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Chapter 30: Forget the Facts - Focus on the Fallacies



In Chapter 17 we started to consider some of the philosophical issues concerned with this case.


We looked at whether absence of evidence could become evidence of absence ( it can !) and we touched on Logic and fallacious arguments


What I want to do now is look at it purely from the point of view of Formal Logic.
We know, know, that there is no forensic evidence of an abduction on Thursday 3rd May 2007
So let us look at the logic of the arguments that have been put forward in the absence of that evidence.




There seem to be three phases, each involving different fallacies.
I will try to pursue them in chronological order




1 Argument by assertion.
Of the night in question, 3rd May 2007 Kate writes “I’d done that, and I knew, I knew, that Madeleine had been abducted.”
The addition of the second ‘I knew’, and putting it in italic is clearly designed to emphasise and therefore to persuade.


This is a classical fallacy known as the Argument by assertion.
If you have no evidence, simply state something. If necessary shout, and as we saw in Chapter 17 in the Lewis Carrol extract - What I tell you three times is true ( and other less amusing and more sinister examples)
If in doubt, Keep repeating it.
It is then sometimes referred to as the Argument by repeated assertion.
This does not reinforce the argument. In some cases it may make it weaker in the minds of perceptive listeners, as the lack of any supporting evidence is exposed.


In fact Kate does this as well in her book. In one paragraph she says “Refusing to acknowledge what I already knew, . . . mentally ticking boxes that I knew, deep down, were already ticked.” In two short paragraphs she uses the word four times, without adducing a single piece of relevant evidence to support the contention.


Gradually this fallacy can begin to metamorphose into the Argumentum ad baculum - the Argument with the club, as the repetition becomes more violent and aggressive, and develops into legal proceedings or in hounding a person to their death. I discuss this later.




It can also become the Argumentum ad lapidem - the argument by kicking a stone to prove its existence.
Even Dr Johnson used / misused these forms. “I know our will is free. And there’s an end on’t!’




2 Affirming the consequent. This is a form of non sequitur (it does not follow) argument, and was used from the start by the McCanns


The correct form of the argument is this. It is called the modus ponens, and is logically sound




It is usually put in the form of a syllogism, formed by the combination of a general statement (the major premise) and a specific statement (the minor premise), from which the conclusion is deduced

If a child is abducted, it disappears
General statement, antecedent -> consequent
Madeleine has been abducted
Specific statement, confirming the antecedent
Therefore she has disappeared.
Conclusion following logically

But affirming the consequent turns it round; it places the consequent (the consequence = ‘disappears’) before the antecedent (abducted) and this makes it logically unsound, a fallacious argument

If a child is abducted, it disappears
General statement
Madeleine has disappeared
Specific statement, confirms the consequent
Therefore she has been abducted.
Conclusion is not logical

To continue with this argument would require evidence of abduction, but this cannot be deduced from the second line.

This can look similar to the fallacy of the undistributed middle, where the minor premise talks about Some, but not All, leading to an illogical conclusion, but it is in fact something different.

This example mixes both
3 The Red Herring They then move to a fallacious argument, that even Kate in her book refers to, by name.
The McCanns invoke several ‘red herring’ arguments to wriggle out of their original statement that the window was open, the curtains were wide open, and the shutters were pulled up when she entered the room. These range from “the intruder was in the room whilst I was there,” to “someone did a dummy run the night before”, and even to “ left the shutters open as a red herring” whilst leaving by the patio door and down the stairs right past where Gerry was standing . . . (I’m not making this up !)


The Red Herring is a reference to a stinky fish dragged across a trail being followed by hounds in order to divert them by leaving a stronger scent.


In fact the main Red Herring which was pulled across the trail of the PJ was the insistence by 9 professional people that everything happened on the evening of Thursday 3rd May 2007 between 9:10pm and 9:50pm. (see also Appeal to authority, post.)

It was wholly successful.

The PJ, and almost everyone else concentrated on that day and date, those times, and the description of the situation in the apartment, and tried to make everything fit within them.

In fact even the alleged “evidential facts” do not fit.


But the Red Herring was sufficiently pungent to keep most of the Truth Hounds on the false trail for a long time.
Get back on the real trail and follow the squirrel - not the herring, and another much more productive line of enquiry shows itself.




4 The next fallacious argument they use is the Argumentum ad nauseam. The fallacy of Argument by constant repetition.

For this they quickly sought professional help. Bell Pottinger who were paid £0.5m, Hanover who were paid some unspecified amount, several gullible or paid tabloid journalists, and a series of spokesmen, culminating with the egregious Clarence Mitchell who went round the world repeating the official story ad nauseam, were employed specifically to promulgate this fallacy.


Their job was to repeat the word “abduction” as many times as possible, and to allow no other possibility to be promulgated

5 Intertwined in all this is another fallacy, Shifting the burden of proof

If you state something to be true, then you have the burden of proof, and it is not up to people who doubt you to provide any evidence against what you have said, until you yourself provide evidence of its truth.

Gerry does this outside the Court in Portugal. “where is. . . where is . . . Where is the child, we’re looking for that evidence, what other explanation can explain why she’s not here , . . .” [3] at 7:15




Simple answer – MANY – but it is not our responsibility to provide them, until you show us the evidence you have of abduction.

In fact the reporter presses the point “Are there any other explanations . . .?”
But Gerry shuts him down, turns away with “OK, any other questions.”

(See also false dilemma, post.)

After the initial stages we moved into TV interviews, articles in the press, visits to foreign countries, press articles and other things, and a new set of Logical fallacies came to the fore.


6 At this stage the Argumentum ad baculum - the argument with a big stick, became much more serious.
The famous or infamous – depending on your status as litigant – libel lawyers Carter-Ruck specialise in this and are acknowledged to be best in the world at what they do.

Never once did they allow their case to be sullied with evidence, or statements given under oath, or to be tested in open court by qualified forensic practitioners.

What they do is more devious.

They threaten their victims with penury, with impoverishment, by quoting exorbitant fees and costs, all of which will have to be paid if one word or phrase can be shown to be defamatory . . . and by so doing are able to get grudging and coerced agreement for signed undertakings, and qualified admissions. They then claim this as victory for their clients.

It is NOT.


None of it speaks to the truth or otherwise of what has been said.

It is therefore a fallacious argument.

The only time the truth has been even partially tested, the McCanns lost. And the Supreme Court of Portugal made the unprecedented statement that their status as suspects was still not settled.

The Argumentum ad baculum was then used to deadly effect against a random internet poster, Brenda Leyland, who after being hounded by Sky News and Martin Brunt over an entire day, took her own life. The ‘truth’ or otherwise of the contents of the ‘Dossier of Death’ may be judged by the fact that neither the Metropolitan Police, nor Leicestershire Police found sufficient in it to take any action at all. [vide Chapter 13]


7 The next fallacious argument used is the Argumentum ad numeram, the bandwagon argument, which is a species of Appeal to the people.




In Germany at a press conference they were asked whether they were involved in the disappearance.
Kate replies “To be honest I don’t actually think that is the case, I think that’s a small number of people who criticise us”. [4]. 0:27
Whether that statement is correct or not is immaterial. The issue is whether they were, or were not involved. The numbers of people who believe it or do not is entirely irrelevant to the truth of the matter.


8 They then moved to the Appeal to Authority.
This is an interesting one.
We are used to accepting the word of experts with knowledge outside our own personal sphere.


We might for example be impressed by a keynote speech on the Aetiology of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation if it came from an experienced consultant cardiologist.
We might be equally impressed by a description of the protocols and legal procedures necessary to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights if that came from a Queens Council


But perhaps not if these were the other way round.


The appeal to authority becomes fallacious if the authority itself is irrelevant or non-existent.


We saw that in the court in Portugal where one witness, Pike, held himself out to be a psychologist. His evidence was undermined when he did have to tell them that he held no such qualification.

Similarly the retired Detective Inspector Edgar gave evidence which was similarly undermined when he admitted that not only had he not read the book in question, but that neither had he been given, nor had he read, all the relevant documents.

Their evidence may in fact have been accurate, but their proven lack of authority condemned it.

The fallacy is overused. A man whose authority depends on his historical skill in playing Association football and of selling potato crisps is invited to give his views on the ‘political and socio-economic implications of Britain’s leaving the European Union’.
A woman with a décolletage whose size can vary with the seasons and a name which is similarly flexible, is invited to give her views, not about décolletage, but about matters unrelated to any of her known or supposed expertise.


9 This fallacy has a close relative, the Appeal to vague authority
Here the authority itself is presented as relevant, and may indeed be so, but the identity is so vague as to leave the statement as fallacious.
“Many scientists believe that the Universe is beginning to shrink”. Well, possibly, but if they are micro-biologists their views may not be as authoritative as those of, say, Astrophysicists.


Kate used this “So on the afternoon of Friday 11 May, the paralegal, accompanied by a barrister, flew out to Portugal. . . .
. . . the barrister first of all assured us that our behaviour could not be deemed negligent and was indeed ‘well within the bounds of reasonable parenting’. “ [p. 124]


We do not know the identity of the alleged barrister, nor whether she or he was a specialist in Family Law, nor of her or his experience, nor whether s/he has a list of relevant authorities and precedents up the sleeve of the gown . . . All we have is Kate’s statement that this was said.


10 As we move further on, we encounter the Argumentum ad hominem (abusive).
Anyone commenting on any aspect of the case was dismissed as a “troll”. The McCanns even had boxes into which they put correspondence they did not agree with, labelled ‘Nasty’, ‘Nutty’, and ‘Psychics Visions Dreams’
This vituperation continues to this day on the internet, with some people, suspected to be in the pay of the McCann team scanning the fora and blog sites and putting on-line vile abuse and threats of physical violence against anyone critical of the official story.
[See argumentum ad baculum, supra.]


11 The False dilemma is a favourite fallacious argument used by people in a tight corner
Gerry used it outside the court room in Portugal, where it was also a species of Shifting the burden of proof
His words “where is. . . where is . . . Where is the child, we’re looking for that evidence, what other explanation can explain why she’s not here , . . .” [3] at 7:15. not only try to shift the burden, but to suggest that there is no other valid alternative to the theory being proposed.


12 Every schoolboy knows . . .
Here a statement is made in such a way that there is a suggestion, which may be explicit or implicit, that anyone who does not agree is ignorant or stupid, or both.

It is used more frequently that we notice
“Everyone knows there is no link between smoking and lung cancer”. (Said for many decades)
“Only a fool would argue that speed kills, Look at Formula 1”. (Still used !)

And here we saw Gerry
GM: We’ve looked at evidence of cadaver dogs, and they are incredibly unreliable.
Q: Unreliable ?
GM: Cadaver dogs. Yes [5] at 4:39

The clear implication being that only a fool would disagree.

The truth might be that only a fool would refuse to read the detailed evidence of their incredible reliability and almost total infallibility.




We then entered a third phase. That of consideration of the McCanns themselves and the implications or their being prosecuted or convicted of a crime or offence in Portugal or England


Whilst these may be valid as arguments in themselves, they are fallacious when they are said to speak to the guilt or innocence of any concerned


13 Argumentum ad misericordiam. The Appeal to pity - think of their suffering in a Portuguese or English prison, think of the twins, and the breakup of the family, of the loss of their professional reputations, of the impact on their friends. Who would look after the house...?
Very clearly this says nothing at all about guilt or innocence, but it diverts neatly from that inconvenient issue.
14 This overlaps with the Argumentum ad sentimus. Emotional appeal,

Pity us, cry with us, light candles, hold vigils, pray during services, make programmes with tear-jerking poems about dead children for Radio 4, drop broad hints about mental strain, and even suggest incipient mental illness when convenient. (But obviously be in a position to deny it vehemently when it is not convenient, such as when it is suggested that mental illness might have been the reason behind an assault...)



15 Appeal to ignorance
We see this fallacy from various people. Some in the press have used it, as have some retired senior Police officers (all of whom ought to know better.)

They all amount to the same thing each time. A bald statement after a re-statement of usually irrelevant details, usually taking the form . . .

“That is why I can’t believe they killed their daughter . . .” or

“I can’t believe they were involved in the disappearance of their daughter . . ."





We are clearly supposed to follow this, relying on the Appeal to authority, but it is fallacious.
The fact that YOU cannot believe it is frankly of no interest, and immaterial to the argument. The question is DID THEY, or DID THEY NOT


16 The Genetic fallacy. This is normally used to destroy an argument, but here it is being used to positive effect. They are Doctors, THEREFORE they are not guilty.




There would rightly be outrage if anyone were to invoke it the other way round, and make loud noises about Dr. Harold Shipman, Dr Crippen, Dr Bodkin Adams, and others through history. [6]




17 The Slippery Slope. This can appear to be persuasive, and is clearly used to stop prosecutions of famous persons, with those cases labelled “Not in the public interest”
The argument runs –







Books on the subject and references


1 “How to win every argument: The use and abuse of Logic”. Madsen Pirie, Continuum International Publishing Group, (Available from amazon.co.uk)


2 Mastering Logical Fallacies”, Michael Witney, Zephyros Press, (Available from Amazon.co.uk)


3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k5Q7QZNfFA At 7:15


4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ3ForLXJT0 At 0:27


5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ULxqfGTVU&t=321s At 4:39


6 https://www.ranker.com/list/serial-killers-who-were-doctors/ranker-crime

Chapter 31: JON CLARKE – OLIVE PRESS LIES AND VIDEOTAPE


Foreword
Nota Bene: After reading the article under discussion I contacted “The Olive Press”, asking for a retraction and an apology. I received neither acknowledgment nor reply
A week later I sent a repeat email.
This time Jon Clarke, publisher and editor replied, denying that anything was ‘libel’.
I sent a suggested form of words for the retraction and apology.
He replied repeating that they did not consider that there was any libel.


In view of this I believe I am entitled to assume that there is no reasonable prospect of a retraction, a correction, nor an apology.
The attitude of “The Olive Press” towards defamation may also be clear, as it was expressed in an article of November 2011, trumpeting under a 44-point-bold banner headline –
          WHY LIBEL IS NO BIG DEAL IN SPAIN                                                                   [1]

In the previous Chapter “Fake News” I looked at an article by Jon Clarke, the owner and publisher of a free newspaper in southern Spain “The Olive Press”.
I showed how that article, published in 2017, was seriously divergent from, and often contrary to facts as reported by other people. Notably, and potentially seriously, it directly contradicted much of what Kate McCann herself had written in her autobiography “madeleine”. But there the matter rested. It was discussed on several Fora, but was largely dismissed as “the usual nonsense”.

In late March 2019 I went into a supermarket in southern Spain, purchased a bottle of wine and wrapped it in one of the free tabloid papers helpfully supplied at the check-out for this purpose.
On this occasion it was “The Olive Press”. Vol.13 Issue 314 to be precise.

On page 3 is an article on the recent Netflix documentary about missing Madeleine Beth McCann, saying “The Olive Press” played a “starring role” [sic] and entitled “Hoping for Answers”.
The article is not attributed and is written in the third person, but is clearly by Jon Clarke.
As the publisher and editor of the paper he is ultimately responsible for its content.

In it I am identified by name, occupation and location, and then subjected to the routine, gratuitous ad-hominen insults and abuse sadly so typical of what we have come to expect of those who uncritically support the ‘official’ story put out by Team McCann and their acolytes and apologists.

In that article, 7 column inches are devoted to Clarke and the Netflix documentary, whilst 3.5 column inches are devoted to maligning and defaming me. 293 words - v - 140 words
One third of the entire article is devoted to entirely gratuitous abuse.

Gratuitous in that it does not address the central point of the article, which is to emphasise the importance of Clarke and “The Olive Press” in the Netflix programmes.
Gratuitous in that yet again it sets up and then knocks down the straw-man argument about “proving that the McCanns did not kill Madeline’ which it is unlikely anyone actually believes.

I am a long since retired police officer as he accurately states, from a previous millennium and perhaps from a more robust generation. I am hardened to abuse of the sort we come to expect from drunks, drug users, criminals and tabloid journalists.

But there is more. He goes on to make four distinct statements about me.
It is in the public domain, published in 100,000 copies, with huge numbers of readers both on-line and via Facebook and Android apps - his figures, not mine - and so I give a quote

“The former Nottinghamshire copper has long trolled that the parents were guilty and even produced a libellous pamphlet on why they did it. . . .
. . [he] once tried to claim that Olive Press editor Clarke could not have been in Praia da Luz on the morning after Maddie’s disappearance.
In a disgusting blog post he also somehow suggested that Clarke may have been in some way involved.”

Strong stuff. So perhaps a measured and proportionate response is not altogether unexpected.

Let us pick it apart. Let us be clinically detached, ignore the sneering and abusive tone, forget the libel, and stick to the facts of what is being said. Keep our eye on the squirrel.

•       “Libellous pamphlet”
No pamphlet in this case has ever been adjudged to be libellous. Clarke is fully aware of this

•       [he] . . . even produced . . a pamphlet . . .
I have never produced any pamphlet, libellous or otherwise. Clarke knows this

•       once tried to claim that Clarke could not have been in Praia da Luz . . .
This is not true. Clarke knows this is not true

•       he … suggested that Clarke may have been in some way involved
This is not true. Clarke knows this is not true

Here we have four distinct and discrete untruths. Jon Clarke knows that each one is untrue.

