app-27
Chapter 27. The final days
My apprehension at the delay between the plane being on time and ‘landed’ was justified when I later learned that all passengers were told to remain seated, except for the gentleman by the name of David Stanley who was to leave the plane first. Over a month later when he was finally able to resume contact with me, he wrote, “I had some reservations about landing back at Airstrip 1." Orwell readers will recognize.
There waiting for him on the ramp outside the door of the plane was a group of armed police, who immediately arrested him. He was allowed one call that evening to the only number he had – that of his Welsh host, which I had asked the consulate in Atlanta to give him, together with his plane tickets and $50 for his train fare from London to Wales. The Welsh host rang me right away with the news.
My first reaction to the arrest was to drop his pseudonym and use his real name. I ran the story under this headline on top of the Inquisition21 web site: “David Stanley has been arrested” and began a thread under the same title on the OBU forum. I also changed the pseudonym to his real name in the manuscript of this book, which was still being written as the events unfolded. For some time I had been promising that if anything happened to him I would begin to use his real name. That time appeared to have come. There was an instant and worried response from the OBU members.
My first attempt to use solicitors to get him released came up against the obstacle that the court refused to deal with any solicitor other than the free legal aid one already assigned to him. This was Michael Clode of South Wales, whom David had already sacked while in the US, giving as a reason that Clode had not informed him of the court date. Upon hearing of this complication, the magistrate at his post-arrest hearing set a date for the sorting out of legal representation on August 25 2010, thus ensuring that he spend at least another sixteen days in prison. But the complications were far from over.
You cannot sack or change your solicitor when you are using free legal aid: only a judge can agree to a change. We quickly found another South Wales solicitor prepared to take him on should, in the first instance, he agree and should the judge on August 25 allow it. This was Graham McClennan of Howe and Spender, who had already dealt with David and the couple he had been cat-sitting for when his laptop was seized and who could be quickly briefed on the whole situation. Graham McClennan appeared to be very approachable and positive and even checked with Chris Saltrese so that no lines would be crossed.
We now had the problem of communicating with David who was locked up in HMP Cardiff to get him to accept McClennan should the judge agree to this. Two local Orees who wanted to visit him expressed fears of retribution from Social Services and the parole service, so I was reluctant to pressure them into doing so and my eye had not yet recovered to the point where I was free to travel by ferry and train across to Cardiff. Several of us wrote him urging him to accept Graham McClennan on August 25th.
I learned that solicitor Michael Clode, despite being sacked by David, had to attend court on the 25th because he was still on the court record. By now advice was that the violent porn charge was ridiculous and that the only charge to worry about was that of ‘fleeing arrest’. I appeared to have the only evidence that could be used in a defence against this – that he was ill and out of the country and that according to an email he had copied me he had sacked Clode for not informing him about court dates.
It appeared wise to contact Michael Clode to at least ascertain his attitude about a possible transfer of representation to Graham McClennan. After several days of trying numbers listed on the Internet that did not appear to work, I finally got through using one of these numbers on August 18 2010. I explained to the secretary who I was and that I needed to speak to Clode about the coming representation case. She flatly refused saying that without a letter of permission from David they could not discuss him. I protested that he was in prison and that I could not exchange letters with him on time, but to no avail. She had no interest in recording my name or number or in any information I might have that could help him. This meant that if by any chance Clode would indeed end up representing him, for now at least there was no way to get the evidence to him that could help.
On reflection, however, that evidence included information potentially damaging to Clode himself. Up to then I had not decided whether to publish the emailed letter that Dave sent him from the US, sacking him, as it was so damning, but here it is now:
To Michael Clode
“I email to terminate use of your services with immediate effect. Please advise the Crown that I may communicate with them directly and arrange a meeting to resolve if possible issues in contention which includes the possession of legally privileged evidence.
“I was a witness to multiple counts of perjury, perverting the course of justice, failure to declare a conflict of interest and in human terms what was total betrayal. I was told the schedule had been changed and contacted you repeatedly. To be unresponsive to the extent of not even confirming the time and date of when the Crown would next like to meet was unresponsive to the point of sabotage.
