Word has spread, I am sure, and my enemies and anti-Semites everywhere rejoice! After a lengthy retirement and a note even the learned judge, His Honour Judge McCreath, found odd, the jury convicted me of two counts of a bomb hoax (!) by a majority of 11 to 1. Majority verdicts have been permitted in England for some years.
The ‘Jerries’ and my other enemies should not rejoice too soon, however. I shall be lodging an appeal. I have already appealed the memory stick conviction – the one where GO2 downloaded some underage gay porn onto a Sandisk memory stick, which was then swapped for one seized from me, explaining the entire absence of my fingerprints or DNA from the stick they claim is mine.
The swapped Sandisk 4GB memory stick is supposed to have been purchased by me in Wellington, New Zealand, a matter of weeks after it was made in the People’s Republic of China. No way. Sandisk don’t ship directly from China to New Zealand. They have regional packaging, and use regional distribution centres. The Kiwis, sensibly, also quarantine imports shipped in wood-based packaging materials.
Sandisk’s UK distributors seem to be a bit nervous of me – I cannot imagine why! US and other distributors of Sandisks are welcome to get in touch. I also need assistance with the serial numbers of Western Digital Corporation hard drives. There is something very odd about the hard drive that Thames Valley Police claim is the one Dell sold me in 2010. Western Digital, so far, have failed to back the police version of events.
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The Jury Note
There were two notes. The second, on day two of the retirement, was extraordinary with respect. The jury asked if they should convict me if they accepted that I believed what I was saying but thought that I knew it could not be true. Ground 1 of the appeal, I think.
With great respect to the jury, you cannot know something not to be true, yet believe it to be true at the same time. Essentially the jury introduced an objective element into what is a subjective offense (Criminal Law Act 1977, s. 51(2)), requiring full mens rea. They seemed to be saying that whilst I acted in good faith they had not seen any evidence to persuade them my reporting was right.
The prosecution was conducted by a state prosecutor, Alan Blake, from the notorious Crown Prosecution Service, which frankly needs to be abolished (sensibly, it’s a UKIP policy commitment and is likely to be an election issue). The CPS, with respect, blew hot and cold on the actus reus of the offense. I eventually worked out that they were claiming that you commit a bomb hoax type offense if you say that a bomb (the phrases I used were an Improvised Nuclear Device, or a warhead stolen from the Russian SSGN Kursk) might be present.
Excuse me? How can you commit the actus reus of a criminal offense by saying that a bomb or device might be present? All I was arguing for with Barry Burton, then the Private Secretary to the then Secretary of State for Defence Phillip Hammond (nearly everybody connected with this case seems to have been moved), was for a verification overflight by an RAF Boeing E-3D Sentry airplane. I never asserted that an IND was present – the intelligence did not go that far, and had not been verified. I wanted it checked out.
What the CPS are saying in effect is that if you call in a suspicious package on a Tube train you are committing the actus reus of a bomb hoax. That with respect is risible nonsense. Not only will this conviction make terrorists’ grisly work easier, it is likely to lead to people doing precisely what they should not do, which is to check out the suspicious package themselves, for fear of being prosecuted if it does not turn out to contain any explosives.
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Messrs Jones and Fulford
The prosecution seemed to accept that the intelligence was provided to me by a nice man named Jones, who lives in Kent. At any rate they did not cross-examine him on the point and there would have been no point anyway. The contemporaneous e-mails were in the jury bundle. Another nice man, and VT colleague, Ben Fulford, in Tokyo supplied intelligence to Mr Jones that there was an ex-Kursk variable yield 500 KT warhead in East London. How could I sit on that intelligence?
The very essence of a bomb hoax, surely, is that you make something up. This is the first time ever, to my knowledge, that anyone has been prosecuted for a bomb hoax for passing on intelligence received from a third party or parties, who are accepted as having acted in good faith. It is also the first time anyone has ever been prosecuted for a ring-back bomb hoax, i.e. where the alleged hoaxer has given their real name and genuine contact details.
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Confirmation of the Nuclear Threat to the Olympics
Another difference between this case and most bomb hoax prosecutions is that the ‘bomb’ in question was actually there, as Gordon Duff and Ben Fulford have confirmed. The CPS successfully opposed this evidence going in, and both Gordon and Ben were warned off giving evidence. We even had Ben booked in Upper Class on a Virgin Atlantic flight out of Narita into London on the second Monday of the trial. In the space of a few hours the Japanese tax authorities discovered a hitherto unsuspected need for a tax audit on Ben – wholly unnecessarily, I am sure! Jerry Corsi, another key witness for the defense, also pulled out.