We can be absolutely sure of this because in each case he has previously published the ’real, true’ facts in other places including his own newspaper. He has previously published the identity of the person who did produce a leaflet and engage in ‘robust discussion‘. And it was not me. So these are not mistakes, errors, typos, mis-information, general editorial sloppiness, nor any of the other excuses normally trotted out on these occasions.
 It logically follows that Jon Clarke, Publisher and Editor of “The Olive Press”, is a liar
and that his newspaper “The Olive Press” deliberately and by design publishes lies.


That might have been the end of the matter. As a person of reasonable fortitude I could have simply accepted that within the fortnight the cat litter trays, the parrot cages and the rubbish bins would have been cleaned and emptied, and that the lies would have disappeared with them – notwithstanding in the modern world they remain forever floating in the aether cloud of the internet.

But I suspected that I was dealing with something else; that I was dealing with organised and concerted mendacity. It is in the first part of the article, in which Clarke’s appearance in the Netflix documentary is featured, that we find very significant differences between what is being said now, and what was said in 2017, only two years ago, authored by the same Jon Clarke.

We need to examine extracts from these three versions together

2017 article in “The Olive Press”                                                                                            [5]

      “But for a couple of loving parents to murder their daughter, bury and cover all traces in an hour while on holiday is stretching it just a bit too far.
      But this didn’t stop the Portuguese police from charging them… “
      “When I arrived at about 11.45am I was firstly able to walk into the apartment, where I introduced myself to the McCanns and told them I would do everything I could to help.
      “The only reporter on the scene till late that evening – apart from Sky News reporter Kate Burley, who happened to be on holiday there – I spent time grilling neighbours, . . ”
      “Incredibly, we had to wait till late afternoon before a couple of sniffer dogs had arrived, which was amateur to say the least, given that Maddie had been reported missing a full 18 hours earlier.

2019 article in “The Olive Press”                                                                                             [4]

      “The Olive Press Editor, 50, was the first journalist on the scene in Praia da Luz the day after police began their disastrous attempt to find the toddler.
      “ . . he takes the crew around the resort, and reveals his shock at how laid back the police operation was and how he met the McCanns in those early hours.
      “Initially there was just a small bit of tape in front of the apartment, and then a bit at the side where the patio doors were,” he revealed in the film.
      “It wouldn’t have been difficult to walk in and have a look round. It certainly wasn’t Fort Knox,” he added.

2019 transcript from Netflix documentary                                                                            [7]

      “This is it, this is it.”
      “This is now what was the Mark Warner complex, the Ocean Club, this one here 5a
      “I said hello to them as they were leaving and introduced myself to them as a reporter from the Mail, and they said “Hi”, and I think they may have also said “thanks for coming”.

      “That was really unfortunately all I could get out of them at that point, so there really wasn’t much opportunity, sadly, to talk to the family about what had happened the night before.

      “Initially there was maybe just a small bit of tape here in front of the apartment, and a little bit at the side where the patio doors were.”
      “And then there was a note on the steps leading up, saying ‘Don’t go past this point’.

      It went up, and I looked in and the door was open and I think I tried to speak.
I didn’t, . . . I didn’t want to push my way through the door or into the apartment which obviously would have been a crime scene, so it wouldn’t have been appropriate to do that, but I got the impression it wouldn’t have been difficult to do that at all, to sort of walk in and take a look around, you know it certainly wasn’t Fort Knox.”

Readers will already realise that some of this is contradictory. In 2017 he says he walked into the apartment and spoke to the McCanns there. In 2019 he says he spoke to the McCanns as they left, and then did not enter the apartment. So let us deconstruct these “versions of the truth”

We find a series of direct statements
          He arrived about 11:45am
          He was the only reporter till late that evening
          He was the first journalist on the scene
          Kate [Kay] Burley was there
          He walked into the apartment
          He did not walk into the apartment
          He met the McCanns in the apartment
          He met the McCanns as they were leaving
          He introduced himself, and told them he would do everything to help
          He introduced himself, and they said ‘Hi’, and may have said ‘thanks for coming’
          There were no dogs until late afternoon
          The Portuguese police charged the McCanns

What is truly astonishing about this whole series of statements is not merely that some contradict others. It is that there is documentary evidence available in the public domain in the form of professionally recorded contemporaneous Video, which proves beyond a reasonable doubt that every one of those statements is untrue.
And Clarke, a professional journalist who has access to the internet and to search engines as we all do, must be fully aware that his lies can be, and will be exposed.
And yet he persists, and refuses to correct or apologise.

          He arrived about 11:45am

In her autobiography Kate covers the departure from the complex with the PJ for the initial statements. The statements are timed with Gerry McCann’s beginning at 1115, Tanner and Oldfield at 1130. Portimão police station is about 32 km from the apartment, and google.maps estimates the time to drive at around 32 min.
Allowing time for organising rooms, paper, interviewers and interpreters and other domestic matters this would indicate a departure time of around 1015 - 1030. This accords with Kate’s book, where she says “it was about 10am by the time a couple of PJ officers turned up”.

What Clarke has failed to notice or factor into his story is the one hour time difference between Spain, where he lives, and Portugal. This was pointed out in the ‘blog’ comments on the 2017 article, but he did not seem to grasp the importance of the detail.

This puts Clarke in PdL around 1045 local time or shortly before. In time to see the McCanns, Payne, Tanner and Oldfield leaving with the PJ in fact. And there is clear video evidence of this.

          He was the only reporter on the scene until late that evening

This is one of Clarke’s most bizarre statements. It seems totally pointless to print such an egregious lie about such an apparently unimportant issue.
The area was ‘swarming’ with reporters and camera crews. A group of 6 reporters including Clarke congregated in the car park outside apartment 5H waiting for them to leave. Clarke is seen on film speaking to one reporter, a woman, and standing within a yard of Len Port, a British journalist based just along the coast who had been there since 0830

          He was the first journalist on the scene . . .

This lie is repeated, even in 2019 when Clarke knew that the Netflix film would include video from 2007 showing this was simply untrue, and despite having access to Port’s book. He could have used the construction “among the first” but again chooses to print another untruth. It is unclear why. Len Port arrived about 0830, and has not only written about this, but was filmed by one of the camera crews. Port does not claim to have been the first – probably because he has no evidence that this was so, possibly because it is entirely irrelevant.

          Kate [Kay] Burley was there

In the 2017 article he names Kate Burley. Commentators on Clarke’s blog site pointed out the mistake in the name, and he altered the on-line version to KAY Burley. It was then pointed out that video exists of Ms Burley presenting the news in the UK that day, and that the person in question was actually a weather presenter, who was identified and named. He has never corrected the untruth, or apologised.

          He walked into the apartment

“When I arrived at about 11.45am I was firstly able to walk into the apartment, where I introduced myself to the McCanns”

In fact the place had been sealed off the previous evening, the McCanns who had been in another apartment overnight – the Payne’s, 5H – either ‘keeping vigil’ (Kate), or sleeping (Gerry) moved their remaining possessions early that morning into their new apartment, 5G, and shortly after 1000 were on their way to Portimao with the PJ
During the morning and afternoon the forensic people were in the apartment, there were dog handlers outside, and the place was crawling with reporters and film crews

          He did not walk into the apartment

In the Netflix documentary Clarke has now changed his story. He will have been aware that Netflix had access to the contemporaneous video footage, and was planning to include some clips. Those include footage of the tape and the warning notice he refers to.

“I didn’t want to push my way through the door or into the apartment which obviously would have been a crime scene, so it wouldn’t have been appropriate to do that, but I got the impression it wouldn’t have been difficult to do that at all, to sort of walk in and take a look around, “

His use of the negative of the conditional perfect tense - “wouldn’t have been difficult” - is a clear admission that he did not enter. He also excuses himself from so doing by rightly stating that it would have been inappropriate because it was a crime scene – or at least a missing person scene – and because it was taped off.

          He met the McCanns in the apartment

But the McCanns were not there. They had spent the night in the Payne’s apartment, and then the entire day in Portimão. They arrived back in PdL around 2030 and went straight to 5G, their newly allocated apartment. Food was provided and they did not go out again until 2200 to give the short press conference by torchlight.

          He met the McCanns as they were leaving

This is more intriguing. For this you should view the relevant video clip above, which can be slowed, and ‘clicked’ frame by frame. Full details are given in the Appendices. A series of annotated stills from the video can be seen at Appendix B.

Clarke is seen standing in the car park among the group of six journalists. He then leaves toward the camera, shaking hands with one of the 5 GNR police officers. As he moves out of shot to the left, Gerry McCann is seen in the distance leaving the stairwell, and walking into the car park on the right of shot.
From this point the camera follows the McCanns, Oldfield and Tanner as they walk with a PJ officer in a leather jacket to the waiting cars. They are joined by Payne, and are seeing getting into the cars and driving away.
Clarke is seen emerging from a row of marked police vehicles on the right of shot, striding into the middle of the road close to Len Port, and taking a photo. At no point is he close to the McCanns. Seconds before the car pulls away Payne is seen winding down the front passenger window and says something indistinct.
So unless Clarke shouted at the open window as the car begins to drive away it is unlikely that this polite exchange could have taken place as described. 
“I said hello to them as they were leaving and introduced myself to them as a reporter from the Mail, and they said “Hi”, and I think they may have also said “thanks for coming”.

          He told them he would do everything to help

It is unclear what part of a journalists professional duty it is to “help”. It suggests that the official story is already known. I shall return to this later

          He introduced himself, and they said ‘Hi’, and may have said ‘thanks for coming’

This is a very different story, and implies something far shorter and less formal than the previous version.

          There were no dogs until late afternoon

Here Clarke uses the words. “Incredibly, we had to wait till late afternoon. . .”
It is certainly incredible. It is unbelievable. We do not believe it.
For the simple reason that it is not true. It is another palpable lie.

 Len Port describes dogs searching during the early hours of the morning -
“As I moved around the village on foot there was at least one obvious manifestation of police activity. Police officers with search dogs on leads were vigorously combing the vicinity of the apartments, the area around the village church, on down towards the seashore and along the full length of the long curving beach. It was all being done in silence.”

In the few video clips referred to it is possible to identify no fewer than four dogs with their handlers. Two are black, one is black and white, and the fourth is a large golden Labrador. And these are only those filmed in the immediate vicinity of the apartment. Len Port is clearly describing yet more further afield.

To ensure that this was correct I contacted a Portuguese journalist who has followed this case
I referred to sentences taken from Clarke’s 2017 article
“From the word go, they did not take this crime seriously. “
“Incredibly, we had to wait till late afternoon before a couple of sniffer dogs had arrived, which was amateur to say the least, given that Maddie had been reported missing a full 18 hours earlier.”

I received the following email [edited with grammar and spelling corrected]

Around 2.00 am, May 4th, there were already more than a dozen GNR officers at Praia da Luz. The lieutenant-colonel in charge of Algarve area also was there, around 3.00 am. He called off-duty officers and brought others from at least 6 precincts in the Algarve. There were also 2 K2 [dog] units, from Portimão.
Around 4.00 am, the GNR commander called headquarters in Lisbon and asked them to send more K2 units, dogs more specialised in searching for missing persons. Those 3 units left Lisbon around 4.30 am and arrived at Praia da Luz around 8.00, starting immediately the searches.
In the early hours of the morning of May 4th, there were more than 20 GNR officers at the place, all access to the building was cordoned off, nobody could get closer than 20 meters, so everything that Clarke says is just a lie…

Even more incredibly, the dog van and handlers were in the car park only feet from where Clarke walked as he left the scene. One camera crew was there taking film of the dogs and of the shutters, and was itself filmed doing so by a second film crew. It is inconceivable that Clarke did not notice, and so the inevitable conclusion is that for some reason he is choosing yet again to lie.

          The Portuguese police charged the McCanns
“But this didn’t stop the Portuguese police from charging them… “

It is difficult to know in which category of mendacity to place this, or whether to try to excuse it on the grounds of crass stupidity. But Clarke is not a stupid man. He is reasonably well educated and his craft depends on the use of the English language. He lives in a country with a Continental legal system ultimately based in Roman Law, and will be, or should be aware of the different roles adopted by GNR police, PJ, and of the role of the Public Prosecutor.

The McCanns have never been charged with anything. There is insufficient evidence to do so.
For many people that is the “causus belli”.

It is unlikely that Clarke has misinterpreted ‘arguido’ status as “charging them”. Most people by now understand the meaning of that term as ‘formal suspect’, equivalent to being ‘interviewed under caution’ despite the McCanns trying to deny that interpretation on oath at Leveson.

It may be instructive to compare Clarke’s mendacious style and somewhat Cavalier approach to truth, facts and evidence with what another British journalist, Len Port, who lives a short distance along the coast in Portugal, says in his book 'People in a Place Apart’

Ch. 24. THE MADELEINE MYSTERY 
[Extract.] On arrival in the village before 8.30am on Friday 4th May 2007, I expected to see some urgent activity. A young British girl, Madeleine McCann, had gone missing the previous night. At first I saw no movement at all. The village was silent and still. While driving around, I came across a single police vehicle parked on the roadside at a junction of minor roads towards the back of the village. I parked directly behind it. A few uniformed police officers were standing outside a block of holiday apartments. The only other people in sight were two women in conversation close to a corner ground floor apartment, 5A.                                                                                                         [11]

Port then walked round the village, and was filmed by one of the many camera crews who were also beginning to arrive during the morning.
This is a still from one such video, showing Port by the pool to the south of the McCanns’ apartment. The heavy plastic tarpaulin screens of the notorious Tapas bar are clearly visible in front of him behind the yellow umbrellas.
If we look at the shadows of Port and of the palm tree and then replicate them on a N-S image from Google Maps, we observe that the image was recorded in the early morning, as stated.


Later in the chapter Port says
“As I moved around the village on foot there was at least one obvious manifestation of police activity. Police officers with search dogs on leads were vigorously combing the vicinity of the apartments, the area around the village church, on down towards the seashore and along the full length of the long curving beach. It was all being done in silence.”
“The tranquility outside apartment 5A gradually changed. As the morning and afternoon wore on, the number of people arriving on the scene steadily increased. Curious passers-by mingled with reporters, photographers, TV cameramen and staff manning outside broadcast vans. A mixture of Portuguese, British and other nationalities, we all stood around asking each other questions and wondering what had happened to the little girl.”

Paulo Reis makes trenchant observations about this phenomenon of journalists and reporters ‘feeding off each other’ in his blog article.                                                                                              [14]

How much more of this can we take ?

These untruths are in a different league from the normal Team McCann and Mitchell mendacity.
We have become inured to the McCann tactic of simple reversal of statements when the objective facts prove inconvenient

* The curtains were wide open - v - they were tight closed
* The abductor got in through broken shutters - v - did not enter through the window
* Gerry entered through the locked front door - v - through the unlocked patio door
* They had no wristwatches - v - they checked the time by their watches
* We never lied to anyone - v - we told a lie about Gerry having a stomach complaint

The McCanns are stuck with those lies for all time. They will be endlessly repeated whenever any claim is made that the McCanns are telling the truth. They can never escape them.
The late Antony Sharples, writing as John Blacksmith, discussed this in “The Foundation Lie”  [13]

But Clarke’s untruths are of a different order of magnitude.

To redeem himself and to try to recover some scintilla of professional credibility Clarke has to admit that it didn’t happen AT ALL.
He has to admit that he simply made it up; to state openly, that as an‘Investigative Journalist’, or indeed a journalist of any hue, and the publisher of a newspaper and on-line outlet, he simply invented a story; invented a meeting, invented dialogue, and twisted the available facts to fit some unknown agenda.

It is no longer open to him to say, “Well it did, but just not quite in that way”

He either DID go into apartment 5A on arrival, or he did NOT

He either DID speak to the McCanns in the apartment shortly after he arrived in PdL on 4/5/7, or he did NOT

There either WERE police dogs present or there were NOT

The McCanns were either CHARGED or they were NOT

And these lies are now preserved on video, to be viewed by millions, exposed over and over again, for all time. He is stuck with it for all eternity.

Even if he had no ultimate editorial control the sequence must be:
- Netflix consult him about events
- Clarke inflates his own role about being first on the scene and first to speak to the McCanns
- Netflix write the screenplay to incorporate what Clarke said in the 2017 article
- Clarke is an important and integral part of the filming and editorial team
- Netflix put that part of the interview as voice-over to the video clip for emphasis
- "The Olive Press" then trumpets itself as playing a 'starring role' in the documentary


In the film he has – or they have – now completely changed the order of events from –
2017 - went in and THEN spoke to the McCanns in the apartment. 
“When I arrived at about 11.45am I was firstly able to walk into the apartment, where I introduced myself to the McCanns”.

to a complete reversal – 
2019 - spoke to the McCanns as they were leaving (the film implying this was outdoors) and THEN went to the apartment
“I said hello to them as they were leaving and introduced myself to them as a reporter from the Mail, and they said “Hi”, and I think they may have also said “thanks for coming”.