“You were of course not present in all the bizarre happenings at Bridgend Magistrates Court, failing to attend in one instance despite our agreement. I first went there for legal assistance and Michael Williams not only failed to uphold the law, he broke it, only to attempt to switch to a role as prosecution some days later balanced only by an apology for his conduct from a court official. This was a conflict of interest - as you put it; 'he can't do that'.
“As an observation, you looked somewhat puzzled that I attended all the various meetings; the court had formally surrendered to my authority on our first encounter and has no legitimate standing in these issues. There are serious problems that left unattended result in very considerable harm - that is in my view a reason to talk. I will pursue matters with the Crown independently. I have been shown nothing despite being promised disclosure. Please forward by email (I have no fixed abode) any relevant documentation.
“David Stanley.”
(One irrelevant sentence removed together with minor grammatical editing.)
At this stage it appeared that Clode would probably be no help anyway and that we had to wait for the judge to agree that David could change his solicitor. That evening more information arrived as David telephoned his waiting Welsh host. The key information received was that he would continue to refuse to allow Clode to act for him and that he did not want visitors as there were few whom he trusted anymore. Significantly, the Welsh colleague reported: "He is almost belligerent about the upcoming court appearance - sounds as though he may well attempt to represent himself." Unfortunately, before his time on the telephone ran out, he did not use the occasion to confirm that he would use Mc Lennan, although he would not have had our letters urging him to do so yet.
That very night, from the US Roland LeBlanc responded to the news, saying, “David is perfectly capable of defending himself. He just proved it by sacking his solicitor.” One other Oree had already said the same thing.
If one were to carry out an analysis of this whole story and list the elements which contributed to the huge injustice of Operation Ore and the other Landslide derived travesties, one would have to include inadequate and incompetent defence solicitors and lawyers. Over and over in the hundreds of stories I had heard and read the subject of useless solicitors and indifferent and incompetent lawyers came up. In the overall Landslide story this begins with Thomas Reedy who at the time this was being written was struggling to have a motion claiming ineffective support from his counsel heard. His counsel’s inadequacy was the first such act that not only contributed to a 1300 year prison sentence for Reedy but failed to halt the worldwide events which followed. Upon reflection, while we railed at the refusal of the prosecution to reveal the evidence to the defence, that now appeared to be just another excuse for the defence to get off the hook, because, over and over, Orees reported that their solicitors made no attempt to defend them but simply tried to get them to plea bargain for cautions or reduced sentences.
On the same day that Clode refused to talk with me, the first huge crack in the Crown Prosecution Service’s refusal to accept the new evidence we were presenting in the appeal appeared. In a response to our experts’ demand for certain explanations, and only under the force of a court order to respond, Nicholas Sharples, the prosecution’s expert witness finally admitted that there were some cases of fraud in the Landslide records, but not enough, as we were claiming, to indicate global or widespread fraud.
This was a monumental admission with huge potential consequences. Our submission had stated that “in the original trial, fraud had been overlooked on all counts; moreover, despite admitting that fraud was not looked for, the Court was nonetheless assured by the prosecution and its experts that fraud in any guise was ‘not possible’ and ‘simply could not be done’ and these same assurances were accepted by the Court; and relayed to the jury in the course of the summing up as assurances to which full weight should be attached.”
This early misconception or deceit was relayed to the public through the media and to Parliament in direct statements and answers to questions as senior policemen and other public figures announced that there was no evidence of fraud.
Central to our submission to the court of appeal was our claim that those in a position to look for fraud, the prosecution, did not do so, and that those with the inclination to look, the defence, were not in a position so to do. Thus the Court and the jury were unsighted.
Our submission also claimed that despite the indicators of fraud, “which were present in abundance and obvious on first inspection, the relevant inspection was not conducted, and these related both to the particular transactions of which the defendant stood accused and as to the generality of the Landslide transactions. Landslide’s computer records, which were held out to the jury as ‘reliable’, were the reverse of reliable.”