Jerry was present when then prosecution witness Commodore Brian English retracted his earlier statement and confirmed that I was right, i.e. that there had indeed been a nuclear threat. In his earlier statement Brian described my briefing for MOD as “bullshit”. The jury were told about that, on the insistence, with respect, of the learned trial judge, but not about his later withdrawal of his statement. Without Jerry to give evidence I was stuck. Jerry did confirm the retraction in writing, and the CPS were aware, as the e-mail confirmation was copied to them, but that did not stop the CPS insisting that his e-mails be withheld from the jury. They will NOT be withheld from the appeal court.
Applications for Jerry Corsi and Ben Fulford to give evidence by video link were refused, indeed every application for evidence by video link was refused. The ground given was expense, even though the cost of the video-link at the other end would have fallen on the defense.
Brian English, very sadly, could not give live evidence, although I was permitted to read his pre-retraction statement. He knows about the DVD and GO2 and confirmed their existence on the record, the first time that has ever been done in a criminal trial anywhere in the Western world. He fell gravely ill in the run-up to the trial, sadly, and could not give evidence. He is now effectively beyond the reach of the DVD and GO2. You won’t see his name in Spyhunter, nor will you have heard it from me before. I am very sorry his name has come into the open as a result of this trial, and the prosecution insistence that the entire trial be heard in open court. Thames Valley Police and the CPS treated this immensely distinguished and brilliant intelligence officer, officially in his 80s but actually in his 90s (he met Adolf Hitler at the Nuremberg Party Rally in ’37) as a harmless old geezer.
They carried out no background checks on him at all about which the jury could be told, not that TVP or the CPS would have got very far with those. Brian’s files are mostly classified way beyond Top Secret. His highly effective and well-informed interrogation of Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess in Spandau Prison after the war is so sensitive the British public still cannot be told about it. In 1941 Hess of course was working with the traitor Sir Edward Bridges, the Cabinet Secretary, in a plot to oust Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill would probably have been murdered after he was ousted, as he would have posed a continuing threat to German ambitions to control Britain and Europe, including Russia. Hess and Bridges wanted to replace Winnie with the pro-German Lord Halifax, a very nasty piece of work, no offense intended. These days he would have been in the Coalition Government.
Another brilliant intelligence officer ‘outed’ during the trial was the CIA’s Joe Lowery, an outstanding U-2 pilot. Joe was offered the Powers mission before Powers. The equally brilliant Terrell Reagan, of Air America and Operation Phoenix fame (Gordon may have come across him in the good old days), who did wonderful work in ‘Nam, also got his name splattered all over the transcript. Sorry, Joe and Terrell. I did my best to keep your names out. Joe became a prosecution witness, albeit a read-only witness. There is no way Joe Lowery would lie on oath. My voicemails to Terrell were agreed, so the prosecution did not need to call him.
Terrell did what he had to do – fob the ‘rozzers’ off with a bunch of horse pooh – but you wouldn’t catch this great spook lying on oath either. Terrell is one of the Good Guys, has one of the smartest brains in the US intelligence inventory and along with Joe and another friend of mine, the late General Walters, is arguably one of the three finest intelligence officers America has ever produced. Bill Casey apparently thought very highly of him, just as John McCone had a high regard for Joe. Joe’s name came up in one of my meetings in the Pentagon by the way, and I don’t mean a meeting with the one of the janitors on the first floor. I mean a meeting on the Secretary of Defense’s corridor, as it happens with the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Joe is also well-known to the old-timers (sorry, Frank!) in the justly famed Skunk Works, unsurprisingly, since Joe was on the U-2, YF-12A and SR-71 shakedown programs. Joe was there when Tony LeVier brought the U-2 prototype back to Groom Dry Lake (aka Area 51) on her first test flight, in fact it was Joe who first told me the story, later verified by my contacts at the Skunk Works, that everybody had forgotten that the runway at Groom would heat up whilst their bird was in the air. The U-2’s wings were so efficient the damn airplane wouldn’t settle on the runway, as the heat coming off it kept her in the air. About halfway down Tony decided that enough was enough and he just yanked the stick back, stalling the sonofabitch right onto the tarmac. Great days, and a great team. Joe was a part of it. He is an authentic American hero.
