-old baby to her.

"I no longer suffer the pain of sex with my husband. The pain was worse than childbirth."

She claimed political asylum to escape a forced marriage and to spare her daughter mutilation.

Ayanna explains that other mothers are allowing their daughters to be cut in Glasgow.

"There were two children on the estate, one aged three years and the other two weeks, who were cut recently by the elder women.

"They use razors, scissors and sharp knives".

FGM is a procedure which, at the least, involves cutting away part of the clitoris or, at its most brutal, all the exposed female genitalia, leaving only a small opening for urination and menstruation.

Women can die from its complications; sexual intercourse and child birth can be agonising.

It is accepted practice in parts of Africa and the Middle East and in immigrant communities from those areas. Some believe that it is a necessary part of becoming a woman. There is also a belief that FGM can reduce a woman's libido, and thus the chances of extra-marital sex.

In Glasgow I met a group of Somali women, all of whom had been mutilated.

"If the authorities could help us to make these people stop it, we would be very happy," says one of them.

"Since I arrived two years ago, I have heard nothing," says another. "There should be announcements, classes so people understand what's right and what's wrong."
No prosecutions

Five hundred miles away in Bristol, a group of schoolgirls tell me about "FGM parties".

"They cut them all together, as a group, because it is cheaper and quicker that way," explains 17-year-old Amina.

"At first the girls are all excited because it's a party, until they realise what is going to happen, and then they get frightened.

"It's done by the elder women, or the Imam, whoever is expert at cutting."
Isabelle Gillette-Faye Isabelle Gillete-Faye thinks the UK needs to do more about FGM

About 20,000 children in England and Wales, and about the same number in France, are deemed "at risk" every year.

The laws which made FGM illegal were introduced in France and England at about the same time, in the mid-1980s.

But whereas some 100 parents and practitioners of FGM have been convicted in France, there has never been a single prosecution in the UK.

I meet Isabelle Gillette-Faye, a seasoned campaigner against FGM, at the Gare du Nord in Paris.

She is trying her best not to be rude about the English.

"In England, you are very respectful of your immigrants," she says.

"It is very different in France. They have to integrate and they have to obey our laws."

Detection

She walks me over to the Eurostar platform to tell me the story of two little girls who were about to board the train headed for St. Pancras to be mutilated in the UK.

"It was a Friday. We heard just in time. They had tickets for the Saturday.

"A family member tipped us off. We told the police and they were stopped from making the journey."

The parents were cautioned. Had they gone ahead with the mutilations and been found out, they would have been imprisoned for up to 13 years.

"We simply will not tolerate this practice," Isabelle explains.

Does she think many French children have been cut in the UK?

"Yes, because you do not care," she says.

Scotland Yard's specialist in child abuse cases, Commander Simon Foy, disagrees.

"I am not necessarily sure that the availability of a stronger sense of prosecution will change it (the incidence of FGM) for the better."

The trouble is that what Isabelle calls our "respect" and what others call "cultural sensitivity" makes detection in the UK almost impossible.

In France, mothers and babies attend specialist clinics up until the age of six.

The genitalia of baby girls are routinely examined for signs of mutilation.

Dr Amellou, who works in a clinic in a Paris suburb explains that after the age of six, responsibility is handed over to school medical teams.

They continue to inspect girls, especially those coming from those high-risk ethnic groups.

I point out that such a thing would be unacceptable in Britain.

"What is your problem," she asks? "Our interest is in protecting the child."

"If we find a girl has been mutilated, we offer her psychological support and, if she wants it, surgery," she adds.

Reconstructive surgery

At 7am in a clinic on the outskirts of Paris, Dr Foldes is scrubbing up for the first of six operations he is due to perform that day to reverse FGM.

An anaesthetised woman from Guinea Bissau, is wheeled in the operating theatre, her legs are put in stirrups and the doctor begins.

"It will take only half an hour," he explains, "I restore the clitoris and labia, which were sliced off when she was six years old."

He says this will help the woman enjoy "normal sex and the delivery of a baby".

The patient will pay nothing for this life-changing operation. Dr Foldes operates "pro bono" and the state picks up the costs.

"I have operated on about 50 patients from the UK," he tells me, "but they must pay for everything."

Dr Comfort Momoh, is universally recognised as the UK's expert on the subject. She says that reconstructive surgery is not offered on the NHS.

From her office at St. Thomas's Hospital on London's South Bank, she explains that there are now 17 FGM specialist clinics in the UK.

"We see women who are about to give birth.

"After they are cut, they are sewn up so tightly that the baby cannot get out when they go into labour. We have to cut them open."