We also claimed that the concept of the impossibility of fraud was one of the major misconceptions of Operation Ore, based on a further confusion in the mind of the prosecution between the concept of data stored on a computer being ‘incorruptible, uncorrupted, impossible to change, unchanged, properly processed and that same information being correct’.
Dr Samantha Type was a colleague of expert witness Sharples and worked also for Celt, providing key expert witness for the prosecution. When she was asked if she looked for fraud she said she did not; later, however, she said that it simply couldn’t be done. And, if it were done and if some attempt of that nature had been made, she would have found evidence of fraud. As already noted in our appeal submission, we commented: ‘The concept expressed in the last sentence (to the effect the Prosecution Expert ‘would have’ detected fraud) sits uneasily alongside the Prosecution expert’s admission that she did not look for it’.
Even after the admission on August 18 by Sharples that there was some fraud, the Crown Prosecution Service still refused to accept the main planks of our appeal, despite the one of fraud alone likely to discredit Ore. It seemed that this was a rearguard action, but try as we did we could not put ourselves inside the minds of those responsible for it. Who had the most to lose? It now seemed that it was Sharples and his other Celt expert witness colleagues, who certainly appeared to have all to lose. If our appeal succeeded and a huge miscarriage of justice involving thousands was admitted, would the CPS and the police point their fingers at these expert witnesses and blame them? But, with our evidence in the hands of the CPS for over a year now, surely the CPS itself, Keir Starmer its head and the prosecution lawyer still holding out against our appeal, shared responsibility? That prosecution lawyer, to our initial surprise, was Paul Bown, who had also acted for the CPS in the original O’Shea case. Had he not contested our new appeal he could have claimed that he did not have the full evidence in the original O’Shea trial, but here he was, one year after seeing our new evidence, still resisting it, thus making himself at least partly responsible for a potential injustice against thousands.
On August 31 2010, the most potentially lethal attack from the police and CPS played itself out. For over a year I had been aware that there was pressure on the O’Shea family, specifically through the police having acquired an interest in Anthony O’Shea’s brother, Paul. Paul had represented his younger brother from the start and had played a key role in the setting up of the group action. He had participated in our evidence-securing adventure and had driven David Stanley from my home to Dublin Airport and met him when he returned back there with the evidence a week later. The three of us had opened the packages in my outhouse and photographed the contents to establish the provenance.
The first pressure on Paul had to do with some trivial incident he had witnessed in a pub, but the second was much more serious as it involved a charge of growing cannabis in a rented house he part-owned with a colleague. As with so many other police charges recorded in this book, I am not in a position to pass judgement on it, but leave it to the reader to come to his or her own conclusions about the real intentions of the police. Paul was now the sixth member of the core group hit by the police and two had recently been imprisoned. I feared not so much the discrediting of Paul as pressure on him and his family causing Anthony to drop the appeal. Our six years of work and £240,000 spent on the case would have had no appellant.
On the first day of what was to have been Paul’s four day trial on August 31, 2010, having ignored his lawyer’s advice and mounted his own substantial defence, the CPS offered no evidence, the judge recorded a not guilty verdict and he was free to go. He had been through what he described to me as ‘pure mental torture’, had lost his wife, his house and almost lost his freedom. He did not receive an apology. He said to me, “What a great justice system we have.”
The verdict coming just two months before the appeal was a huge relief to me as an attack on the O’Shea family no longer appeared likely. It was even plainer to me, however, that only Chris Saltrese and his legal colleagues and I had not been directly hit by the police. For the first time, I wondered if it would be safe for me to travel to the High Court in London.
Now, however, there was the problem of David to deal with. Although all of the media ignored the story, despite the closeness of the appeal and the key role that David had played in it, I hoped that someone would tip off the judge that there was more to David’s story than met the eye. I was aware that the British police were daily readers of both the Inquisition21 and OBU web sites, and that many in the legal profession would be very aware that our case had already begun with the experts’ meetings under the High Court judges.