Ask around the intelligence community and someone will probably tell you the story about Joe Lowery walking down the fuselage of a KC-97 knee deep in AVTUR after a bag tank burst, to manually let down the ramp (a spark from the electric motors would not have been good). He got the ramp down, the co-pilot raised the nose a touch and the gas went out the back of the plane. The boys made it home. So did the plane they were waiting to gas up, which might have been an RB-47 Stratojet, which might have been doing a recon run over the Kamchatka Peninsula, or somewhere else it was not supposed to be. Joe was that nice man General Curtis LeMay’s (he bombed the hell out of Tokyo and was in charge of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, operations which went exactly to plan and fried lots of fascists) favorite recon pilot.
Joe spotted the cash going from Al Qaeda into the 9-11 recon cells in New York and DC. It was laundered through a London bank, which also laundered the PLO’s cash. He was made by a CCTV camera in the bank and set up by GO2 in a ludicrous prosecution, backed by Iran’s VEVAK, which had a penetration asset in the CPS. GO2 also had a couple of City of London cops on the payroll. He was the CIA’s last real hope of stopping 9-11. I was his defense lawyer.
He was granted £100,000 bail, which the CPS thought he couldn’t raise, indeed they were pooh-pooing any suggestion of an intelligence connection, even as the CIA’s Deputy Director was being dragged off a boat in Chesapeake Bay at the weekend to deal with the crisis caused by Joe’s unlawful arrest in London. The cash turned up next morning at the City of London Magistrates Court, in used notes, in an aluminum briefcase, carried by a very nice lady intelligence officer, who did not announce herself as such and left her gun in the car (they have metal detectors at City of London Mags).
No offense, but Thames Valley Police and the CPS are not the sharpest knives in the box, indeed if they ever invite you to a Thanksgiving dinner, bring your own carving knife. Joe had to surrender his passport (no s**t Sherlock) and it wasn’t handed back to him when he made bail. Fifteen years later these boys were still trying to work out how Joe got back home. The CIA at Mildenhall do NOT ask to see your passport when they invite you aboard one of their gleaming G-5s (strictly, not their G-5, but one discreetly provided by a corporation with a small Agency shareholding). The CIA know who you are before they invite you onto the plane.
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Fukushima
One of the issues in the trial was whether or not the Fukushima event was triggered by a nuclear blast. It clearly was. As many VT readers will know the Japanese government got over 10,000 of their people killed, and nearly lost Tokyo, by ignoring Ben Fulford’s warning that what he calls ‘the cabal’ (Ian Fleming called it SPECTRE – its real name is the Deutscher Verteidigungs Dienst, the baddest bunch of Bad Guys on the planet, even badder ass than the Gestapo, one of their predecessor agencies) were planning an undersea nuclear detonation off Fukushima. Indeed they were, but I need those seismic surveys people. Courts act on evidence, not intelligence, one reason why no court of law is ever going to stop a nuclear attack.
Courts, like the police, have to wait for the attack to happen before they will act. If it happens to be a nuclear attack there may not be a courtroom at all any more, and the policemen’s eyeballs may have melted, but until that nuke goes off they will just treat any warning as a conspiracy theory. There it is.
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The GCHQ recordings
Not the least scandalous aspect of this with respect malicious prosecution is that the British Government have been in possession all along of the recordings of the two telephone calls in issue, the call from Barry Burton at MOD to myself on April 19 2012, and my call to Sarah Sproat, agent to David Lidington, the current MP for Aylesbury, and a bitter political enemy of mine (well, he is now), on April 20. My voiceprint is on file with GCHQ. They pick up ALL my calls, even if they don’t listen to them. The recordings in question exonerate me completely, which is why GCHQ have been astute to suppress them.
Thankfully NSA also have my voiceprint, along with my permission to record all my telephone calls (I gave this some years ago, to a former NSA General Counsel, to pass on to his successor – the NSA has a strict privacy policy, as all y’all may know, and it avoids NGOs ventilating silly conspiracy theories about the agency bugging people). Meade has copies of both recordings, thank goodness, and good quality copies too. So too do some other friends. My legal team for the appeal will need those recordings. Yes, I will be making a Freedom of Information Act request, and yes I will be putting a call through to the boys at Meade, who are very nice people. The FOIA is a wonderful piece of legislation – the best method of releasing classified data the White House want suppressed that has ever been devised.