Only then does he go to the gate and the stairs with the tape
And we see the notice indicating that even he as reporter should not enter
He waves to indicate something out of shot
And says : "It went up, and I looked in and the door was open, and I think I tried to speak.”
The words “It went up, . . .” are, curiously, a voice-over to a clip from 2007 of the stairs, the tape and the notice with an unidentified woman in shot, left, who is clearly holding a microphone, clearly a news reader and speaking directly to camera probably LIVE.
And his use of the construction "It went up," leads us to understand "The prohibition / the cordon / the exclusion zone went up, . . .
which makes his reluctance or failure to go into the apartment even more understandable and acceptable.

By saying he “tried to speak” he is also, of course, clearly admitting that there were already people IN the apartment to be spoken to. We know these were police and Forensic officers. As does he.
Which may be why he only “tried to speak” as his Portuguese may not be as fluent as his Spanish, and perhaps why he did not want to risk a confrontation and possible arrest, as he explains -

I didn’t . . . I didn’t want to push my way through the door or into the apartment which obviously would have been a crime scene, so it wouldn’t have been appropriate to do that,

[Just as an aside, the repeated “I didn’t . . [pause] . . I didn’t . . .” is potentially an interesting insight into the possible mental turmoil he may have been feeling as he repeated this version of a story he knew to be untrue and which he feared might one day be exposed]

The fact remains that the McCanns are in the shot – in an unbroken ‘real time’ sequence – from the car park, along the road, and getting into the car, and at no time does anyone approach them close enough to have a conversation. Tanner keeps behind the group, and Oldfield is seen using his body and arm as a physical shield the entire time. The sequence is unbroken until the first car is seen driving off and the camera pans to take in the entire convoy. The only ‘window of opportunity’ is when Paynes opens the passenger window, a sequence of rather less than 6 seconds, before the vehicle moves away.

Viewers must draw their own conclusions about whether Clarke really 
“ . . . said hello to them as they were leaving and introduced myself to them as a reporter from the Mail, and they said “Hi”, and I think they may have also said “thanks for coming”.

We note his use of the deliberately vague “I think they may . . .” Is this his escape route ?

If so it is a very long way from the 2017 version. 
“When I arrived at about 11.45am I was firstly able to walk into the apartment, where I introduced myself to the McCanns and told them I would do everything I could to help.”

Does Clarke have an escape route from that ?
Or can we now accurately describe the 2017 version as a Lie, on the simple grounds that

- not that this is just sloppy writing about poorly remembered events –
- not that this is mere tabloid trash journalism –
- not that this is nothing more sinister than trying to sell a few more copies with ludicrous attention grabbing “Freddie-Starr-ate-my-hamster” headlines –
- not that this is innocent mistake or inadvertent misunderstanding –

but that this is a quite deliberate, studied, careful and calculated series of untruths.
Falsehoods published to a very particular end.

And if so, would this make Clarke a calculated liar, or perhaps, since he is very free with the accusation of “conspiracy theorist”, is he himself merely a highly paid pawn in something much bigger, of which perhaps even he knows nothing ?

Cui Bono ? Who benefits ?

What was the point of lying about me ? What did it benefit anyone ?
What was the point of lying by claiming to be the only, or even the first journalist at the scene ?
What was the point of lying by saying he went into the apartment ?
What was the point of lying by saying that he spoke to the McCanns, there and then ?
What was the point of lying by saying there were no dogs; by saying that Kate (or Kay) Burley was there; of claiming that a road crew was still digging up the street “literally right outside the apartment“ ?

Why did he not write articles based on the truth? It can be just as critical, just as sneering, just as disparaging. I am no journalist, but it is not difficult to do.                                           [APP C]


What led or has caused Clarke to publish this entire series of egregious, false and defamatory statements in his own newspaper “The Olive Press” over many years, to say nothing of the ludicrous ‘new leads’ that were then so eagerly picked up by “The Sun” and others ? [Olive Press passim.]


Jon Clarke and “The Olive Press” are no strangers to criticism of their antics.

In 2013 FAPE, the Federación de Associationes de Periodistas de España - the Spanish Journalists’ Association, handed down a judgment against “The Olive Press” and Jon Clarke for having published a long article entitled “Maddie? Yes, but not the one we were looking for . . .” and found it infringed Articles 4 and 13 of the FAPE Ethical Code for not having respected the right to personal and family privacy of M.A., a minor, and of her parents, Mr. L. A. and Mrs. R. E., and also did not bother to check the sources of the information.                                                                               [APP E]

The judgment continues [my translation]. “In the reasoning of this resolution it states that the journalist has acted with remarkable flippancy and published a scandalous story based on very flimsy material. The information published in "The Olive Press" is an example of irresponsible sensationalism to attract the attention of the prospective reader. Its content is pure charlatanry, "gossip" in the language in which it has been written and in journalistic language “amarillismo", [sensationalist journalism] always reprehensible but much more when an innocent subject of the information can be endangered”

The facts are that “The Olive Press” latched on to a young British girl who lived with her parents in a small village in southern Spain. It was her misfortune to be called Madeleine. Her photo was published, against the specific wishes of her parents, the family home was clearly identified, and inevitably hordes of tourists descended to take photos. The article bore the sub-title "Has Olive Press solved the connection of the Axarquia with the disappeared Madeleine McCann?”

The answer was of course “No” which rendered the article otiose, irrelevant, and even more reprehensible.

Spurious ‘facts’ were invented about the parent’s employment and supposed travel to Thailand,

The journalist in question was contacted by the parents and exonerated herself saying that it was not her decision to publish the article in that way, but that of the editor Jon Clarke.

The incident in question had occurred over two years before publication.

Even more revealing is the fact that Clarke and “The Olive Press” had not contacted Operation Grange, nor apparently the Portuguese PJ with their ‘revelation’, and in reply to the complaint by the girl’s father it appears merely sent the draft of another article about their daughter, saying that in view of the complaint they had decided not to publish it.

The panel also noted “the report published in "The Olive Press" dominated its news items and pretends to be "investigative journalism" although this was cursory and elementary”

She was merely one of many victims of ludicrous and lurid Olive Press stories.

A paedophile took Madeleine McCann, not her parents - (by which we assume that what Clarke means was not that a paedophile had intended to take her parents . . . ! ?
I saw Maddie in a supermarket on the Costa del Sol
Ex-soldier claims he saw Madeleine McCann by a Nerja swimming pool
Spanish Maddie mystery solved
I saw Madeleine McCann playing outside Costa del Sol beach restaurant
Could Maddie be alive and well in Nerja?
Gypsy link to Maddie

Article 13 of the FAPE Code is very clear
Art. 13. The commitment to the search for truth will always lead the journalist to publish only facts of which he knows the origin, without falsifying documents or omitting essential information, as well as not publishing false, misleading or distorted information.
In consequence:
a) A journalist must substantiate the information published, which includes the duty to check the sources and to give the opportunity to the affected person to offer their own version of the facts.
b) Journalists are warned that the spread of false, misleading or distorted material, will result in an obligation to correct the error with all speed and with the same typographic and / or audiovisual display used for its dissemination. Likewise, they will publish an apology when appropriate.                                 [APP E]


What is the force which drives a journalist who has been paid in the past by News International, to publish over a long period a series of stories clearly designed to defame and traduce the officers and the organisation of the Polícia Judiciária (PJ), and the officers and the organisation of the Guarda Nacional Republicana (GNR), not to mention the British Police and specialists including a dog handler and the many journalists and camera crews who attended the scene in the first days.

What is the motive behind insisting that the investigation was anything but the best that could reasonably be done under difficult circumstances, particularly given the misleading and contradictory information supplied to them by ‘witnesses’ ?

As a wider issue, what or who caused the British Press to turn from initial professional detachment to an all-out assault on anyone who dared question the ‘official’ story put out by the McCanns and their large team of advisors and sponsors ? An assault which manifestly continues to this day.
 
A Portuguese journalist, Paulo Reis, has interested himself in this latter aspect, writing first on his blog site about three undercover visits he paid to PdL to observe the manipulation of other journalists  - particularly British - and recording their ‘methods’ of obtaining information, and more recently authoring a book, “A Guerra os McCann”. ('The McCann's War') which is currently on sale, with the English translation in final proof reading.

In it he is able to identify the exact date from which the British Press changed from normal professional detachment to a concerted and mendacious attack on the Portuguese, their lifestyle, their Police and their legal system.

We remember that the McCanns notoriously paid Lord Bell of Bell-Pottinger half a million pounds –we suppose out of the “fund” to keep their story on the front pages of the papers for a year, whilst simultaneously complaining to Leveson about ‘Press Intrusion’.

Which then raises the question - was Clarke himself an innocent dupe ?

And here we are forced back to the so-called “conspiracy theory” that much of what the British press have published from very early has been on a concerted attempt to deflect from proper consideration and analysis of the available evidence.

How many ‘pieces of silver’ are the Press and journalists paid to keep this up ?
Who is controlling it, and why ?


Post scriptum
Everything I have said is based on materials freely available to anyone who cares about the truth.
I have no special skills, no sources of information nor access to documents or photos and videos not in the public domain.
Everything here is available to every journalist and every police officer and every member of the general public – everywhere.
I have tried to provide extensive references, and in the Appendices are series of photos, made up of screen shots taken from the video footages from Friday 4th May 2007, so that readers may draw their own conclusions.
If I have made mistakes, they are entirely mine, and I will correct and apologise.





Is this all just silly nit-picking over a short article in a free Tabloid supermarket paper ?

My integrity has been impugned and I feel entitled to respond proportionately, by addressing the cohort of people who follow this case and who read the evidence and opinions about it.

Clarke is a journalist and publisher. His craft is the use of the English Language. He is an educated man. He speaks standard received English, using normal grammar and syntax
without any noticeable regional or national dialect forms.

When he writes “I did this, then, there” we can suppose he reasonably intends us to believe it.
If we then find we can not, serious questions are raised.
Amongst the serious educated British ex-pat population round Ronda the word most often used about The Olive Press was “embarrassing”. To move the paper from that to “consistently mendacious, unreliable and abusive” is a serious step.
The paper’s reputation may take some time to recover.

Post-Post Scriptum
Whether Netflix will be impressed to discover that they have been so cynically manipulated to put out across the world this series of untruths is not yet known. Only time will tell.

New chapter published today 13 May 2019

Chapter 32: ON LIES AND CONSPIRACIES



In his recent book Paulo Reis lays bare the development of the campaign by the British Press against the PJ and Dr Amaral. Jon Clarke and “The Olive Press” were at the forefront of this.

Here I try to trace the origin of one of the more persistent Conspiracy Theories.
I start by examining three apparently unconnected circumstances, and will try to show how they overlap and how these coincidences can so easily be interpreted as being something different.

Having established that “The Olive Press” is somewhat relaxed about the truth, cavalier with ‘facts’ but very free with invective and personal and public abuse of those who do not accept every word of what they say, let us turn to one of the more interesting of the conspiracy theories.

I want to go through this carefully so that errors can be identified.

We start with Clarke

Jon Clarke has said, twice, that he was phoned about 0715 on Friday 4/5/7, and that he left his home about 30 minutes later. He is very precise about this time, and repeated it in the Netflix voice-over emphasising “and it was 7 or 7:30”

2017 – I RECEIVED the call at 7.15am . . . I was on the road half an hour later

That puts him on the road at 0745 Spanish time (technically CEST = CET+1 since we are in ‘summer’ time)

The distance from his home to Praia da Luz calculated from google maps is 404 km

It is 5 km from his home to the main road, along single track rural lanes and narrow roads with blind corners.

Sunrise was at 0715, civil dawn at 0645.

What follows is included so that anyone with the inclination can look at google maps, or google earth, and follow this for themselves. It is even possible using “street view” to travel the entire route and see it from a driver’s point of view. . Any errors can then be identified.

We join the main A-374 and the next 150k is on a two lane mountain road winding up gorges and through passes in the mountains of Andalucia, west onto the A-357 and then turning north onto the A-384 and the beginnings of the rolling central meseta at Puerto Serrato. The speed limit is 90 kph, but for much of the route this is simply not possible. In many places it is restricted for safety to less than this, and in many stretches overtaking is prohibited, or simply too dangerous.

From there it is less winding, more open, but still only two lane, and still within the national speed limit of 90 kph.

As we approach the Sevilla ring road there is a series of junctions where the limit is as low as 40
The approach to Sevilla and the ring road are officially motorway, but are heavily used and frequently congested. There are many junctions, and the short stretch to the bridge has 4 of the top 24 Sevilla congestion areas.
Clarke would have hit the ring road about 90 minutes after leaving home, so on his timing around 0915. Roughly the peak of the ‘rush hour’.

We skirt Sevilla to the south and west on the A-4 and the SE-30 on the high level bridge over the Ship Canal, with a rigidly enforced speed limit of 60 kph. In reality traffic usually passes much more slowly than this
After crossing another bridge over the Guadalquivir and negotiating a series of tricky junctions and filters which cause all traffic to slow even further, we head out west on the A-49 motorway up a
long slope out of the valley, past IKEA, and towards Huelva. Then after another 125 km. across the bridge forming the border with Portugal, also restricted to 70 kph, it is renumbered as the A-22.

The “Border” is nothing more than a collection point for motorway tolls for ‘foreign’ vehicles, - if they can be bothered to pull off the motorway and stop. There is no physical barrier, as both Spain and Portugal are within the Schengen area, and have been since 1995. Under the treaty the border may only be reinstated, “for a short period where there is a serious threat to that state's public policy or internal security”.
Approaching Lagos and PdL we leave the motorway, the roads again become smaller, and the speed limits drop. From the border to PdL is given as 137 km, a further hour and quarter, 


Google.maps gives an estimated total driving time of 4 hrs 20 minutes including the part I have not shown from his house to the main road. Allowing for ‘flexibility’ with speed limits, and the inevitable comfort stop we are still left with an arrival time of around 1200.
Clarke states he arrived at 1145. But we must charitably assume he means Spanish time (Central European Summer Time = GMT+2, or CET+1).
Portugal is on British Summer time, (Western European Summer Time = GMT+1) so the time he reports arriving would have been 1045 -1100 local time.

NB. It should be noted that this is the ONLY route. There is no short cut across country, for the simple reason that there are no roads crossing the Doñana wetland Natural park to the south of Sevilla. (See map supra) If you want to go to Portugal or Huelva from the south there is simply no choice but to take this route. The ring road bridge is the most southerly crossing point for road traffic. This may easily be confirmed by glancing at google maps.

So to repeat, Clarke’s own timing puts him in PdL around 1045-1100 local time


But let us approach this issue from the other end.

Kate McCann reports the PJ officers arriving to take them to Portimão about 1000. The use of this phrase and its context clearly indicates their leaving some time ‘shortly after’ 1000.

The extract is instructive.

“It was about 10am by the time a couple of PJ officers turned up. . . .They told us they had to take us and our friends to the police station in Portimão. We couldn’t all go at once as somebody needed to look after the children. After some discussion, it was agreed that Gerry and I, Jane, David and Matt would be interviewed first and the PJ would come back for the others later in the day.”

The implication is clear. Kate is expecting us to believe that this is the first time they had realised they would need to go to a police station or make statements, and that until that point no thought had been given by anyone within the group to the logistics, nor to Child-care arrangements. How long the “some discussion” took is not explained.

Whether any of this is even credible is another matter entirely.

The McCanns and Tapas friends were taken the 30 minutes to Portimão and GM’s statement is recorded as starting at 1115

When we factor in organisation time at the police station, parking, re-grouping, finding suitable rooms, drinks, writing and recording materials, interpreters, introductions, preparation, briefings – all of which must be translated into Portuguese – and then all the other ancillary tasks, as we must, it is apparent that they must have left PdL some time before 1030. Probably as early as 1015
Which is what Kate indicates.

It is clear from the video evidence, however, that by that point –1015 – Clarke was already deeply embedded at the scene. He had found the location, found somewhere to park, picked up his camera and note pad, had obviously introduced and identified himself to at least one senior GNR officer – with whom he shakes hands later – had determined the McCann’s location, had spoken to the other reporters at the scene – he is seen comparing notes with one young female – and is then shown striding away to the left out of the car park area a little time before the McCanns and the Tapas friends begin to emerge in the background on the right to make their way to the cars waiting some distance up the road.

Consideration of all of this leads to a suggestion that the entire sequence of events as reported by Clarke should be pushed back. Certainly by at least half an hour. possibly considerably more.

Even more realistically, given that his car at the time was a robust and functional family vehicle, not a fast sports model, and that as a responsible and fiercely protective family man he does not take unnecessary risks with his own or his family’s safety, and given that in his own words he did not know what the full story was or even if the child would be found before his arrival, indicating clearly that there was for him no overwhelming sense of urgency, we should perhaps push this back yet more. From Netflix –

“I don't think they said whether it was a girl or boy. I don't even think I had the age. I didn't have any idea who the family were. I fully expected to arrive there and for this child to have turned up and for it to have dissolved into a non-story." ( transcript)

This pushes the phone call to 0600 - 0615 (Spanish Time), Clarke leaving at 0645 (SpT), arriving at 1100 - 1130 (SpT) which is 1000 - 1030 Portuguese time.

0600 Spanish time is 0500 British time. The British press offices were therefore well aware by 0430 - 0500 of the incident and of the course of action to be taken.

I shall return to this later.

But then we note a strange thing.