This is what one of the OBU members wrote upon hearing the news of the arrest:
“I'm sickened but not surprised that he was summarily arrested and whisked away upon arrival in the UK; it's exactly what I anticipated would happen. It does suggest that certain powerful parties are desperate and will resort to whatever means they can devise to discredit him and push him over the edge. But to treat an exceptionally traumatised and vulnerable human being with such Gestapo-like ruthlessness seems to me unutterably villainous.
“I'm sorry to be so impractical; like many others following this agonising story, it just makes me want to howl at the moon - that we live in a world which could do this to a good and courageous man, that thuggery and fanaticism have become so pervasively institutionalised, that malignant bullies who 'get off' on scapegoating, persecuting and ruining harmless people are depicted as saviours and heroes. I could go on, but I need to stop, for all our sakes. Thoughts like this can drive you mad.
“I wish you well David, and I hope to God you'll allow yourself to be properly defended.”
Another wrote:
“Anyone who is familiar with this can only conclude that this is an awful travesty still in progress. I only hope that this vindictive conspiracy to get back at Dave unravels, and is seen to unravel, along with the wider Operation Ore debacle.”
By now David was in HMP Cardiff, Prisoner number A01S3AW.
“Another member wrote: “Sad and shocking news that a decent guy ended up in this state. How can it be that you get treated this way for trying to do what is right?
“Makes me feel ill when I think about it actually.
“I hope that fu*k*r (name of a certain policeman removed here) dies a painful death.
“All the best, Dave.”
On August 25th in Cardiff Court Judge Curran set a plea date of September 10 and refused bail. No pleas were entered because David refused to plea, but good news to me was that Judge Curran reserved the case to himself to be heard in Newport Crown Court. He said that he would also resolve the issues of the transfer of the legal aid certificate, the plea and possible bail application. This gave me a boost as it seemed that Judge Curran now knew that there was more to this case than met the eye. Any doubts I had about publishing the story under David’s real name were now dispelled.
I posted this to the OBU forum: “It is not yet known who will represent him, but this appears to be out of our hands.”
Not all saw it as good news and this reply came:
“Thanks for the sad update. After more than a fortnight in the Tomb for the Living, I suspect that David is feeling every second of his incarceration. You may not have the information at your disposal, but do you know if bail was refused on 'safeguarding the public' grounds (i.e, pure BS), or because he had no fixed abode to be released to?
“If it's the latter, the police state which rendered him destitute and homeless in the first place is justifying continued incarceration on the grounds that he is in the very predicament which they themselves created for him. Despicable.”
Later I learned that David was allowed to telephone or write only to the Welsh colleague with whom I had arranged his accommodation, so the few fairly incoherent messages I received from him were relayed to me by this good man and his apparent reluctance to answer my specific questions suggested that he intended to defend himself.
The day before the hearing, the prison authorities told him to telephone his Welsh host to say that he would be bailed the next day to that address. The next morning after four weeks and one day in prison, he was sentenced to one week for the ‘violent porn’ image and one week for evading arrest and, as he had served double that, he was to be released immediately. There would be no need for pleas to the court or the giving of evidence; in other words the story would not be told in that court. In the hope that I might be able to influence the situation, I had contacted the Newport Argus newspaper that advertises for tip-offs concerning local news. Nothing could have been more local. When I told them about David’s connection with the Operation Ore High Court appeal, they dropped the story like a hot brick. Two months only from the appeal and the media attitude had not changed.
That evening David arrived by train at the station in Wales where his host was waiting for him. The prison officials had given him a travel voucher as sometime after his arrest at Heathrow his $50 train fare had been stolen.
The $50 was not much, except to serve as one last example of the contempt we should all have for the police of a once great nation determined to exert a last ounce of malice against a good man they had for so long persecuted. I was later to learn from him that while in prison someone had spread the word that he was a ‘kiddie fiddler’. I can construe this only as an attempt to have him assaulted or even killed. It did not work, however, as the other prisoners did not believe it. When I posted the news about his Airstrip 1 humour, one member replied, “It is encouraging to learn that this ‘enemy of the state’ has maintained his sense of humour after all he has been through. Even more encouraging that for the time being he no longer enjoys the hospitality of the Ministry of Love.”