Release of the recordings to the defense would chop the prosecution off at the knees. They wouldn’t be able to run a marathon, or even shoot their girlfriends, without strapping on a pair of blades. Apparently Meade also have the faxes of the drafts of Barry Burton’s with respect dodgy note of his call to me going back and forth between MOD Main Building and the Cabinet Office (thankfully, they are a lazy lot in the Cabinet Office – it’s only 5 minutes walk, and about 5 minutes to get up to Burton’s office). Burton didn’t tell the jury or the defense about the other drafts, and may not even have told the CPS. Oh dear.
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Some other stuff
I can confirm that I was not allowed to complete my evidence, nor call a key witness whom I wished to call (a nuclear expert present at the recovery of the Kursk), nor complete cross-examination of key prosecution witnesses. The learned trial judge imposed a two-week time estimate over the wishes of the defense (I argued for four). All of these case management decisions are likely to be called into question on appeal, respectfully of course. Unlike America, English criminal procedure has become quasi-inquisitorial, with trial judges being given extensive case management powers. In effect our criminal trial procedure has moved closer to that of France or Germany. The learned judge went so far, with respect, as to assert a right to define the issues in the case, i.e. to decide what the defense was.
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The Ferguson and New York Grand Jury Verdicts
I don’t disagree with all jury verdicts, indeed had the jury been told the truth, with respect, by the government side in my trial they would have acquitted. I entirely disassociate myself from the impertinent criticism of the grand juries in Ferguson MO and New York not to issue indictments in respect of two killings by police officers. There does not seem to have been any suppression of the facts from either jury.
I was surprised by neither decision, indeed it’s encouraging to see grand juries refusing to cave in to political pressure to bring bogus indictments against white police officers on grounds of political pressure. We should bring grand juries back in England – at the moment decisions to prosecute here are political decisions, taken by civil servants in a government department which reports ultimately to the Cabinet Office. The two young black men in question in Ferguson and New York would not have died had they cooperated with the officers, who were only doing their job.
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HM Queen Fabiola
My condolences to the Belgian people on the passing of dowager Queen Fabiola. I understand that she was a lovely person – she was certainly very popular in Belgium, and rightly so. I am a social liberal, indeed I have just joined the Bar Lesbian and Gay Group, being bisexual, and by definition a member of a minority myself. However, I entirely agree with King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola’s opposition to divorce.
This was entirely genuine and rooted in their deep Catholic faith. I am not religious – as I explain in Spyhunter, I am an Anglican – but I not only respect the Catholic Church’s teaching on divorce, I respectfully agree with it. It’s a sanctity of life thing. If you don’t want to make babies, use contraception, or try oral sex instead (it’s quite nice). I’m just against killing babies. I’d rather kill Germans.
Both King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola were aware of the DVD. When the b*****ds brought down a SABENA Boeing 707-329 (OO-SJB) near Brussels on February 15 1961, murdering the US Figure Skating Team and all 72 souls aboard, by sabotaging the controls (port spoiler mechanism, port outboard spoiler bypass valve and stabiliser trim) the King and Queen went personally to the crash site. Kings and queens do not normally turn up at airplane crash sites. They tend to leave that to NTSB go teams. They were both very good people.
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Philip Hughes
My condolences, too, to the people of Australia over the sad death of Philip Hughes, who was felled by a bouncer at Sydney Cricket Ground. I saw him play – he was a fine attacking batsman. He was prone to getting out too early but he had recovered his form and was on the verge of reselection for the Australian Test side. There is no doubt that his best years were ahead of him. He was only 26.
Some have compare him to the great Sir Donald Bradman, but that is perhaps a little unfair on both. I would compare him to Norman O’Neill or Peter Burge, two very fine Aussie players of the 60s. There is no doubt that Philip Hughes played the game of cricket in the right spirit. It is an absolutely tragic loss, not just for Australian cricket, but the Australian nation and the game as a whole. He will not be forgotten. I very much hope that HRH Prince Charles will be allowed to represent HM the Queen at his memorial service at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
No Bond movie this week – it would strike the wrong note, given the recent deaths of these two fine people.
December 7th 2014 – 73rd anniversary of the sneak Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Rest in Peace men of the USS Arizona.
Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.
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