With the recent influx of Somali immigrants in to the UK, fleeing the war there, she warns that there are not enough NHS clinics available for what is a growing problem.

"I was in Glasgow recently," she says "and they can't cope."

Back in Bristol, Muna who was born in Somalia and came to Bristol from Sweden in 2003, is baffled as to why the government does not do more to stop it.

"Those statistics show how little the government is doing.

"They are so terrified and they are using cultural sensitivity as a barrier to stop them from really doing anything.

"What would you do if the girl had blue eyes and blonde hair? Would FGM still be carrying on in the UK?"

I ask her if she has a message for David Cameron?

"Yes," she says, "do something about FGM.

"And if you can't handle the issue then there is no point in you doing your job." BBC and video


Female genital mutilation

There are three main types:

The removal of the tip of the clitoris.

Total removal of the clitoris and surrounding labia.

The removal of the clitoris and labia and the sewing up of the vagina, leaving only a small opening for urine and menstrual blood - a process known as infibulation.

Female genital mutilation is tagged FGM on this blog.

Sex, Lies and Julian Assange

Updated below with partial transcript.

Sex, Lies and Julian Assange

By Andrew Fowler and Wayne Harley

Video Documentary Four Corners - ABC Australia

Four Corners reporter Andrew Fowler examines in detail what happened in those crucial weeks while Julian Assange was in Sweden. What was the nature of his relationship with the two women who claim he assaulted them? And what did they tell police that led the authorities to seek his arrest? ICH

Updated full episode of ABC Four Corners "Sex, Lies and Julian Assange".

ANDREW FOWLER: At the heart of the matter is whether the Swedish judicial authorities will treat him fairly. Certainly, events so far provide a disturbing picture of Swedish justice. Using facts agreed between the defence and prosecution and other verified information, we have pieced together what happened during those crucial three weeks in August.

On August 11th, 2010, Assange arrived in Sweden to attend a conference organised by the Swedish Brotherhood – a branch of the Social Democratic Party. He was offered Anna Ardin’s apartment while she was away, but Ardin returned home a day early on Friday the 13th. She invited Assange to stay the night, and they had sex. She would later tell police Assange had violently pinned her down and ignored her requests to use a condom. Assange denies this.

The following day, Assange addressed the conference with Ardin at his side. Later that afternoon Ardin organised the Swedish equivalent of a top-notch barbeque – a Crayfish Party. She posted a Twitter message. “Julian wants to go to a crayfish party. Anyone have a couple of available seats tonight or tomorrow?”

The crayfish party was held that night in a court yard off her apartment. It went on until the early hours of the morning. Ardin tweeted at 2am: “Sitting outdoors at 02:00 and hardly freezing with the world’s coolest, smartest people! It’s amazing!”

A guest at the party would later tell Swedish Police the event was a very hearty evening. When he offered to put Assange up at his apartment, Ardin replied, “He can stay with me.”

In the past 24 hours, Ardin had worked closely with Assange, had sex with him, organised a crayfish party on his behalf – and, according to one witness, turned down alternate accommodation for him. It is during this same period that police will later investigate whether Assange coerced and sexually molested Anna Ardin.

PER E. SAMUELSON: Well, if you send text messages like that, “I’ve just spent some time with the coolest people in the world”, the night after you then say you were raped – I mean you shouldn’t write such text messages if you had been raped by that person the night before.

ANDREW FOWLER: Your client described Julian Assange as a “cool man”. I think, one of the “coolest men in the world” that she’d had in her bed.

CLAES BORGSTROM: I will argue in court....... Read the full thing with opinion at craigmurray.org

Wikileaks - Diego Garcia Judge Orders Questioning of William Hague

You may think this is a pretty obscure subject to blog about, but not so if you had previously blogged or watched John Pilger's excellent documentary Stealing a Nation.

Posted originally in 2007 under my own title: Diego Garcia: Chagoans "They Died Of Sadness" it is now part of a larger post: John Pilger: The World War on Democracy.

At the time, I had this to say:

John Pilger exposes the inhumane and shameful actions of successive British Governments in their treatment of the dispossessed, indigenous population of Diego Garcia, the main island of the Chagos group.

The film is testimony to just how little people are worth when the "Land of Hope and Glory" colludes with the "Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free" in pursuing global expansion.

The conduct of the British, still to this day, can only be described as sordid.

With that in mind, read on. But if you have the bandwidth and the inclination, then do please try to watch the thing.

Senior Government officials to face cross-examination over Wikileaks cable
John Ashton
25 July 2012

A top judge has taken the unprecedented step of ordering two senior Government officials to face cross-examination in court over a classified US document leaked by WikiLeaks.