Among the many journalists and reporters on the scene not one seems to have done any investigating.
Not one seems to have reported that – contrary to the news bulletins coming at regular intervals from the UK – the shutters were NOT damaged, forced, smashed or jemmied.
Not one at that early stage seems to have reported the lack of visibly from the Tapas bar through the opaque plastic screening, across the pool, over the wall and through the untended vegetation to the patio door of the apartment
Not one seems to have paced it out
Not one reports how long it took to walk, or jog, or to sprint
Not one reports doing the same journey round to the front door opening into the car park
Not one reports investigating the shutters, even during the weeks after the initial frenzy had died down, nor of asking a police officer to demonstrate or supervise whilst it was done.
Not one is filmed actually doing it – testing the hypothesis with physical experiment and recording the results. As I was.
And unless we are very much mistaken, not one reports a long and detailed interview with the McCanns or any of the Tapas group. There may be, and probably are, good reasons for that, since the PJ had tried to prevent press involvement, and the publicity team was in full control.

It is that apparent total lack of any investigation which led one commentator in sheer exasperation to say words to the effect “Were you even THERE ? ? ?”

Instead, as Paulo Reis observed during his undercover visits, the journalists seemed to have done little more than sit around in bars talking to each other in their respective languages, and waiting for the official briefings so obligingly provided by the McCanns’ Publicity team. In English.

So where do conspiracy theories come from. Where are they conceived and born, and who raises them.

Let us take a few simple examples.

Gerry McCann first said in his first signed police statement that – “. . . the deponent entered the club, using his key, the door being locked,
A mere 6 days later he changed this to “Despite what he said in his previous statements, he states now and with certainty, that he left with KATE through the back door which he consequently closed but did not lock,”

Ok. So he lied.

We could all easily say - So what if he did go in though the front door, or the patio door, or climbed through the kitchen window - Madeleine is missing, and that is what matters.

We should not care which way he went in, we should care that Madeleine is not longer there.

But we do care that he lied, because the lie forces us to ask – Why did he even say that ?

Not What did he say ? but Why did he say it ?

The lie diverts us. It was apparently pointless, it added nothing, but he still felt the need to do it.
And that fact – the fact of the lie – suddenly assumes a greater importance than the underlying fact that Madeleine is missing.

And so it goes on. Mitchell very quickly built up a reputation for himself for lying, to the extent that it almost became possible to predict that the exact opposite of anything he said would one day turn out to be the objective truth.

His ludicrous assertion about no watches or mobile phones, stated long after we had been told of split-second accuracy of times – checked by watches – served only to demolish any credibility he might once have supposed he had.

But what or whom did it serve ? Who cares whether they had phones or watches. If you are going to check a child it is unlikely that you would click open a mobile phone to check the time, or even glance at a wristwatch. Normal people don’t do that. If pushed for accuracy, honest witnesses will time visits between one course at dinner and another, or by reference to TV programmes or external events.

It didn’t matter. It wasn’t important – until Mitchell made it so.

A long time ago a character in a drama was given the words, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”. The McCann case has been full of too much protest from the very start.

Lying is poisonous. It acts like a slow venom, dissolving the liar from the inside, until only the husk of what had once been a decent human remains.

Or to mix metaphors it spreads like a malignancy eroding the strength of a person’s character.

Once Jon Clarke had been caught out telling one blatant and provable lie, it became clear that even that one article was riddled with them, and that they have now spread their poisonous tentacles into the Netflix programme and beyond.

And then we can go back and look at other things written by him on other subjects, and begin to discover more examples of deliberate falsehoods, or an attention to detail so lax that it must allow us to suppose ‘facts’ have simply been invented.

The malignancy is at work. Or, like the larvae of the parasitic ichneumon wasp which lays eggs in its victims, he is being consumed from the inside, until ultimately only a shell will remain.

Tanner recognised this too late, and tried to counter it, but ended by insisting, feebly and pathetically “I am telling the truth, you know”. 


We are not talking here about the Lie - simple.
          Did you eat the last chocolate biscuit ? - No

Everyone can understand that one, and why it is said. To an extent we can also begin to forgive the person using it. They have only two choices. Deny, or admit.
English law does not add extra punishment to a person who pleaded Not Guilty to punish the lie, though discount is often given for telling the truth. It is tacitly accepted that many guilty people will lie about their guilt.

Here though we can observe the construction of something larger, a structure, a scaffolding frame, designed to support or prop up the central lie.

JUST suppose, purely for the sake of argument of course, that the following was NOT true in the conventional meaning of the word.


The core proposition is that Madeleine was
-  abducted
   -       from Apartment 5A
   -       between 9:30pm and 10 pm
   -       on Thursday 3rd May 2007

Points to prove - as they say in legal circles - or things to be established in support of the above proposition are
1         She was alive on 3/5/7
2         She was in the apartment
3         She was there at 9:30
4         Someone got in
5         Someone got out
6         She was abducted

Taking these in turn we see that each has had some ‘evidence’ attached to it. An attempt has been made to strengthen and reinforce each of these with struts or supports.

1.        She was alive on 3/5/7. For this we call in aid the Pool photo, which uniquely, although it is not visible on the image itself, has a time and date embedded in it. And so that everyone shall recognise the importance of the photo in establishing the exact date, the existence of the EXIF Metadata will be emphasised, totally unnecessarily, by a spokesman, and the image – with the Metadata – will be released for publication.

2.        She was in the apartment. It is clearly not sufficient for the parents alone to give this testimony, and so for this we will call on a third party to testify to a visit and to seeing her

3.        She was there at 9:30pm. A parent’s word alone would not be sufficient, so again we need to ask a third party to testify to this.

4.        Someone got in. For this we can rely on family and friends, and thereafter a compliant press to spread the story of broken, forced, smashed and jemmied shutters. The parents can talk about the window and the curtains being wide open, and can aver that the shutters can be opened from outside.

5.        Someone got out. We can rely on people supposing that an intruder would have had the same range of entry points at his / her / their disposal. We do not need to elaborate. This can be left deliberately vague for people to form their own opinions, if it ever occurs to them.

6.        She was abducted. Ideally someone will have seen someone carrying someone away, but in a perfect scenario will only report it much later, after any chance of immediate pursuit has long passed. We will call on a third party to do this.


And there we have it.
A scenario proposed, and each of the major points covered by ‘evidence’.
An open and shut case, surely, and all the Police of Two Nations have to do is solve it.


7.         But we also recognise that with this scenario there is the possibility that we may be accused of Child Neglect. So we have to cover this aspect. Again we can call on Third parties to testify to a regular checking scheme, and feel confident this will be accepted.


A big problem then arises when each one of these crucial ‘supports’ is examined forensically.

One by one each has been demolished, or so badly damaged that it is no longer capable of supporting the core lie. Like cutting the cables of a suspension bridge, or knocking out props in a coalmine, for a time nothing much appears to happen. We see no change.


But gradually there will be some visible movement, followed by a sudden total collapse.

To take them in order

1.         The Pool photo has been examined. It does not appear to provide the necessary proof

2.         The third party visit to the apartment is riddled with contradictions, and does not appear to provide the necessary proof

3.         This third party clearly realised that he would be severely compromised by being the ‘last person to see her alive’ and reneged on his promise, changing his story at the last minute to say definitively that he had NOT seen her, and dropping that awesome responsibility back on the father. His testimony does not therefore provide the necessary proof

4.         The “broken, forced, smashed and jemmied shutters” were proved to be an untruth within a few hours. Video evidence is clear for all to see. The window is visibly too small. The story about the curtains has been changed from wide open, to tight closed. It was demonstrated that the shutters cannot be opened sufficiently from outside to achieve the intended goal. This entire thread of testimony does not appear to provide the necessary proof.

5.         Placing the father with JW outside the apartment rules out one possible exit. The untouched front door, and the size and accessibility of the window seem to rule out the other possibilities. There is nothing which appears to provide the necessary proof.

6.         The ‘sighting of an abductor’ remained in the public domain for a long time, despite scepticism, until it was comprehensively and finally dismissed by the Operation set up to examine the conduct of the case. This therefore does not provide the necessary proof.

7.         The regular checking scheme was examined with considerable attention to detail, and attempts were made on paper to re-create it. It was realised that its preparation was lacking in fine detail. The Tapas group refused to submit themselves to a reconstructive demonstration of their claims. Extensive analysis has failed to produce a coherent timetable. It does not appear to provide the necessary proof.

And that seems to be that.

Every one of the supports, the struts, the cables or the props supporting the central proposition has been removed. In some cases there was physical evidence. Not just that there was no evidence for it, but that there was clear evidence against it.
In others it was people who failed to provide the essential support, or wavered at the crucial moment.


Or to put it another way


There is no amount of invective, of legal process, of ad hominem or profane internet abuse which can put this back together again.

Let us try to pull these threads together

From the start we were treated to several stories which “just didn’t sound right”. From that point doubts began to creep in. They still fell short of proof of falsehood, but on the credibility spectrum were definitely towards the end marked just possible rather than the one marked very probable.
When research failed to support the stories this was exacerbated and they were deemed even less possible than before.

Suddenly we are able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond a peradventure, that one or more of the stories were very simply LIES.
From there, the natural reaction is to go back to everything else that particular person or group has said, and to apply that standard of veracity to previous statements.
This is of course, as readers will immediately recognise, a fallacious argument. A species of the Genetic fallacy –
Just because a person has lied on one or more previous occasions does not automatically mean that he is lying on this occasion.

Sometimes however we come across someone who is so used to lying that it is apparently second nature. Someone whose moral compass was washed overboard long ago. Someone for whom lying, and then the use of aggression to conceal this fact appears to be second nature.

But it is still necessary to test each of the previous statements independently. Previous convictions are not admissible as proof.
On this occasion we can do it.

Clarke lied about being the only journalist at the scene until late afternoon, he lied about there being no dogs, he lied about entering the apartment and speaking to the McCanns . . . And about much more

The McCanns lied about their point of entry, about the window and the curtains, about the shutters . . . And about much more

Mitchell lied about the absence of watches or mobile phones . . . And about much more.

The British Tabloid Press lied, and continues to lie, about sightings and suspects. It invents “information” supposedly leaked from the Metropolitan Police. It has, from very early on, acted in a concerted way to denigrate the Portuguese authorities . . . And much more.

And all of this is clearly to one end.

To take the focus of attention away from the parents and friends

Conspiracy ?

It is when we add all of the previous together,
when we add the early involvement of News Corp, owners of the Sun and SKY TV
when we observe that for many months Clarke was in the pay of The Sun,
when we consider the clear evidence of coordination of the attack by the British Press on the PJ, the Portuguese authorities in general, against Dr Amaral, and against even the Portuguese Diplomatic service . . .
When we add all of this together it is surely tempting to identify a greater “power’; a Great Architect pulling all these strings.
And our imaginations can run riot.

Then, as we think about this and look back, we find other interesting points.
Clarke has come up with two totally distinct explanations of his behaviour.
In one, he says he went straight into the Apartment, spoke to the McCanns there, and “promised he would do all he could to help.”

In another version “I don't think they said whether it was a girl or boy. I don't even think I had the age. I didn't have any idea who the family were. I fully expected to arrive there and for this child to have turned up and for it to have dissolved into a non-story." After which he says he merely introduced himself as a journalist, and they said “Hi”.

Which is correct ? He did know who they were and offered to help, or he did not know who they were and they said “Hi”.
The first version is from his 2017 article. The second is from a transcript of the Netflix programme.

A conspiracy theorist might suggest that Clarke was sent to PdL specifically to “help”, as he claimed he said, and that the subsequent attempt to change the story has been done with the realisation that his previous untruth might reveal the existence of the conspiracy.

At the moment is it impossible to be certain.


What are the possible responses if you have lied, and realize you are about to be exposed ?
You can hold your hands up and admit it, attempting to mitigate by blaming
           typing errors,
           “mis-speaking” – a favourite of politicians, since it is totally meaningless
           being “tired and emotional” – another politicians’ favourite
           poor briefing
           confusion
           or a whole thesaurus of other emollient words
OR, you can Attack.
And this attack must prevent the facts ever from emerging or being tested. It should never address the central issue, ideally never referring to the stated facts at all. It is frequently associated with ad hominem abuse, and with other arguments based on the fallacies of relevance, such as abusive analogy, or dicto simpliciter. The fallacy of loaded words often passes unnoticed.

We remember that some of the fiercest attack as the best form of defence is conducted by Libel Lawyers. It is axiomatic that the substantive case must never be allowed to go before a court. To do so is to allow exposure of the facts.
Cases within memory illustrate the perils of this only too clearly. In Archer -v- Daily Star Archer was awarded £ 0.5m, only then to be imprisoned for 4 years for perjury, and forced to repay not only the £ 0.5m but a further £ 1.3m in costs and interest.
Aitken –v- Guardian and Granada collapsed when the facts became known. He was jailed for 18 months, and bankrupted by the incident.
So the facts must never be exposed, never be tested. Firms like Carter-Ruck, and Schillings are the experts in work of this kind. A previous iteration of one web-site laid out the way in which the substantive issue is neatly converted into a procedural one, which is almost impossible to answer.

And looking back to the Conspiracy theory, what have we seen ?
Ad hominem abuse, gross and profane language on the internet, the publication of vituperation in local newspapers, harassment by a News Corp outlet of a pensioner resulting in her untimely death, threats of bankruptcy against another pensioner, and much more.

A fully paid-up Conspiracy Theorist might with justification conclude that it was possible to judge the wickedness of the lie or the level of guilt by the viciousness of the attack.

 
Very recently someone with a more poetic command of English than I wrote a short piece, of which this is the gist.

A little girl is missing
Her parents lie
Their friends lie
A reporter lies

12 years later the little girl is still missing
Her parents are still lying
Their friends are still lying
The reporter is still lying, and now adding new ones.
Someone else once said

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?


I have appended a list of References and Sources.

All are in the public domain

REFERENCES AND SOURCES

1         A Guerra os McCann, (The McCann’s War), Paulo Reis, 2019, Guerra & Paz

2         Paulo Reis, undercover in PdL
https://gazetadigitalmadeleinecase.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-i-went-undercover-to-praia-da-luz.html

3         The Olive Press, 2017,
https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2017/05/11/madeleine-mccann-olive-press-editor-talks-first-journalist-scene-10th-anniversary-disappearance/

4         The Olive Press, 2019,
[url=https://www.theolivepress.es/print-edition/" \l]https://www.theolivepress.es/print-edition/#fb0=3[/url]

5         Netflix,
To access the Netflix documentary go to
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=netflix
           and enter 'The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann’


6         Google maps and ‘street view’

7         'madeleine’, by Kate McCann, 2011, Bantam Press.

8         Video evidence at
https://www.youtube.com.watch?v=DRe3g25ma4o

9         McCann’s and Tapas 7 friends’ police statements at
http://www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk/Nigel/
http://www.mccannpjfiles.co.uk/
http://www.mccannpjfiles.co.uk/PJ/TRANSLATIONS

10        ‘Hamlet’, W Shakespeare, Act 3 Sc. 2

11         Pool Photo,
http://www.gerrymccannsblogs.co.uk/gestalt-3AsTheKTPHorg.jpg

12         The Bible, Mark 8:36


https://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-32-on-lies-and-conspiracies.html

To post comments, please use this thread: https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t16362-chapter-32-on-lies-and-conspiracies

Chapter 33: Jon Clarke Entrenched Lies



First an Addendum to previous chapters

After publication of Chapter 31: Jon Clarke – Olive Press LIES and VIDEOTAPE
and Chapter 32: ON LIES AND CONSPIRACIES
I have been contacted by several people who made important and trenchant observations.

I now realise that I have fallen into my own logical trap. I presented some of the case as a choice. Often called the ‘black and white’ fallacy; false dichotomy or dilemma, or the either/or, it is fallacious because other possibilities may exist, but here I was clearly in error by suggesting that two statements by Jon Clarke were mutually exclusive.
This
“When I arrived at about 11.45am I was firstly able to walk into the apartment, where I introduced myself to the McCanns”
- Versus -
“I said hello to them as they were leaving and introduced myself to them as a reporter from the Mail, and they said “Hi”, and I think they may have also said “thanks for coming”.

I suggested it had to be one or the other, or neither, but not both.

But it is now more clear that in a real sense BOTH could be correct.
Ignore the nonsense about the apartment and times and places, and concentrate instead on the message Clarke is trying to impart.
It need not be the exact words he used. It may not even be any of the words he used, but he is clearly trying to convey information. To get a point across.

So let us roll the quotes together. [Note - this is my elision, Clarke is not on record as saying this]
** “I said hello and introduced myself to them as the reporter from the Mail, and told them I would do everything I could to help, and they said “Hi”, and I think they may have also said “Thanks for coming”. **

Does that sound feasible ? If so, then even more serious questions remain.

Does this imply that the McCanns knew that the Mail were sending a reporter, and were therefore not surprised by his arrival, even thanking him for coming ?


A second issue was also raised.
It is always useful to go back to the core material. It helps us keep our eye on the squirrel.
The creche sheet - Jellyfish - for Friday 4/5/7 shows Amelie, Sean and Lily signed in by Diane W at 1010
So IF Kates' reported arrival of the PJ, and the discussions about what to do with the children took place at all, they MUST have been significantly before 1000, or DW would not have had time to round the children up, walk them round the pool and sign them in at 1010.