About one month before the appeal, there was a further development to demonstrate that the influences maintaining a witch hunt society were still not waning. Within the previous year had come the good news that one of the Orees, I will name Robert, had channelled what could have been despair or at least depression into studying law as a mature student and was now poised to go full time into university for the final year. I was very pleased when he informed me that he had chosen Operation Ore as his dissertation and that his supervising professor applauded the choice. Responding to his request for research material I began to make it available to him as the sub judice restrictions allowed.
On October 2 2010, he wrote me to say that his ‘respected law professor’ who before the summer break had been enthusiastic was now suddenly ‘notably cool towards it’. He went on: “Whether this is some sort of change of heart, or he has been 'got at' in some way, I can't tell. It is odd though. Leaving it this late means I've nowhere else to go, because all the other supervisors are taken. He has said that he wants to supervise me, but it's just that this subject is 'difficult'. I'm going to try and win him round again, or failing that, try and get something with at least a component of Ore in it, or some relation to it. This guy genuinely doesn't strike me as a bad sort by any means. But this, as I say, is odd. One way or another though, I am determined to write this. It may have to wait a bit longer than I had hoped though. Perhaps I am being a little paranoid, and the professor is concerned form a marking perspective. I don't know. Any thoughts?”
I sent it off for advice to Winston, author of Another Country, an expert on academic politics and he replied as follows:
“It seems to me that power rarely stands nakedly before its subjects today; if it does, it's usually failing. Its occult machinations are discerned in its effects, in decisions which take place behind closed doors and beyond public scrutiny, not in displays of open repression - as when a broad-minded and good professor suddenly reneges, without explanation, on a promise he'd given to a student who wished to explore a contentious issue. Departmental funding, which has never been as dependent on the whims and pockets of the powerful as now, can suffer badly if ideologically inconvenient (and potentially destabilising) matters are intellectually probed.
“I know that an anecdote doesn't prove much beyond the anecdote, but during my doctoral research (a good few years ago now) I began finding persuasive but ignored evidence that the prevailing mainstream academic view - namely, that 'violence' predominantly meant 'male violence against women and children' - was a distortion (most routine violence against children, for instance, is committed by mothers; and significant numbers of women can be horrifically violent toward their male partners). The mainstream view had been established by militant ideologues, although I confess that I hadn't understood this then - who were now in influential positions in many university departments. I was left with no illusions that I would not gain supervisory endorsement for any thesis which challenged the women-are-victims position.
“Ore is even more highly charged - very powerful, and powerfully dangerous, people are up to the necks in it. I'm usually very sceptical about conspiracy theories, but Lacan's notion of the University Discourse isn't a conspiracy. It's more of a business arrangement, and naive academics who believe too literally in academic freedom threaten to inflame raw nerves amongst powerful paymasters and establishment figures. They are very bad for business as a result - the university discourse is funded to support the master's interests, not the Enlightenment quest to further knowledge and human reason.
“It may still be worth it for Robert to try to have a conversation with this professor. It may be that a less polemically inclined analysis may tilt the balance somewhat - much useful data can still be uncovered in research, and it is possible to publish a more politically engaged and trenchant repudiation of the witch-hunt beyond (or after) academia.
“All of which is a long way of saying that I'd be surprised if Robert's professor hadn't been 'got at' (or even threatened) in some way, that this is indeed the University Discourse operating as it's intended to do and, sadly, that the professor is most unlikely to admit to undue influence when pressed to do so. This could make me sound like a conspiracy nut, I know; it could be that he's just found out that his daughter's pregnant, his son is gay and his wife has left him for a first year undergraduate. But my money is on the probability that he's been 'nobbled' in some way.
“I hope Robert finds a way through in his most important work.”
Before closing off the final days before the appeal, I need to deal with the all-important matter of our legal team. By now the reader will be aware that we had ranged against us the full weight of the police, the social censors and the media opinion-formers, and of course the might of the Crown Prosecution Service. I now come to a subject that I could not have even commented upon before the appeal. The poisonous tentacles of the child protection ideology had reached not just to media, solicitors and expert witnesses, but, when it was supported by the might, and the budget, of the Crown Prosecution Service, it reached even to senior counsel. We had great difficulty finding a solicitor and an expert witness to stand up against the prevailing ‘dominant discourse’ and we had witnessed what happens to a forensics expert when he goes against the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. But our senior counsel, if we found one, had to be able to both question the ‘dominant discourse’ and go against the Crown Prosecution Service from whom there would likely be no more profitable work.