Despite strong objections from lawyers acting for Foreign Secretary William Hague, the High Court judge ruled today the move was necessary to resolve "fairly and justly" a claim launched against the Government by exiled residents of the Chagos Islands.

The judge declared the leaked US cable - alleged to relate to a private US-UK diplomatic meeting - could be investigated in court even though it must have been obtained unlawfully by "the notorious internet organisation".

The groundbreaking ruling will come as a blow in Whitehall, which argued the courts should not entertain any applications for cross-examination in relation to documents unlawfully obtained by WikiLeaks.

The British expelled the Chagos islanders between 1965 and 1973 in order to allow the US to establish an airbase on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).

The expulsion has been described by critics as one of the most shameful episodes of modern colonial history.

The islanders have been fighting a long campaign, which has included a string of court cases, for the right to return to at least some of the islands.

Today's hearing relates to a new High Court application by the Chagos Refugees Group for judicial review of the Government's decision to create a Marine Protected Area (MPA) round the islands.

Commercial fishing is banned within the MPA. The islanders say the MPA was created for the "improper purpose" of preventing resettlement of the islands.

The UK Government denies anything improper and maintains the MPA was created for environmental reasons.

But the islanders say their case is supported by the cable obtained by WikiLeaks. It was sent by the US embassy in London to the US State Department in Washington in May 2009.

The MPA was established in 2010 by a proclamation made by Colin Roberts, Commissioner for the BIOT, acting upon the directions of the British government.

The court heard that, in the leaked cable, Mr Roberts asserted at the May 2009 diplomatic meeting with the Americans that creating the MPA would not adversely affect US defence interests - but it would the islanders.

Mr Roberts is reported in the cable to have asserted "establishing a marine park would, in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the (Chagos) archipelago's former residents."

Nigel Pleming QC applied on behalf of the Chagossians earlier this month for permission to cross-examine Mr Roberts when the Chagossian judicial review application comes on for hearing in the near future.

He also applied for permission to cross-examine Joanne Yeadon, a civil servant at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the talks with the Americans.

Mr Pleming said it was not suggested that the WikiLeaks cable was not a genuine document, but the Government was hiding behind a "neither confirm nor deny" policy.

Mr Pleming said he wished to question Mr Roberts in the witness box about his discussions with his US counterparts and to test the denial that an improper motive drove the creation of an MPA.

Steven Kovats QC, appearing for the Government, said the High Court was in "a novel situation" with regard to WikiLeaks disclosures.

Mr Kovats said: "My clients are not opposing cross-examination because they have anything to hide.

"We are opposing it because, as a matter of principle, it does not seem right in relation to an improperly leaked document.

"We, as a matter of principle, do not accept that WikiLeaks can effectively compel the Government to defend something which - absent WikiLeaks - there would be no question of it coming before the court at all."

Today Mr Justice Stanley Burnton rejected the Government's objections and ordered that cross-examination should go ahead.

The judge said he acknowledged that the US document "must have been obtained unlawfully, and in all probability by the commission of a criminal offence or offences under the law of the United States of America".

He added: "I understand why it is the policy of HM Government neither to confirm nor deny the genuineness of leaked documents, save in exceptional circumstances, particularly where, as here, the documents in question are not those produced or received by the UK Government.

"However, the documents have been leaked and indeed widely published."

No application had been made for a public interest immunity certificate to prevent the courts openly investigating the genuineness of the cable.

He ruled: "I do not see how the present claim can be fairly or justly determined without resolving the allegation made by the claimant, based on the WikiLeaks documents, as to what transpired at the meeting of 12 May 2009, and more widely whether at least one of the motives for the creation of the MPA was the desire to prevent resettlement.

"Given the conflicting evidence, in my judgment, in order to resolve the dispute, oral evidence will be necessary, including cross-examination of Mr Roberts and Ms Yeadon." Independent

Summary Execution on the Streets of Anaheim California?

In the main, and for reasons that matter not, I stopped doing 'police brutality' videos quite sometime ago. That doesn't mean however that there aren't sufficient examples under the sidebar tags of Police and Fascist.

This story of the cops in Anaheim California, is a day or two old. I was in two minds whether to run it or not, because I have to say, I did find it particularly disturbing. Bad enough that the cops feel they have the right to shoot, often in the back, just who they please, but it was the brutality with which the police set about the citizens of the community of Anaheim that was particularly concerning.

The community, involving women and babies and kids, was just that, the community, not the enemy; but watching the cops go into action, you would think that the Berserkers had put in an appearance. Well I suppose they had in a way, they were the ones in uniform, and boy oh boy, did they live up to the name or what?