They were still 2 years old. Difficult to 'herd' at the best of times, and with the PJ and GNR and dogs and vans and traffic and reporters milling around, must have been a nightmare.
[ had they already come to an agreement that the children would not be photographed . . .?]

from KM’s book.
“It was about 10am by the time a couple of PJ officers turned up. . . .They told us they had to take us and our friends to the police station in Portimão. We couldn’t all go at once as somebody needed to look after the children. After some discussion, it was agreed that Gerry and I, Jane, David and Matt would be interviewed first and the PJ would come back for the others later in the day.”

The implication is clear. Kate is expecting us to believe that this is the first time they had realised they would need to go to a police station or make statements, and that until that point no thought had been given by anyone within the group to the logistics, nor to Child-care arrangements. How long the “some discussion” took is not explained.
Whether any of this is even credible is another matter entirely.

The three possible routes for DW and the children are shown here
5G, down stairs, through car park right, right again, right again though pool reception, to Tapas bar crèche = 160m
5G, down stairs, short cut through apartment 5C or D, out of garden, left onto footpath, right onto road, right again though pool reception, to Tapas bar crèche = 130m
5G, down stairs, through car park left, left again along footpath, right, then right though pool reception, to Tapas bar crèche = 200m

So for about 10am, we may now perhaps force it as far as a bit BEFORE 10 am
Which gets them out of 5H very soon after 1000, into the car, and off to the PJ in Portimão, to do all the necessary things
before settling down and hitting the record button on the tape machine with GM at 1115
WHICH in turn puts Jon Clarke in PdL and at the scene at the very latest by 1000, and given his relaxed body language with the group of reporters and the GNR Inspector, possibly even earlier.
Which in turn pushes his Phone call from the UK even more firmly to 0600 Spanish summer time = 0500 BST



In his 2017 article Jon Clarke wrote
“The only reporter on the scene till late that evening – apart from Sky News reporter Kate Burley, who happened to be on holiday there – I spent time grilling neighbours, before noticing that a road crew was still digging up the street to lay sewage pipes literally right outside the apartment. The trench was nearly two metres deep and three men continued to shuffle around inside it.
Nobody had stopped them.’

Until recently most thinking people had passed quickly over the first few of the five distinct and separate lies in that one sentence, and then just assumed that describing a trench as “literally right outside the apartment” was simple hyperbole, just journalistic exaggeration, overstatement, embellishment, magnification, and “puffery’ which could be cheerfully ignored.

But then in 2019 came the Netflix production, prepared and filmed largely in 2018.

In it Clarke lies yet again. As we have seen earlier his ludicrous assertion that he was the only, or the first, journalist on the scene was simply untrue. His contention that there were no dogs, that the police were not treating the issue seriously, and so much else of what he wrote and said is simply a catalogue of lies.

Now he goes even further.
Now he stands immediately outside Apartment 5A on Rua Dr. Francisco Gentil Martins, just south of the junction with Rua Dr. Agostino da Silva, a few metres from the infamous Tannerman location.

Now he faces south, down the hill towards the Pool reception and the Baptista supermarket.

Now direct to camera he says
“There was a big trench here, from about here going down . . . leading down from here,
all the way down the road about this wide, and six foot deep.
And there was two or three guys working in the trench . .
And you think . . . could she have fallen down there.“

‘here’ is said three times, There is absolutely no doubt about the location.
He is standing on an exact spot and pointing.
When he says “literally right outside the apartment” he intends us to believe him.
He desperately wants us to believe him. He demands that we believe him.
He expects the word “literally” to be taken literally.

That piece to camera in the 2019 Netflix video is in tight close up, so the background is out of focus. Nevertheless it is easy to see where Clarke was when this was filmed.

Usefully the Netflix production also uses multiple video clips and photos from May 2007.

We start where Clarke comes into left frame. We see the overhanging hedge and the dark red bougainvillea beyond. The break in the building line is a clear focal point.

(Reference is Netflix, E1, S1, at 14:07)

But the problem is – ALL THIS IS UNTRUE
Clarke knows it is untrue
Clarke knows it will be checked
Clarke knows he will be exposed as a serial liar
Clarke knows that video and photos exist from 2007 which prove he is lying.
Clarke knows that anyone watching Netflix can immediately see that he is lying.
But still he goes ahead.

A glance at “google maps –> Street view” will clarify the situation. These shots are dated September 2018
The red bougainvillea has been pruned hard back by September 2018, but is still obvious
The following stills are from Netflix E1:S1, and originate in video taken on 4th and 5th May 2007.
At 19:20
At 21:48
At 48:38
At 10:20

Clarke had the option of simply not saying it, or perhaps of making it a passing throwaway remark,
but chose, quite deliberately, to Lie

To coin a neologism – “if you find yourself in a trench, stop digging”

Is Clarke somehow committed to fantasy, to untruth, to pure invention, or as we now must term it – to LYING ?

These are stills taken from the very same Netflix production.
They are not from any outside source. They are contained in that same 50 minute film.
Everyone seeing the film may confirm their provenance, and come to a fuller understanding of the egregious extent of Clarke’s continuing mendacity.

Roadworks in Praia da Luz

There WERE of course road works in Praia da Luz. It would be remarkable if there had not been.
They were obviously the subject of diligent investigation by the PJ during their enquiries.
The foreman was interviewed and his statement is easily accessible in the PJ files, by using the search engine.
ANYONE can do this. (I have appended the full statement and link to save people the trouble.)
I have also prepared a composite map to show the three streets named.
The nearest point is slightly under 300 m. from Apartment 5A

https://www.mccannpjfiles.co.uk/PJ/CARLOS_PEREIRA.htm
Witness Statement
Carlos Manuel Figueiredo Pereira
Date: 2007/05/31
Occupation: Civil Engineer

He comes to the process as a witness, he works for the municipal chamber of Lagos since 1988 as a civil engineer.
With specific reference to the Urban and Environmental re-qualification works carried out in the town of Luz, namely in Rua Direita, the witness clarifies the following:

During 2006 a public tender was issued with the aim of adjudicating the firm offering the best conditions and guarantees.
This tender was won by the company Canana & Filhos Ltda and the date for starting work was established as April of the current year (2007).

During the first days/weeks of April in Rua Direita together with Largo da Republica, the different necessary infrastructures were created such as : networks for domestic drains, water supply, public lighting and telephones. These actions took place over the course of about 30 days, following others that had been implemented along Rua Helena Nascimiento Baptista.

With regard to the month of May, and after the first days of the month, work was begun at Rua Direita, aiming at the installation of water pipes, telephones and public lighting. The technical space excavated which guaranteed the application of three types of infrastructure previously mentioned, had the following average dimensions : 1,20 metres deep by 0,90 metres long, it being certain during the excavation work that they were almost immediately covered with sand and earth.

When asked how the daily checking was done, with regard to security measures and the quality of the work carried out, the witness said there was nothing abnormal to point out, it was a work that had been carried out calmly and without any incidents.
And for those who will wish to argue that it is credible that Madeleine wandered off, and fell into uncovered road works, unnoticed by anyone that evening, and unremarked during the overnight searches, or the following days by the GDR, the PJ, dogs, horses and half the holidaying population, this is most direct route.
And this then leaves us with another serious issue

Why did not the Netflix editorial staff see what everyone else can ?

One of the few possible answers is –
That the Netflix production was part of the much larger campaign which exists for one purpose, and involves a great many people.
Everything they do, everything they say, write, tweet or post is done to one end –

To divert attention from the inconvenient fact that there is no evidence of Abduction
          No evidence of a time Window
                    No evidence of Entry
                              No evidence of Presence
                                        No evidence of Exit

And that after 12 years, or 4,400 days . . . of the police of 2 Nations, of various experts in their respective fields, of commentators, apologists, acolytes, ‘private detectives’ of varying morality and expertise, members of their many legal teams, and all the others . . .
not one has been able to suggest even a superficially plausible Abduction scenario.

Not one.       Ever

To conclude – for the moment –

We may wonder how this makes Jon Clarke’s wife and children feel, knowing that their husband and father is a serial liar.

Knowing they cannot trust anything he says nor anything he writes

Knowing that he will stoop to lying about the disappearance and probable death of a little child.

We wonder how his friends feel, knowing that he is so easily caught out when he does lie.

We wonder how employees at “The Olive Press” feel knowing they have to sift anything he says

We wonder how his advertisers will feel, knowing they are associated with mendacity of this enormity, (and perhaps realising that they have to believe his circulation figures.)


I have no answers.
But someone does.

http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/07/chapter-33-jon-clarke-entrenched-lies.html
---------

For comments, please see this thread: https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t16396-chapter-33-jon-clarke-entrenched-lies

Chapter 35: Mirage


This chapter is something of a diversion.
In it I shall examine how we can think or believe we see something, when in fact the objective and scientifically provable truth of the matter is that we either did not, or that we saw something else.

We were not ‘lying’ or being dishonest when we told what we saw. We saw something and our mind forced us to interpret it in a particular way.

We can only fit what we see into categories we already know and understand. Before the discovery of Oxygen the phenomenon of burning could not be interpreted as oxidation, and so Phlogiston was a rational but ultimately flawed attempt at explanation.

Medical treatment is the most obvious case of rapidly changing knowledge, exposing millennia of previous professionally agreed diagnosis and treatment as nothing better than ignorant superstition. Even ‘modern medicine’ is being exposed in a similar way. The last frontal lobotomy was performed as late as 1967, and the leading Medical journal in the UK is The Lancet, betraying its origins in the bloodletting prevalent as a treatment and recommended in medical texts up to 1923, but now condemned as ignorant and misguided barbarism. Every new treatment implicitly criticises the previous one. We no longer prescribe Insulin Shock Therapy for schizophrenia, cocaine for toothache, cigarettes to “ease the chest”, or Bed Rest for “hysterical women”.

Through history this has always been the case. Historical observations can be reviewed and interpreted in the light of modern scientific knowledge, and we must be humble enough to recognise that our current observations and explanations will in turn inevitably be interpreted differently in the future. Archaeologists are recognizing this and in some places are deliberately leaving significant parts of sites untouched for future generations to explore.

Continental Drift started as an interesting theory, ridiculed by Sir David Attenborough’s own Cambridge professor, which evolved into Plate Tectonics and remained at the level of highly probable theory until someone sent a submarine down to the mid-Atlantic ridge and actually filmed it happening. And Sir David had the last laugh – but only for the time being.

Read more here:  http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-35-mirage_1.html

Chapter 36



A free press is one of the foundations on which modern ‘liberal’ democracy rests.
“ Freedom of speech ” has long been recognized as important “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” George Washington

We have become used to reading and hearing, and more recently actually seeing, proceedings in Parliament. Our Parliament. It was not always so.


We have also become accustomed to access to a range of newspapers. We accept that each will have its own political agenda reflected in the leader article or evidenced by the general tone of the editorial and commentary.

There was a time when journalism was a respected profession. It was referred to as the 4th Estate, with a mission to hold the Establishment to account by reporting the truth and by fearlessly exposing corruption and deceit.

Thomas Carlyle attributed the origin of the term to Edmund Burke, who used it in a parliamentary debate in 1787 on the opening up of press reporting of the House of Commons of Great Britain
     "Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all”

Relatively quickly however, that importance and power began to corrupt. As Lord Acton observed in 1887 “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”

Oscar Wilde wrote in his 1891 pamphlet The Soul of Man under Socialism:
     "In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism."

Though he was also scathing about its purpose: “There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.“ 
What are the gradations, the categories of truth and of truth telling?
Is truth indivisible? Can it have context or nuance?
Can you have your personal “version of the truth”?
Can it be placed onto a scale according to some level or quantum of truth or mendacity, or by assessing the spectrum of damage caused to individuals and to the freedom of us all?
And when that truth is reported, what then?
I have tried to fit it into a scale here.

(I use the word Truth to mean objective and provable fact, and I use Mendacity to mean deliberate, calculated falsehood, as opposed to error, mistake, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.)

You may observe that I include a category not normally associated with Journalism, but I believe intimately concerned with Truth and Mendacity and able to influence freedom of speech. Libel Lawyers.

Let me try to develop this

At the origin of the curve is -
 
Investigative journalists do not simply report what they see or are told. They go deeper and further. They ask questions, they research, they compare and contrast the stories; they check and double-check their facts. They challenge everything they are told, seek proper references for every statement they make. They look at events from different points of view, before coming to a synthesis.
They have their minds open to new evidence, and are always ready to reassess, re-write; to correct and to apologise for inadvertent error.
Independent, courageous, honest and decent investigative journalists spend enormous amounts of time and effort to reveal the truth.

In the US the term ‘muckraker’ is sometimes used of investigative journalists, usually pejoratively by those who are the victims of the revelations of the truth about corruption. The term, in fact derived from Bunyan, became popular in the Progressive era between 1880 and 1920.

Perhaps the best known in the UK is the late Paul Foot, after whom a prize is named. He exposed the corruption of architect John Poulson; was instrumental in overturning the verdicts of the Birmingham 6; and campaigned against the miscarriage of justice in the conviction of al-Magrahi for the Lockerbie bombing. He won awards including Journalist of the Year (twice), Campaigning Journalist of the Year, The George Orwell Award and many others. He was among the founders of Private Eye.

Investigative journalists Robert Winnett and Christopher Hope on the staff of The Daily Telegraph exposed the MPs’ expenses scandal in 2008, which indirectly brought down a government.

As a result a new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority was established, but as The Guardian observes:
     “Now, anyone can check how much their MP gets, and what they are spending it on – petrol costs, hotels, rent, and so on. MPs are no longer claiming money for birdhouses, or to have their moats cleaned out. That’s mainly because of IPSA’s new rules, but partly it is thanks to the fear of being caught out by the press.” [my emphases] 

It was Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two young reporters on The Washington Post staff, who by their tenacity and boldness in the Watergate saga brought down a President.

Private Eye tried long and hard to expose Saville and Smith as disgusting perverts, only to find both were protected by the Establishment and libel lawyers.
Their current editor, Ian Hislop, is referred to as the most sued man in history.
Others might place him among the bravest journalists of the modern age.

Truly investigative journalists will sometimes go so far as to put their lives at risk.

Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana, was assassinated when it became clear she was going to expose governmental corruption. Despite intimidation and threats, libel suits, and arrest on two occasions she continued with her investigations into Maltese politicians and their links with the Panama Papers scandal. 
And today her work is being continued by Juliette Garside, an investigative journalist for The Guardian. 

The murder, dismemberment and disposal of the body of the Saudi Arabian journalist in the Consulate in Turkey is another such example.
Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi dissident, a journalist for The Washington Post, and former general manager and editor-in-chief of the Al-Arab News Channel. Khashoggi wrote in his last, posthumously published column, that he was of the opinion that "What the Arab world needs most is free expression”. It is thought he was getting ‘too close’ to members of the Saudi royal family
Unusually, a Saudi court sentenced five defendants to death; sentenced three defendants to prison terms, and acquitted three others. Coincidentally the Crown Prince deemed responsible by the CIA for ordering the murder was not included. 

To counter this and ensure that the assassination or murder, imprisonment or silencing of an investigative journalist shall never succeed, a group known as Forbidden Stories has formed.
The comments from around the world from the general public are telling:
     “Even if Forbidden Stories rescues just a handful of investigations that fall into a sort of limbo each time a journalist is jailed or killed, it will already be a great victory for citizens.”

The people understand the vital importance of decency, honesty and truth, and yearn for the freedom from tyranny supported by good, bold, and honest journalism.


******************************

At the other end of the curve is the deliberate and malign control of the media in general by rich and powerful people, and eventually total control by the State. This is easier than we might think.

The UK's national newspapers and Media outlets are mainly owned and therefore controlled by just six people, or companies controlled by them.
We remember with a sense of increasing nausea Labour MP Robert Maxwell, who was owner of The Mirror until his death. His media empire is now largely Reach plc
Reach plc                                                           Mirror, Express, Star, Record, People
Richard Murdoch,                                            News Int. / Corp., Times, Sun, News of the World, Sky, Fox,
Barclay Brothers,                                             Telegraph, Spectator, Scotsman
Jonathan Harmsworth (Lord Rothermere). (DMGT). Mail, ‘i’, Metro,
Guardian group                                                 Guardian, Observer.
Nikkei                                                                  FT
It is clear that parties and governments select media outlets to “put across their message” in the way they wish it to be seen.
On 11 April 1992 The Sun blazed across its headlines "It's The Sun Wot Won It" [sic], making no pretence that it was taking personal responsibility for the election result which saw John Major (Tory) defeat Neil Kinnock (Labour), and become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

The Sun is part of the media empire owned and controlled by Rupert Murdoch. An Australian.


******


Next up the graph is:  

Journalists report what they see, hear, or are told. They often do so uncritically, perhaps lacking the time, the inclination, critical faculties, or the intelligence to probe more deeply.
The danger is that a small misinterpretation of fact combined with that same lack of research may allow unintentional error to proliferate.

Journalists operate under a loose professional code and have their own professional bodies, but these are largely toothless, in that they can only advise and reprimand, and have no ultimate coercive power.

An example is the judgment from the journalists’ professional body in Spain against Jon Clarke, the owner and editor of The Olive Press. It amounts to little more than fine words, and there is no evidence of any change in behaviour since it was handed down. Indeed the demonstration of their lack of ‘teeth’ seems perversely to have emboldened him.