The first ace in our hand had been human rights solicitor, Chris Saltrese, a champion of those falsely accused, a courageous critic of the justice system and of the dominant discourse that bred false allegations and the compensation claim culture. He now produced a brilliant solution to our need for a senior counsel, especially valuable in a case of mass accusations of child sexual abuse. He recruited a talented and award-winning woman - Tania Griffiths QC.
We had been more than content that the CPS was using the prosecutor from the original O’Shea case, as he was trotting out the same old arguments, but when they saw that we had Tania on our team they did an about-face and came back fighting with their own version - Miranda Moore QC. At this late stage, it demonstrated that the CPS was still fighting to reject our evidence. We speculated that Miranda Moore might realize that she was being handed a poisoned chalice.
Now to a very important individual, mentioned already, but just briefly. The findings of Jim Bates, our forensics expert, painstakingly extracted from millions of lines of code from the computer logs we had seized in Fort Worth, had to be understood, edited and presented in both legal and understandable language. To put this in some perspective, Jim Bates lives and breathes, and, maddeningly at times, talks computer forensics. He had by now spent four years poring over the Landslide computer logs and data base and related records, to the point where his wife, Jo, feared for his health.
After the High Court had ordered the return of the material the police had seized from him illegally, and the public climb down of Chief Constable Colin Port, a police helicopter circled their home in the countryside near Leicester every day for a month, literally ‘buzzing’ them and frightening an already anxious Jo. One day, Jim ran out and shook his fist up at them and a watching officer just waved some papers down towards him. By the time I was writing these lines, he and Jo had been staying with my wife and me for a break and I feared for his health because of the continuing workload and the intensity of his commitment. Under control of the judges he had been locked in arguments with the CPS hired experts for months during 2010. He was with us on his 70th birthday. I was 76.
How now to translate the voluminous and complex findings that were being disputed by a team of technical opponents into understandable and acceptable language? This ‘translation’ would literally be the script handed to Tania Griffiths who in turn would have to present it to the High Court. Once again, Chris Saltrese produced the goods, this time in the form of an extraordinary individual by the name of Oliver Cyriax. The best way I can describe Oliver is through the eyes of Jim Bates, who had the unenviable task of instructing him. This is, of course, also doctored by my own impression of what Jim was trying to tell me.
Imagine that you and I are Jim and this somewhat – ‘dotty’ might be too strong, but certainly studious and rather academic in an absent minded way individual is reading what we have presented and are trying to explain to him. We are frustrated by his apparent difficulties in understanding what we are trying to tell him and he appears to be struggling to grasp some aspects in which we do not see that much complexity. He asks questions, but even these do not reassure us. Then he begins to write! And it’s dynamite!
We suddenly see what we might already have known but could not succinctly express. He has hit it right on the head, line by line, point after point.
Finally, to the most sensitive issue here. One of the three judges in the judicial review and contempt of court cases resulting from the illegal seizure of Jim Bates’ equipment and files was Lord Justice Stanley Burnton. He criticised the behaviour of Chief Constable Colin Port who at first threatened to defy the High Court’s order, saying, “The chief constable had an obligation to comply. He did not do so. Instead, he gave an interview to The Sun that gave grounds that he might indeed not comply with the order. It's regrettable in a case involving a chief constable the matter has come this far - - - ."
Now that we had a good solicitor, an award-winning woman senior counsel, an expert and Oliver his script writer, all we needed was a judge who would really understand our situation. The chief judge presiding over the 2010 meetings between the experts and to sit on the appeal was Lord Justice Burnton.
At last, fate appeared to be on our side. Then, as if in corroboration of this, on October 4 2010, Jim Gamble, chief policemen in charge of Operation Ore, resigned.
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