But watching the footage surrounding the latest shooting* I couldn't help but be reminded of something that I had previously found equally disturbing, the summary execution of a young man on the streets of Rio de Janeiro by the local cops. If the details are to be believed, then this shooting itself is little different than the execution witnessed on the streets of Rio by Ross Kemp in his television series, Gangs.

Now I'm not that naive that I don't think this kind of thing goes on all the time, a dark alley, two in the head, and a throw away gun (do read) in place by the time an investigation appears at the scene. And thanks to Democracy Now, the details of a previous shooting were elucidated, and if that doesn't sound like summary execution, I don't know what does.

The forty two second clip of the Rio shooting, I had originally intended to embed at the end of the post, but perhaps it might be better to lead with the thing, it certainly helps put things in perspective.

*There was a second, unrelated fatal shooting by the Anaheim cops, before the first vic had cooled off. Details in the main clip.

Ross Kemp on gangs - Rio 42secs, caution advised.




Update: Anaheim police fire on media as unrest continues

Police Brutality in Anaheim Sparks Outrage After 2 Latinos Shot Dead and Demonstrators Attacked

Democracy Now: Police in the California city of Anaheim are facing allegations of murder and brutality after fatally shooting two Latino men over the weekend and firing rubber bullets at crowds of protesters. On Saturday, Anaheim police shot and killed 24-year-old Manuel Diaz after he reportedly ran away from a group of officers who confronted him in the street. Diaz was unarmed.

Hours after his death, a chaotic scene broke out when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at a crowd of local residents protesting the shooting. Another Latino resident, Joel Acevedo, was shot dead by police the following day. Police say Acevedo was suspected in a car robbery, but the circumstances around his death remain unconfirmed.

We discuss the situation in Anaheim with Gustavo Arellano, editor of the alternative newspaper, OC Weekly, and Theresa Smith, who has worked with families to call for police accountability in Anaheim since 2009, when officers shot and killed her son, Cesar Cruz, a 35-year-old father of five. "Given the fact that this is the eighttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhth officer-involved shooting within one year in the city of Anaheim ... the community is going to be very upset," Arellano says. "There’s a lot of angry residents, and rightfully so." transcript

Previous related articles, all featuring, and not by accident I suppose, Paul Craig Roberts

Tyranny In The Heartland

America’s Police Brutality Pandemic

Americans Are Oppressed, Too

Criminals With Badges

Masked Men Carved Anti-Gay Slurs Into Nebraska Woman’s Body

This is what happens when the national dialogue is preoccupied with the sexuality of others.

Along with a preoccupation for Jesus that is. Not to mention the IQ of the perps, prejudice and intolerance, always being inversely proportional to intelligence.

Police: Masked Men Carved Anti-Gay Slurs Into Nebraska Woman’s Body
by Neetzan Zimmerman
23 July 2012

An openly lesbian Nebraska woman appears to have been the target of a horrific hate crime which took place inside her own Lincoln home.

Police: Masked Men Carved Anti-Gay Slurs Into Nebraska Woman's Body

According to the victim, three masked men broke into her home yesterday morning and tied her up with zip ties. They then proceeded to carve the word "dyke" into her skin and spray painted "we found u dyke" on her basement wall.

"They put gasoline on the floor and they lit the match. I think the intent was to burn her," said close friend Erin Thompson. "Then they left and she managed to get out. She was still bound, so she was crawling on her hands and knees, and she got out the back door."

The unnamed woman, who was naked and bleeding, managed to make her way to her to the home of neighbor Linda Rappl. "I was in shock," Rappl told CNN. "She was naked, her hands were tied with zip ties. All I could see was a cut across her forehead and blood running down."

Rappl covered the sobbing woman up and phoned 911.

Lincoln Police have no suspects, but said the incident, which has been classified as a hate crime, is still under investigation.

Mayor Chris Beutler released a statement today calling hate crimes "despicable and appalling," and vowing that the city's police force with do all in its power to "ensure that justice is done."

Lincoln's LGBT community responded en masse to the shocking assault, with hundreds attending an impromptu vigil last night in solidarity with the victim.

"Our hearts go out to the victim, her family and close friends. Many in our community are understandably experiencing a great deal of sadness, anger and confusion," said Tyler Richard, president of the LGBT support group Outlinc. "We look to our entire community to pull together in this difficult time."

Advocate group Star City Pride has launched a victim recovery fund which is collecting money to help the victim's "physical recovery and her overall healing."

According to Rappl, the woman was treated at the hospital before being released to an emergency shelter where she is currently residing. Gawker

Bill Hicks was never one for illusions about Ameriki.