******


At some point that lack of research can be added to sometimes accurate facts which can then focus on irrelevant peripheral detail.

Here we enter the zone of

In the UK the term “The Gutter Press” is used for Tabloid red top papers which thrive on scandal, rumour, and sensationalism. They concentrate on stories about crime and sex, the lives of celebrities – however defined – and put a sensationalist twist or ‘spin’ on anything they report.

One of their favourite tactics is to find an entirely spurious link to another story.

A particularly nasty example was The Sun publishing an article about an English cricket player, but including full details of the murder of half-siblings on the far side of the world some 31 years before. The distress this caused to the surviving relatives can only be imagined.
On that occasion other parts of the press openly criticised the decision to publish partly, but only partly, because of the damage it did to the standing of the profession as a whole.

Another frequent tactic was to seek out a distant relative, who may have once been, or been the partner of, a Police officer. This became so ridiculed that now, mercifully, it is seen more rarely.

In the US it is known as Yellow Journalism, with its emphasis on treating news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism.
Interestingly the term is also in use in Spain, (amarillismo), and was specifically used in the judgment by the professional body FAPE against Jon Clarke and the Olive Press.

******
More recently, and particularly noticeable with the expansion of the internet we have a new phenomenon, known by the neologism

Material is simply ‘copied and pasted’ from other sources, usually unnamed, never checked or referenced. It is simply “Churned”. Very rarely is the copy edited or re-written, so the same spelling errors, sloppy grammar and syntax, poor punctuation, factual inaccuracies and even photo images can be tracked across the web.

The danger here lies with the way in which the error or misinterpretation referred to above under Journalism, and Gutter Journalism, not to mention outright falsehood, can be spread so quickly, and as in the parlour game of Chinese Whispers, gets altered, edited, amended and added to.
A recent example, again involving the egregious Olive Press, was the ludicrous development of the story of The Rock in the Road.

This relatively harmless story about a rock on a road, accompanied by a perfectly adequate photo, was ‘developed’ with increasingly hyperbolic language, and then after some days and out of the blue irrelevant, wholly absurd and scientifically impossible weights and measurements were added.
There in turn were ‘churned’, further developed and manipulated until the result was a bold statement, again by The Reliably Mendacious Olive Press, that the ‘weight’ was 5 tonnes.
A simple calculation showed that the rock, which took two weeks to remove, would have been less dense than balsa wood.

*************************************************************


So far we have considered reporting which has not usually attempted deliberately to mislead, even though it may inadvertently have done so.
So to move to the next item is a big step.



This is the point on this progression at which someone, some organisation or entity, acts deliberately to suppress a fact or facts, an opinion or a point of view. It is the point at which a decision is made that they alone shall be allowed to know the truth, but that no one else shall.

We should not confuse this with the wholly respectable ‘Précis, or Editing’, which may seem to be achieving the same ends, selecting some things and cutting out others to achieve a finished product.

A commentator put the difference neatly -
     Editing is soliciting, selecting and polishing the best material you can get for your publication.
     Censorship is when you use your position of power – any power – to shut people up and/or to control the information that other people can access. 

Editing is seen as a benign activity. Helpful, and respectable.
Censorship – as malign and controlling

*****

And now, somewhere beyond the mid-point of the curve we come to

IN MY HUMBLE OPINION [!] libel lawyers are at a critical point on the Truth – Mendacity spectrum,
but well beyond the tipping point on the Danger scale
Lawyers in general perform a vital function. They give voice to the voiceless, they speak for the inarticulate, they interpret the rules for those who are unable to do so.
In an accusatorial system it is vital that anyone accused should be represented by one as educated and articulate as the accuser. It is also vital that this representative should not judge. That is not the lawyer’s function, which is to give the best advice given the strength of the opposing argument and the details of the evidence – so far as they know them.

Libel Lawyers however operate on a different plane.
The tort of Defamation (slander and libel) is concerned with reputation, not necessarily with objective facts.
The facts are immaterial, what matters is whether “the statement serves to undermine the reputation in the eyes of right thinking members of society generally, by exposing the victim to hatred, contempt or ridicule.“
However if I may quote
     Truth provides a full defence to an action of defamation. It requires the defendant to show that that the imputation conveyed by the statement complained of is substantially true. Therefore the onus is on the defendant.

The danger is apparent. If the matter goes to trial and the defendant is allowed to rehearse the ‘facts’ in open court, and they can not be adequately refuted, then not only might the case fail, but the plaintiff may become liable for civil suit or criminal prosecution for the acts alleged.
The two notorious cases of Archer and Aitken who were both allowed to give evidence during their proceedings, and who both subsequently went to prison for perjury make the point.

For this reason Libel Lawyers keep their clients away from court proceedings, and specialise in procedural tactics to achieve this.
The most feared and arguably the best Libel Lawyers in the world, Carter-Ruck, boasted openly about this strategy, and in a previous iteration of their web-site gave details of how they had used it in a string of cases. (It has since been altered, or ‘edited’.) But what is still clear is how many cases are never allowed near a court.

It is for this reason, the deliberate and calculated concealment of the truth and of the facts, that I place them so high on the chart.

A list of the people who have been successfully represented by the three major firms in the UK includes murderous dictators, predatory sexual perverts, companies which cause immense and irreparable harm to the environment and to people. One notorious case under the guise of the recently invented “super-injunction” involved an attempt to stifle the reporting of Parliament itself. All this may prompt right-thinking people to wonder whether Libel lawyers should not be somewhat further along the Danger axis.


******
Full article here: http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-36-press-freedom-good-bad-and.html

Chapter 37: A short re-cap





First the known facts:
On Thursday 3rd May 2007 the world was told that a three-year-old British girl, Madeleine Beth McCann, had been abducted that evening from her bed in an unlocked apartment in Praia da Luz, a small seaside resort on the Algarve, Portugal.

Over the next 24 hours details were released for publication. Many of these were proven within a very short time to be false; others were so extraordinary as to be incapable either of proof or refutation.

Over the following weeks more stories and details were added, and eagerly seized on by the world’s media. Many of these have been shown to be false, and several are clearly deliberate fabrications.

This was spotted in the very early stages of the investigation by the GNP – The Portuguese National Police – and then by the PJ – the Polícia Judiciária, the Portuguese Criminal Investigation service.

British police were sent to assist the PJ with nationally accredited search experts and others. All came to the same conclusion: the story was not coherent; the “abduction” hypothesis was not credible.

In plain English – it did not hang together.

Bluntly – the more they looked, the less they found.

Several of the initial stories are characterised by their inaccuracy or impossibility




And so on for dozens more examples.
Every one of these lies has been exposed and picked over. In some cases we have the facts behind the falsehood; in others it is more difficult to see why the lies were told.

But every lie has a motive. Lies are told for a reason, often a very specific one:

– The shutters and curtains, the visibility of the apartment, and the alleged sighting of Tannerman are clearly intended to make us believe in an abduction.

– The pool photo, the tennis balls photo and the unforgivable waterslide fabrication are clearly designed to convince us that Madeleine was alive and well from Sunday onwards.

Jon Clarke’s contributions are less easy to divine, since he has produced three different and contradictory versions of going to the apartment and of speaking to the parents. His disgraceful insistence on a deep but non-existent trench is clearly designed to convince the gullible that there might have been an alternative explanation for the disappearance.

All fail.

We can, reluctantly, understand why the parents might lie, and why they might invent elaborate stories. We can, almost, begin to understand why their friends, the Tapas 7, might offer a degree of support. But from that point it gets murky.

Is it as simple as “follow the money”? Journalists are paid for what they write, and their success is judged by the numbers of copies sold. We remember Martin Brunt of Sky News, who had a reverse Damascene conversion, moving from professional detachment and skepticism to being an active proselyte and persecutor of non-believers.

Jon Clarke professes to having been neutral on his way to PdL, but also undergoes a conversion despite being in a position to see for himself the falsity of much of what he was being told. He continues to repeat falsehoods, and adds many of his own, even though videos of the scene expose his mendacity.

But then we learn that he too was ultimately on the payroll of News Corp (now News International), the company which owns Sky News, employs Brunt, and pays Kandohla and Lazzeri.

Let me take each of the nine points in turn. I shall try to explain them briefly and then give the references so that people may either refresh their memories, or look more closely at what is being suggested.


1. The shutters were not broken, forced, smashed or jemmied 
    (See Chapter 1) 

This was almost the first detail to be put into the public domain.


Apologists have tried to argue that there is no evidence that the McCanns said these things. This is not quite correct. The McCanns phoned various members of their close family and friends during the night of 3rd and 4th May, and they in turn dutifully contacted media outlets on the 4th and gave verbatim reports of what had been said.

The fact that these reports were going out on live TV and radio news at the same time that viewers could also see live footage of a hapless forensic scientist trying to find a single fingerprint on shutters, which were clearly intact and unmarked, seems to have escaped notice by people determined to believe everything they were told.


2. The curtains did not “whoosh” 
    (See Chapters 3, 12)

This extraordinary story was a later invention by Kate McCann.

In the parents’ original statements, and the second one by Gerry, there is no mention of curtains “whooshing”, nor of the door “slamming”. In fact both parents are very specific that the window and shutters were wide open and the curtains were also drawn back, fully OPEN.

It was some years later, both in the autobiography and then in various TV interviews, that Kate develops this into the curtains being tightly CLOSED, and 'whooshing' into the room when blown by a sudden powerful gust of wind, complete with histrionic excess involving dramatic gestures with open and outstretched arms. On two occasions this draws a look of astonishment and incredulity from Gerry, who had of course in his police statements originally said the curtains were wide open.

The story is disproved by simply accessing the wind records for the night in question.


3. The apartment could not be watched from the tapas bar 
     (See Chapter 4)


 It was said in the initial reports that there was a clear line of sight from the tapas restaurant to the apartment, and it was implied that this of itself ruled out any suggestion of negligence in the child-care arrangements.
When the facts began to emerge a different situation emerged.

It was night. What lighting there was came from low-power lamps on posts. The tapas restaurant is around 65m in a straight line from the patio doors, across the pool, and over a high wall. There was at that time a thick overgrown hedge which stuck up over this wall. In any event the children were in the “front” room at the opposite end of the apartment overlooking the car park. There was a thick translucent plastic screen enclosing the tapas bar area which distorts images, reflects the light from the lamps, and is difficult to see through clearly.

And . . . on their own “admissions” when asked to sketch their positions round the circular table, the McCanns BOTH place themselves as having their backs to this screening.


4. The pool photo could not have been taken at lunch time on Thursday 3/5/7 
     (See Chapters 12, 14, 15 28, 28A)

The pool photo, widely referred to as the “Last Photo”, was presented to the world three weeks after the night in question, after a visit to the UK by Gerry, his return to PdL with Clarence Mitchell, and the arrival of his sister Philomena, the wife of a keen astronomer and skilled manipulator of digital images.
So far as is known it was not first handed to the PJ, but went straight to a press agency from where it was sent across the world.

Embedded in the digital photo is the metadata, also called EXIF, the detailed record of the camera settings and of the date and time of the creation and subsequent alteration of the image.

There was considerable debate about this image, which was said to have been taken during the luncheon interval on Thursday 3rd May.

Analysis of weather reports, sunshine records, travellers’ photos posted on various sites, and a host of other independent sources shows that this photo cannot have been created at that time on that date.

It allows us to speculate, with some certainty, that it was taken on the Sunday 29th April, and to imagine the possible sequence of events which led to the metadata’s being altered.


5. The tennis balls photo was not taken by Kate after mini-tennis
     (See Chapters 21, 22)

The tennis balls photo represent a strange anomaly in the midst of so many other anomalies.
 It is said to have been taken by two different people on any of three different days.
What is plain however is that despite what Kate insists in her autobiography, it was not taken on the McCann’s camera, and examination of the evidence available within the picture leads to a belief that it does not depict what it is supposed to.

Whether it has been tampered with is still debated. The original has never be put in the public domain, and the quality of what has been released in its various forms is so poor that further analysis is barely possible.


6.  The waterslide did not even exist 
     (See Chapter 20)
 
This story illustrates the depths to which journalists and journalism will sink in order to create a story out of nothing. It is a clear fabrication from start to finish. Every part of the story is invented. Not only does it not ‘hang together’ internally, with clear contradictions and impossibilities included in its own text, it is apparent to anyone who has bothered to look at the photos and video of the resort that is it full of downright lies. There is no waterslide. There was no waterslide.

Nevertheless it was published, and for some reason has never been denied, corrected or disavowed by the McCanns nor by their teams of advisors and acolytes.


7. The deep trench was not immediately outside the apartment
     (See Chapter 33)

Although the story about the trench in the road emerged a long time ago it had been consigned to the folder marked “journalistic puff”, and dismissed as irrelevant exaggeration or nonsense.
The actual trench and indeed all the roadworks in the village had of course been identified on the first day by the GNP and the PJ, and the statements from the supervisor, and the detail of the searches carried out are in the PJ files released on DVD when the investigation was shelved. They are available to anyone who cares to read them.

Chapter 38
 
 
Over the 13 years and 3 months we have been following and analysing this dreadful case we have been variously disappointed, astonished, appalled and disgusted at the way the Media in general and the press in particular have failed to adopt their constitutional role as disinterested reporters of the known facts.
 
We learned to expect that Kandohla, a some-time gym friend of Kate McCann, would write drivel which simply churned out the ‘official story; that Lazzeri would publish nonsense; and that The Sun and other gutter-press tabloid red-tops would maintain a decade-plus long campaign of disinformation.
 
This is normal, and to an extent we have to accept it. A free press is free to publish what it chooses, and the alternative of having the press shackled by law, by ministerial edict or by libel lawyers is the first sign of tyranny.
 
In the internet age some of the press maintain ‘Comments’ columns where their editorial stance or the statements they make may be challenged or corrected.
 
The hope of all decent people is that one day the press will themselves start to behave decently, will report known facts and make clear what is no more than speculation and hearsay, and identify what is clearly fantasy.
The laws of Libel and in some cases the internal monitoring of the press by their own Professional body should act to prevent excess.
 
The position of Jon Clarke, editor and publisher and, it is believed, part owner of The Olive Press is altogether more worrying.  He operates in Spain, is not answerable to English legal system nor to the Press Association, and cares nothing for the law of Libel, as he clearly set out in banner headlines in his own paper.
Let us first explore what we do ‘know’
In previous chapters I showed, giving full and detailed references, how Clarke has changed his story over time. He has claimed –
• to have been phoned at 7:15am CEST (Spanish time) = 6:15am BST (Britain and Portugal)
• to have arrived, after a 4 hour car drive, in PdL at 10.45am (unclear which time zone applies here, since  neither fits the known facts. Spanish time allows him to have seen the McCanns leaving, – which is recorded on video –  but even that does not allow sufficient time for the journey). see Ch 32
• to have been the FIRST journalist at the scene – or alternatively
• to have been the ONLY journalist at the scene until late afternoon
• to have walked straight into Apartment 5A and to have spoken to the McCanns there – or alternatively
•  to have found the apartment taped off and therefore NOT to have walked straight in, but to have spoken to the McCanns as they were leaving [to go Portimão for interview]•   to have spoken to the McCanns in those early hours and so on. 
 
Many of these versions with some minor variations have been repeated in the years leading up to and then including the Netflix production.  Mercifully for seekers of the objective truth that same Netflix production included several pieces of contemporaneous video footage from the day in question recorded by the many News crews who were already at the scene with their many reporters and journalists and presenters, not to mention the many police, dog-handlers, dogs, forensic teams and a throng of others - when Clarke arrived. 

Those videos have been and remain available in the public domain, notably on You Tube, and can be double and cross checked by anyone with the will to do so, [including Libel lawyers]
I appended some still shots in Chapter 31 and 33 where I expose yet more of Clarke’s more egregious mendacity, [or in plain English disgraceful lies]  and provide the full references and the YouTube links
The clips and the fuller videos show conclusively that much of what Clarke said was simply untrue
For non-native speakers of English, let us conjugate the verb
                  Infinitive                                 To lie
                  Present indicative                 Clarke lies
                  Present continuous              Clarke is lying
                  Simple Past                            Clarke lied
                  Past Perfect                           Clarke has lied
                  Perfect continuous               Clarke was lying
                  Pluperfect                              Clarke had lied
                  Past imperfect                       Clarke used to lie
                  Future                                     Clarke will lie
                  Future perfect                       Clarke will have lied . . .
                                    and so on
 
But now yet another of Clarke’s “versions of the truth” has been exposed.

