John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

 

An utterly shabby proceeding, but then that is the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from David Cameron.

Please, when is it appropriate for a judge to pronounce on someone’s “probable” guilt?

Never.

And our day-in, day-out practices support that view.

As I recall, we had only recently the case of the late Lord Greville Janner being tried as a pedophile, and apparently there was evidence or he wouldn’t have gone to court.

Yet old Janner died, and the case is closed, we have no judge pronouncing on Janner.

This ‘probable” call by what is supposed to be a responsible official in a decade-old matter which has not gone to court, and which is riddled with doubts and contradictions is about as convincing as the idiotic Warren Commission’s finding in the death of President Kennedy. The parallels are striking.

In case you don’t know, that finding was that a single loner with no known motive, one with a record of poor marksmanship, and without a weapon worthy of the name, killed the president. Chains of evidence around every significant artifact – shell casings, the rifle, a paper bag, and many others – have been shown to have been utterly corrupt. And the judgement was reached with absolutely no normal courtroom rules of evidence. The dead accused was not even permitted cross-examination of witnesses by a lawyer representing his interests.

And more witnesses were ignored than used. There was a clear pattern of selectivity in the use of witnesses then. And important leads, like the work of Oswald as a paid informant for the FBI, were buried.

Moreover the Commission itself did no investigation. It relied entirely on an FBI whose head had come to the conclusion of guilt almost immediately after the crime, a head official by the way who detested Kennedy and whose agency had a long record of selective investigations and corrupt practices.

Perhaps the single most important witness was ignored. Jack Ruby asked Justice Warren to take him to Washington where he could feel free to talk, but Warren refused, lamely saying he couldn’t do that.

But Oswald was “probably” guilty. And great secrecy was maintained over many details of the case, and even today the most important parts of the secrecy remain intact.

As the great Bertrand Russell asked at the time, if as we are asked to believe, the assassination was the act of one man, where is the matter of national security?

His question has never been answered, because it cannot be answered.

Any person who is not biased by a government or political connection and who has studied the case in detail – as I have – knows we were not told the truth.

The Warren Commission was a cover-up for an event far more terrifying and complicated than a supposed “lone nut” shooting a president.

And just so this feeble and irresponsible pronouncement. We know Litvinenko was working for a British security agency. What was he doing? We know also he had contact with some very doubtful Russian emerges living in Britain. What was that about?

Moreover, David Cameron’s government does everything that it can to discredit Russia because Russia on numerous occasions has embarrassed him, demonstrating the true nature of some ugly and contrived American acts and revealing Cameron’s words on subjects like Syria or Ukraine as so much re-written American propaganda. Or perhaps that should be re-written Rupert Murdoch propaganda?