It comes from the magazine CLOSER, published by the Bauer Media Groupin Peterborough, who produce
at least 40 magazines, and have 51 radio channels.
This is from the on-line version at https://closeronline.co.uk/ and is BY KRISTINA BEANLAND | POSTED ON 11/06/2020
We might by this time have expected a retraction and explanation for the previous sets of falsehoods, and their replacement with the definitive account of Clarke’s actions on the first day, and then during the weeks that followed.
Our hope for honesty and decency from Clarke is however dashed once again.
The full text and the reference is appended, so I summarise. (I underline for emphasis some salient points)
Here we learn
Journalist Jon Clarke was one of the firston the scene in Praia da Luz, Portugal, when Maddie went missing from a holiday resort in May 2007, while her parents ate in a nearby restaurant.
Jon recalls the call he received from a British newspaper on the morning of 4 May 2007, asking him to report on a missing child.
He says, “I remember thinking that by the time I got there, she’d have turned up. Praia da Luz was a sleepy little village and hardly anyone was around when I arrived later that morning. But I was shocked when I saw the McCanns’ apartment – there was no security and just a flimsy piece of police tape covering the side gate.”
A few hours after arriving, Jon met Kate and Gerry. He says, “They were polite, and even thanked me for reporting on the case. They were clearly devastated. The press conference outside their apartment later that day only confirmed my feelings. I think almost every person there shed a tear. As a journalist, you try not to get too emotional about a story, but my own daughter had just turned two, so it was hard not to get upset.
It is very clear and very precise.  It is also in direct speech. In Quotes, if that means anything in modern journalism
He now claims
• to have been one of the first [journalists] on the scene
• to have met the McCanns a few hours after arriving
• to have had his feelings confirmed at the press conference later that day
 So although he is now clearly admitting in print that being THE FIRST journalist, or THE ONLY Journalist until late afternoon were lies, for which small mercy we may be thankful, his inclusion in the video footage among a group of at least six, and the presence of multiple fully equipped camera crews leads one to suppose that for him ‘among the first’does not imply a podium place.
But look at the weasel words that he met the McCanns “a few hours after arriving”.
Now his proven lies about entering the apartment speaking to the McCanns there, and/or of having spoken to them ‘as they left’ are by implication admitted for what they were.  Lies.
Their replacement with ‘a few hours after arriving’ seems sufficiently anodyne as to try persuade some that there might be admission of previous error and an explanation of the truth.
Let us dissect it further.
In this context “met Kate and Gerry” can only mean ‘for the first time’.
What do we know, from Kate’s autobiography, from the times on Police statements, from TV footage, and from other sources.
 Well, this.
The McCanns left the Payne’s apartment shortly before 10am under close police protection, were driven to Portimão for long interviews and statements, and did not return to PdL until around 8.30pm. 
On arrival they went straight to their new apartment which contained members of the family and friends looking after their remaining children, had some light refreshment, and then prepared a short statement for the benefit of the press, which was read out by Gerry with a torch in the stair-well at 10pm.
And as can be seen on the video recording of that event, the McCanns spoke to no one either before or immediately after the statement, but turned abruptly away,  returned to the apartment, and were not seen again until the following day.
At what point then did Clarke speak to them?
 
Having established that his first two statements are bare-faced lies, it looks ever more apparent that his third may bear the same stamp.
“A few hours later’ must mean in this context an absolute minimum of 10 and a half hours. (9:45am - 8:30pm),  but we can also be fairly sure the Clarke did not speak to them on their return.
Firstly because they were under Police ‘protection’ and escorted throughout.  
But then when Kate herself takes up the story and describes the scene on their return –
"We steppped out of the police car amid clicking, whirring cameras and dazzling lights. . .
Upstairs our new apartment, 4G, was heaving with people. Among them were my mum, dad and Auntie Norah, who had arrived from the UK. . .  It was all such a blur I can’t be absolutely certain who else was there that night, but I think I remember John Hill, Emma Knights and Craig Mayhew from Mark Warner, and Ambassador John Buck, British consul Bill Henderson and Angela Morado, who had accompanied us back from Portimão. There were some new faces, too: Liz Dow, the British consul for Lisbon, British Embassy press officer Andy Bowes and Alex Woolfall, a PR crisis-management specialist from Bell Pottinger in the UK, who had been drafted in by Mark Warner, as had a trauma psychologist from the Centre for Crisis Psychology (CCP) in north Yorkshire, who had now also arrived in Luz.
13 named people.  All crammed into a small apartment, plus an assortment of Tapas 7 who will have been responsible for herding them all together and catering for their needs.
 

 But no mention of Jon Clarke !


From that moment they were under the protection of the Tapas 7 and several family members who had arrived during the day. . . and within a few days were controlled by PR and ‘Spokes-people’.

The press conference is a different matter. That would have been, and clearly was communicated to all interested parties in the usual way. The stage was clearly set with television news cameras and lighting in place before their scripted appearance – which was carefully timed for 10pm GMT, to go live on the News

Bulletins across the world. There is nothing unusual about that. It is how “live” broadcasts are arranged.

And as we all clearly saw, and can see again if we choose to on YouTube, the McCanns appeared in the stairwell, Gerry read the short statement, and they then turned away and disappeared, taking no questions.

They were neither approached nor spoken to by Clarke nor by anyone else.

So now we have to address an even more fundamental question.

Did Clarke speak to the McCanns at all ?    Ever ?  
 
There is no clear evidence of his having done so. There are no attributable quotes, only the suspiciously vague 2019 version – “they said “Hi”, and I think they may have also said“ thanks for coming”.”, which has now hardened into 
“They were polite, and even thanked me for reporting on the case. They were clearly devastated.”
No explanation or details of the evidence which led Kate to know ‘know’ that Madeleine had been abducted, and very specifically by a paedophile.  No quotes to show the anguish they were both allegedly suffering at that moment.  No heart-string-tugging phrases . . . and certainly no long attributable interview, reported in his own newspaper, - which on any test would be been worth a small fortune at that moment in “syndication rights”.
Nothing.
All we are given are at least three different and contradictory versions of his “alleged’ first encounter.
The language he employs may be revealing –
“there wasn’t much opportunity, sadly, to talk to them about what had happened . . .”
But this was written in 2019.
What he notably does NOT add is words to the effect -
“It wasn’t until 5 days later that I managed to get them on their own and hear the whole story . . .”
and that may be important.
Even Martin Brunt, the world famous Sky Crime Correspondent, who spent 10 days in PdL did not manage to speak to the McCanns before he left, so close was the protective barrier erected around the them and the Tapas 7.
“I spent 10 days in Portugal," he says. "I thought there were still angles to the story to explore. But I came back because it was deemed we were spending a lot of money on it when there were other stories to cover." So he'd have liked to stay longer? "Yeah. I hadn't at that stage interviewed the parents.”
Kate is similarly silent in her book.  One might have thought that a friendly English-speaking journalist fully seised of the official story would have been of great value in their press campaign.  (As in fact he tried to become over the next few months.)
Brunt admits that even he did not manage to speak to the McCanns in the 10 days he was there.
Clarke stays silent.
Clarke wrote for the Sun and News International (now Corp) for some 6 months before he published a single article in his own paper.  
Is that astonishing, or does it simply suggest an exclusive – and lucrative – contract.
He continued to write the most lurid and far-fetched articles for The Sun, which were then copied and pasted across the tabloid churnalist world,  the most ludicrous being ‘The Curious Case of the Angolan Bouncer’, over which it is probably better to draw a veil.  The rotting corpse of this story has been dissected at length and the debris sluiced away.   Only the salient points remain pickled in the formaldehyde of the internet in case someone cares to re-examine it.
In the early days his reports featured in the Mail, though it is not possible to say whether this is syndication, churnalism, or a continuation of the original contract.
And from there we have to ask – What was Clarke actually DOING for the two weeks he claims to have been there?
Can we assume that during that time he nipped home the four and a half hour trip each way to see his wife, G*******a,  and his young family?
Did he try to build contacts within the GNR or the PJ?
He now tells us that he walked up and down the beach at least ten times, and looked into deserted buildings, for what possible reason again we are not told.  Given that the GNR dogs and large and diverse search parties had been at the scene since the early hours of the first morning – contrary to what Clarke reports, but clearly evidenced in the contemporaneous news reports which include shots of Clarke himself – and spent the following weeks scouring almost the entire town and waste land surrounding it, it seems a fairly pointless and time-wasting activity for a journalist.
Or did he confine himself to joining the gaggle of reporters in the bars who sat and drank and waited for their official briefing each day before hastily filing their copy, as was so perceptively observed by a real Investigative Journalist, Paulo Reis, who went ‘under cover’ to observe how his fellow journalists continue the slide of their profession into disrepute.
Clarke was on his own account, at least for the initial stage under twocontracts.  Sky and the Mail.  
And this means double pay and double expenses.
NOTA BENE:    I am assured that this is apparently normal and permitted within the arcane rules of the Media, and however dishonest it may seem to us lay people, it must be made clear that it is not.    It is one of the few perks of being free-lance.
What it means is that he was not short of funds.  But the suspicion arises that longer he remained in PdL, the longer this particular financial arrangement would continue.
We can be sure his imagination did not extend to making full enquiries and recording observations, nor of considering the full range of options.
Nowhere have I been able to find any discussion of the not-broken, not-forced, not-jemmied, and not-smashedshutters, though they were clear even on his arrival.  They are shown already liberally covered with “Dragon’s Blood” fingerprint power as he is filmed walking past them.   And this despite this particular story’s appearing on news bulletins across the world for the first few days.


Nowhere have I been able to find an in-depth interview with anyone of interest.
No interview with Hill about the lack of evidence of forced entry nor of abduction for example.
He puts forward no theories, no scenarios, no explanation of how ‘it’ might have been achieved.
What we are given is an endless repetition of the original story, that one fixed in time as at 10:00pm Thursday 3rd May 2007, and never altered since that day, even though the subsequent discovery of evidence and multiple enquiries shows it was neither credible nor even remotely possible.
In that sense became a “mantra”. An article of faith, which if repeated often enough induces in its practitioners a type of semi-hypnotic state in which it becomes part of what may be termed a religion.
A Religion – in the sense that it relies only on Faithand Belief, and not on evidence except that written by the leader of that religion whose writings are or course self-fulfilling.
A Religion – in the further sense that any who dare to question it will be dismissed, reviled, punished, abused, financially penalised, and in some cases put to death or pressured into taking their own lives.
Or is it more like one of the fake pseudo-religious cults, so frequently discovered in the US exploiting the most gullible and intellectually underprivileged, where at the centre is that which all worship.   MONEY
To repeat – Clarke was paid both by the Mail and by The Sun in the early days. Double pay and double expenses.  For the first six months he did not publish a single article in his own paper in Southern Spain
This highly suggestive of lucrative and highly exclusive but legally restrictive contracts.
It is also, when we look at the evidence of how it seems to have worked after that contract came to an end probably in late October, suggestive of the manipulation for money of a ‘useful idiot’  to plant or invent stories which can then be repeated in the national press.
The Media can then always claim to be merely repeating what has been written somewhere else.
It was during this time that Clarke was heavily censured by the Spanish Press Association’s watchdog, FAPE,  but given their lack of coercive powers he simply ignored them, and carried on his regime of vilification, abuse and defamation of any who stood in his way.   See chapter 31.  
And the next big question is WHY.  Why did Clarke do this?   Why does he continue to do it?
This is not a question of being right or wrong. Either or both of us may be wrong.
The question is about why Clarke felt and still feels the compulsion to lie – endlessly – when his lies are so easily exposed, and add little if anything to the topic under discussion.
Let me demonstrate.   Compare the following hypothetical statements :-
“I was the first journalist at the scene and I saw that the shutters were not broken.”
against what he could so easily and honestly have written –
“I joined a group of journalists at the scene and we could all see that the shutters were not broken”
[And of course he says neither, since it is clear that discussion of the shutters is taboo. Haram. Verboten.]
How does the first statement enhance the observation ?
It clearly doesn’t, but it has the incidental side-effect when the lie contained therein is exposed of reducing or totally destroying the credibility of the reporter.
It would be easy to assume that money was involved at the beginning, and that gradually it has become impossible for him to resile from the initial stance for financial and contractual reasons.    But what does it say about all the journalists and reporters and commentators who have sold their souls in the same way?

This does not pre-suppose that one theory or the other is de facto correct. Far from it.
What it implies is that members of a ‘profession’ we have relied on to challenge the establishment, to pick apart statements, to dissect points of view and thereby to maintain our collective freedom had cynically and deliberately decided not to do so.
They have failed us all.    And for that we condemn Clarke and all like him. 
We shall not easily forget this betrayal.
 
As the German connection begins to fade away, and the Staatsanwalt [State Prosecutor] Hr. Wolters has his bluff called and is about to be exposed as having no evidence sufficient to put before a Court of Law, (despite Brunt claiming a couple of months ago that he “believes that perhaps the prosecutor has video evidence of her being killed, or her dead body.”.    Yes, he really said that !) we might remind ourselves what the professional and other people at the scene in the immediate aftermath told the world, either then, or subsequently.
 
 
 
 
Brunt:                                        There is no evidence . . . we were over-sympathetic, lost our objectivity 
Mitchell:                                   Disappearance is a complete mystery
Hill:                                            No evidence of a break in, and no evidence of abduction
DCI Amaral:                              No evidence
DCI Tavares:                              No evidence
DI Paiva:                                    No evidence
Prosecutor Magalhães:          No evidence about the circumstances under which she was removed
Forensic teams:                       No evidence
Search teams:                          No evidence
Tracker dogs:                            No evidence 
BritPol:                                      No evidence
MetPol:                                     No definitive evidence (of anything very much really)
Lee Fountain:                           No evidence. But concentrate on the parents
 
In a previous Chapter  (Ch. 17 Philosophical Problems) I examined this lack of evidence and tested it against the oft-repeated aphorism –   “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
I showed how in this case it very definitely IS evidence.
To precis : Absence of evidence (of abduction) can be evidence of absence (of abduction) if:
1               You would reasonably expect to find evidence, and
2               Qualified investigators conducting a proper search fail to find evidence.
In this case both apply, and we can become ever more confident that it is indeed Evidence of Absence.
To spell it out for those who are hard of understanding :-
The issue is not that there is no evidence that Christian Brückner or Raymond Hewlett, or Robert Murat, or Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Daniel Whiddon, Harry Hawke, Uncle Thomas Cobleigh . . .
or indeed anyone else chosen apparently at random “DID IT”– 
The issue is that there is no evidence and anyone “DID IT”.
There is no evidence that ’IT’ was ‘DID’ in the first place.
In that place at that time in that way.
 
What we can be sure of is this –
Madeleine is missing.  This fact was reported around 10pm on Thursday 3rd May 2007
 
And it is worth repeating as often as we can, so that everyone remembers and understands; 
the only people who insist that Madeleine was abducted by a paedophile are the principal suspects – the parents – and neither they, nor any of the people who have supported them in this story over the past 13 years are able to point to a single piece of what any rational person would term ‘evidence’, nor to provide a coherent scenario how “IT” might have been performed, or in which “IT” might have been achieved within the parameters so rigidly set by the principal suspects – the parents - themselves.
 
And if that is correct they we may tentatively suggest that Operation Grange and the Bundeskriminalamt –the German FBI / CID, (the BKA) might spend their time more productively hunting Unicorns.

CHAPTER 38

REFERENCES AND ORIGINAL TEXTS.


1

https://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2011/11/07/24455/

WHY LIBEL IS NO BIG DEAL IN SPAIN


2

http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-29-fake-news.html


3
http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/01/chapter-31-jon-clarke-olive-press-lies.html

JON CLARKE – OLIVE PRESS - LIES AND VIDEOTAPE


4
http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-32-on-lies-and-conspiracies.html


5
https://closeronline.co.uk/real-life/news/madeleine-mccann-german-suspect-jon-clarke/


As a prime suspect in the Madeleine McCann case is announced, Closer speaks to Jon Clarke who has followed the story since the three-year-old went missing...


Journalist Jon Clarke was one of the first on the scene in Praia da Luz, Portugal, when Maddie went missing from a holiday resort in May 2007, while her parents ate in a nearby restaurant. He has been reporting on the case ever since.

Jon recalls the call he received from a British newspaper on the morning of 4 May 2007, asking him to report on a missing child.

He says, “I remember thinking that by the time I got there, she’d have turned up. Praia da Luz was a sleepy little village and hardly anyone was around when I arrived later that morning. But I was shocked when I saw the McCanns’ apartment – there was no security and just a flimsy piece of police tape covering the side gate.”

A few hours after arriving, Jon met Kate and Gerry. He says, “They were polite, and even thanked me for reporting on the case. They were clearly devastated. The press conference outside their apartment later that day only confirmed my feelings. I think almost every person there shed a tear. As a journalist, you try not to get too emotional about a story, but my own daughter had just turned two, so it was hard not to get upset.

“In the days that followed, it was clear this was a story like no other – hundreds of journalists descended on the town and Maddie’s face was everywhere. Everyone was looking for her – I must have walked the length of the beach ten times, combing through the wasteland and looking in abandoned houses.”

Jon stayed in Portugal for two weeks while the case unfolded – until it became clear that Maddie was no longer in Praia da Luz. He says he has since returned countless times to report on the story, and even appeared in a Netflix documentary that aired last year about her disappearance.


6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxHuwT__URc

Press conference 4/5/7 10pm


7
'madeleine’, by Kate McCann, 2011, Bantam Press.   p.93


8
https://web.archive.org/web/20070706231113/http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2725892.ece


Brunt accepts that the way that the story was handled by his and other media organisations was imperfect. "It's the view of a few of us that when we look back over the first two or three weeks of the coverage we were in some ways over-sympathetic. We kind of adopted the tone and the language that the family did. I think we perhaps lost our objectivity a bit, we became a bit too subjective about the story."

The message of hope that was broadcast contradicted what Brunt's police sources had told him from the outset. "Ever since day one, when I spoke to cop contacts and others who had been involved in this kind of story, they said 'Just look at the statistics'. Most children who disappear in these circumstances are victims of paedophiles who plan everything and then panic. The easy option for them is to destroy the only witness to their crime. It was clear to me from very early on that this was going to be the most likely outcome. I think journalists in general tended to shy away from making that point."

Nonetheless, he remains sore that he was pulled off the story before he was ready to come home. "I spent 10 days in Portugal," he says. " I thought there were still angles to the story to explore. But I came back because it was deemed we were spending a lot of money on it when there were other stories to cover." So he'd have liked to stay longer? "Yeah. I hadn't at that stage interviewed the parents.


9
https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/379292/madeleine-mccann-is-in-america-and-iknow-

who-took-her/


10
https://gazetadigitalmadeleinecase.blogspot.com/search?q=undercover&maxresults=

20&by-date=true

Thursday, 10 May 2018       Why I went undercover to Praia da Luz


11
FAPE Resolucion 1013/82


La información publicada en “The Olive Press” es un ejemplo de sensacionalismo

irresponsable para atraer la atención del eventual lector. Su contenido es

charlatanería en estado puro, “gossip” en el idioma en el cual se ha escrito y en el

lenguaje periodístico “amarillismo “, siempre reprochable pero mucho más cuando se

puede poner en peligro al sujeto pasivo de la información que irrumpe

inesperadamente en el ámbito de la intimidad de la menor, una niña de ocho años,

sacándola a la luz pública con perjuicio de su estabilidad emocional e incluso con

riesgo para su integridad personal. 


[my translation]. “In the reasoning of this resolution it states that the journalist has acted with remarkable flippancy and published a scandalous story based on very flimsy material. The information published in "The Olive Press" is an example of irresponsible sensationalism to attract the attention of the prospective reader.    Its content is pure charlatanry, "gossip" in the language in which it has been written and in journalistic language “amarillismo", [sensationalist journalism]  always reprehensible but much more when an innocent subject of the information can be endangered”


VII.- RESOLUCIÓN

Teniendo en consideración los anteriores razonamientos de la ponencia, esta

Comisión de Arbitraje, Quejas y Deontología del periodismo ACUERDA que don Jon

Clarke, editor de “The Olive Press” y doña Wendy Williams, autora del reportaje

“Maddie? Yes … but not the right one” han infringido los arts. 4º y 13 del Código

Deontológico FAPE por no haber respetado el derecho a la intimidad personal y

familiar de Madeleine A., menor de edad, y de sus padres, el señor L. A. y la señora

R. E., ni haber cuidado de contrastar las fuentes de la información, no dándoles

además la oportunidad de ofrecer su propia versión sobre los hechos.

Madrid, 6 de noviembre de 2013


[my translation].   In 2013 FAPE, the Federación de Associationes de Periodistas de España - the Spanish Journalists’ Association, – “is agreed that Mr Jon Clarke, editor of “The Olive Press” and Wendy Williams, the author of the report, “Maddie? Yes, but not the one we were looking for . . .”  infringed Articles 4 and 13 of the FAPE Ethical Code for not having respected the right to personal and family privacy of M.A., a minor, and of her parents, Mr. L. A. and Mrs. R. E., and also neither bothered to check the sources of the information, nor gave them the opportunity to offer their own version of events.”

Madrid, 6 November 2013


12
https://9now.nine.com.au/a-current-affair/german-prosecutor-claiming-madeleine-mccann-is-dead-may-have-video-of-the-incident/

Mr Brunt believes that perhaps the prosecutor has video evidence of her being killed, or her dead body.


13
http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-17-some-philosophical-thoughts.html

http://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-38-lies-damned-lies-and-jon.html

https://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t16952-petermac-chapter-38-lies-damned-lies-and-jon-clarke#425725

One of the issues which lurks in the background of this saga and bothers researchers is the question of who it is organising and coordinating the “Official Story’; the timing of the releases of information and ‘revelations’, and the blatant invention of sightings and stories designed to give weight to the “Official Story” at each stage of its long metamorphosis.
Those who have devoted 14 years of their spare time to this Complete Mystery may be forgiven for suspecting that there is a single malign entity at the helm.

We can investigate this through the technique of Information Flow Analysis, and create some rudimentary charts similar to those generated by the ANACAPA system

We focus on the WHO ? questions
Who HAS the information? Who HAD the information?
And if someone now has it who is not a first-hand witness, what is the possible link, what is the route by which the information travelled?

It is irrelevant whether the information is true or even accurate.
Paradoxically it is more easy to track false and invented information, since there is no chance of a third party innocently having discovered or invented it for themselves.

The techniques of the “Canary trap”, and the “Barium Meal Test” are well known and documented in the world of counter-espionage and counter-intelligence, and can be used even in everyday situations.
Marking notes, numbering copies, and typing onto photosensitive paper are well known techniques.

Let us give a simple example from the workplace :–
An employee is suspected of leaking information to the press, and we know the Press are are now in possession of a copy of a document.
I prepare another document.
The original in my possession reads     “This document is not to be copied”
The copy for Employee A reads             “This document is not to be photocopied.”
The copy for Employee B reads.            “This document is not to be photo-copied”
When a copy is found I can then tell whether my secretary has copied it, or whether employee A or B is responsible. Trapped by a hyphen or a full stop.

Let us go back to the beginning

Consider the first [false] story about the forced, broken, smashed and jemmied shutters and the open window. We can be certain that this information got to the press from relatives and friends who in turn got it directly from the McCanns. Because they told us so. On the record. All of them



But even if they had not told us, the McCanns were the only ones in possession of that [false] information, and so it cannot have some from any other source.

This is what they would like us to think. All very direct and straightforward, even though, strangely, McCann supporters deny this is what happened, and insist that no claim about the shutters was ever made. 
In fact what we have discovered was this.


We have wondered for 14 years what could possibly have possessed the McCanns to open their campaign with such a series of blatant untruths, when it must have been obvious to them, and to the Tapas 7, that they would be exposed as the sun came up, so soon as the first independent observer looked at the shutters in question.

We are thus led into a place we do not wish to be. Into a Conspiracy Theory.
Most Conspiracy Theories are nonsense, nothing more than the product of overactive minds incapable of sifting through observable facts and admitting that there are gaps in knowledge.

This is probably no different [before anyone goes rushing off to Libel Lawyers ! ]
But it may not be.

Several followers of this case have seen the influence of people who would not normally have been involved in a case of a small girl missing in a foreign country, beyond some anodyne statement that “the department is keeping the matter under review . . .”

We therefore tentatively posit the existence of some one, or some group, manipulating and controlling the entire Saga, right from the start.
We have no idea who he, or she, or they may be, though several of the Usual Suspects present themselves.

Let us for sake of lightheartedness, and to show that we are not necessarily being serious, refer to this person or entity as The Fat Controller.


Now the story involving the shutters, relatives and Press begins to look different.

The Fat Controller must be in possession of the truth from the start, and will then work out a strategy of misinformation to push into the public domain the “Official Story” we know only too well by now.

https://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-3-curtains-door-and-windows.html

**

Applying this possibility, ridiculous as it may be, to other episodes may help to make clear what was previously obscure. In the Gusmaroli story we may seriously suspect the presence of a controlling hand.

https://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-20-spot-water-slide.html

Gusmaroli cannot POSSIBLY have known about Madeleine’s clothing either on Sunday 29th April, or on Thursday 3rd May.
She was not told it by Mrs Boyd, who had no reason to recall it, nor by the McCanns.
Therefore . .
Someone TOLD Gusmaroli what to include.

The fact that Gusmaroli’s story is slightly at odds with the image in the Pool Photo is not important.
The fact that the story includes a top and skirt rather than a swimming costume, a sun hat, and includes the slide even though it is identified as a “waterslide”, rather than the one on the Wendy House is paradoxically an indication that she did know what she had to include.

Similarly with the day and date and time of the alleged encounter.

After 14 years of research and investigation we know that the Pool Photo was not and cannot POSSIBLY have been taken at lunchtime on Thursday 3/5/7.
So who told her to include that exact time, day and date ?

This is what Gusmaroli would like us to believe




In fact we now know that the Information Flow Diagram should look more like this, with Mrs Boyd giving a very limited amount of information, but Gusmaroli inventing the “facts”.




The possibility of a Fat Controller might make the whole episode more comprehensible.
The information can ONLY come from the McCanns, and has to reach Gusmaroli somehow




At its simplest it might look like this. G&K pass accurate information to The Fat Controller, who then gives instructions to Gusmaroli to ensnare an unsuspecting Boyd, and pass the false report to First.

But it becomes increasingly likely that something more complex is involved
The Fat Controller is now also controlling G&K, and probably First, to remain in control of the whole thing.

And the reason for this is that the same Fat controller who organised the First article must also have been involved in the alteration of the date of the Pool photo, so that the two things coincided in time and place, as well as in details of clothing.
Again, the fact that the article got scrambled and distorted does not detract from this.

To digress slightly on this point.
It is not difficult to see how the Gusmaroli story ended up as it did
Picture if you will, the scene.

***



***
This will be familiar to almost everyone. As with the party game of Chinese Whispers peripheral details get lost and added. Sometimes an original detail re-appears, particularly when it is an obvious or likely addition.

The close coordination of the timing of the release of the Pool Photo and the Gusmaroli / First article might lead us to suspect something like this.

Here we can track the flow of information in the two simultaneous events, with the Fat Controller coordinating the two stories. On the left is the Gusmaroli / First story and in perfect synchrony on the right is the preparation and release into the public domain of the Pool Photo, with its all important DATE in the EXIF Metadata

For those who need reminding, none of this could have happened between 10pm and midnight on Thursday 3/5/7. This took some considerable time to coordinate.
https://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-39-beyond-reasonable-waterslide.html

The Photo was released on 23rd May, and the first Magazine appeared on the shelves on 21st May




****

Now let us think back to the egregious Jon Clarke and his part in this sorry saga. We find several indications that he may have started as a bit of a maverick, operating outside instructions in the early days, but then that he was reined in tighter as time went on.

His nonsensical lie about the deep trench directly outside the apartment, repeated on the Netflix film, for example, DIRECTLY challenges the “official story” in that it implies the possibility of the Woke and Wandered followed by accident scenario, but with the body being unaccountably missed by searchers, dogs, police and family over the next weeks and months, even though it lay within two metres of the gate.

https://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/07/chapter-33-jon-clarke-entrenched-lies.html

His three (at least) different lies about meeting and speaking to the McCanns add nothing, except to underline his habitual mendacity.

But later there are indications of higher control. We recall that he wrote exclusively for News Corp, the Murdoch press, despite having a young newspaper of his own. Whether that is a factor we may never know.

Read again the chapter on the Angolan Bouncer. Clarke uses a risible and pathetic passive evasive construction when his explanation consists of “I found myself inadvertently interviewing an Angolan chap”.

Claiming to have “found myself” in Huelva, more than 3 hours drive from home, and “interviewing” a man who claims to have material evidence in the case of a young girl abducted by Paedophiles – “inadvertently”, is a ludicrous distortion of language. It is simply not true, as we have sadly grown to expect from him.

To re-cap as briefly as I can, the Angolan was handing in to the Spanish police, in the presence of his lawyer, a dossier about an international child-smuggling ring which had taken Madeleine to the USA. Clarke wrote a lurid story complete with full face photo, and strangely, a photograph of the gentleman in question in an office with piles of documents on the desk in front of him. That he did this to a man allegedly in fear of his life, or at least of losing some more teeth, emphasises what we all really suspect about the story.

We were given no details of location, persons present, time, date or anything which would enable further enquiries to be made. Only the gentleman’s full name. That enabled a quick internet search which revealed that one of the mainstays of the story – that he had “fled to Spain” (or perhaps – just crossed the invisible and unmanned border between two Schengen area countries) was an invention, by one or the other of the people concerned, as it was clear that not only had he lived in Huelva for some some, but had been instrumental in the success of the local basketball team in a Regional or National competition a year or so before.

Again this has all the hall marks of coordination, or Command and Control, by The Fat Controller
Let me summarise from the Chapter
https://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-34-decline-and-fall-of-modern.html

Consider:
Ronda to Huelva is 223 km, by car. Approx. 2 hours 40 Min. Allowing for time to park, locate protagonists, coffee, comfort, introduction and explanations we can safely allow 3 hours. Each way.

If we then suppose an absolute minimum of 2 hours interview, in order to investigate, to probe and cross check the information being supplied, read the dossier, discuss with the lawyer what details could and could not be published, organise and agree the photographs, and negotiate and finalise contract for the fee payable both to the interviewee and his lawyer, we are looking at a full 8 hour day.

What can we deduce ?
Someone had to learn of the events about to take place; or to make sure they did;
had to speak to the Angolan Bouncer and/or his lawyer;
had to contact a friendly and complaint journalist;
had to coordinate the date, time and place of the interview;
had to ensure an interpreter was present, or was not necessary;
had to arrange fees and expenses for interviewer AND interviewee;
had to ensure that the finished article was sent to The Sun and nowhere else;
and much much more.

This did not happen by accident or happenstance.

Is not this more likely ?

The same hand is seen controlling and coordinating. The question is who is The fat controller

And again, to labour the point with another blatant example
Go back to Clarke’s first visit to PdL. I recap from Chapter 32

Clarke claims in print on the record to have arrived at 11:45.
We charitably supposed he meant Spanish time (BST + 1), which gives us 10:45 Portuguese Time (BST = WEST)
But that implies that he left home at 0730 Spanish, 0630 Portuguese

In fact he is known and can be proved to be in PdL at the absolute latest by 0945 Portuguese time, 10;45 Spanish, which implies he must have left home at 0630 Spanish, 0530 Portuguese and UK, well over an hour before he claims to have left.
If we allow for time for Clarke to find PdL, find the locus, park, find relief, orientate himself, meet and introduce himself to the GNR officers and present his journalistic credentials, meet and introduce himself to the several other journalists who were – contrary to his repeated lies – gathered in front of the apartment building [ He is on film doing this] then the time may be pushed back at least another 15 or 30 minutes
His fuller story was that he received one or more phone calls, and that “I was on the road half an hour later”.
As I showed in Chapter 32 this puts the time of the phone call/s at 0600 Spanish time, or 0500 Portuguese and British time, at the very latest.

So by 0500 the British press – as a whole not just one paper – knew, knew, that this story was worth sending a journalist from a neighbouring country. They had had time to brief the various levels of organisation, trawl their contact lists, and to select a pliant reporter, even though he lived 4 hours away, when Len Port another ex-pat reporter, who speaks Portuguese, lives less than 20 minutes from PdL.
This again pushed the knowledge of the importance of the Story to 0400,

Which in turn makes the suggestion of planning by a Fat Controller rather less ludicrous.

There is very high level censorship and involvement in this case.
Someone organised Carter-Ruck to officially offer “pro bono” legal help.
The saga has involved one death, possibly two, possibly more; Libel actions resulting in awards of substantial damages; One High Court case leading to a sentence of imprisonment and financial ruin; Books banned from the Amazon website; books banned from sale; comments banned from on-line news outlets. One emigration.

There is no doubt that the pressure on journalists will be now be very great to continue to toe the party line and push the “Official Story” even as it changes and bends with the prevailing winds.
After 14 years how many of them would willing admit they were wrong all along and name and shame the organisers ?

Should one feel a certain sympathy ? Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

The question remains unanswered –

Chapter 42: 'My Search for Madeleine' - Jon Clarke. Some first impressions

* Stylistically it is a strange mixture.
 
It starts with more formal documentary account of events over a decade ago, and at times we have a recollection of having read parts before, a long time ago. Nothing wrong with copying and pasting one’s own words of course. It ensures that the meaning and details are not distorted by passage of time.

Then there are passages which are more gentle, even amusing and self deprecatory. He adopts a ‘matey’ style, with somewhat loose grammatical construction and syntax.

It is marred at times, as is so much of Clarke’s work, by viciousness and vituperation, and his pathological venom-spitting hatred of anyone who seeks to question either him or the “official narrative”, using all the well worn clichés, “evil, vitriolic minds behind this filth”, “his gang of trolls”, “and all the usual restricted vocabulary employed by those who will not, or cannot argue the case in a civilised manner. He adds the obligatory ad hominen attacks and repeats one or two well rehearsed lies, several of which have been discussed in other Chapters about Clarke and his progressive distancing of himself from the normal rules of veracity.

The first third is also a litany of all the suspects so far named and eliminated.
Murat, (of whom more later), Malinka, Walczuch, vonAesch, Hewlett, Ney, even Monteiro are all listed and examined but only in the sense that their alleged involvement is detailed.
Not, ‘and that’s an emphatic NOT’, in the sense that their eventual elimination from the enquiry is stressed or even grudgingly noted. It is as though Clarke is hedging his bets in case anyone in his book turns out to have been in any way involved in anything.
He quotes Paulo Rebelo, through ‘sources’ as saying he believed that ‘Russian child traffickers’ might be involved. And then adds “He might turn out to be correct”, and leaves hanging and unresolved the re-hashed story about the Angolan Bouncer and taking Madeleine to the USA.
Neat.

He grudgingly admits that Robert Murat, the man whom he personally helped to frame for a crime which may not even have been committed, “Looks as though [he] is innocent”.
You have to wait until p. 124 and the Netflix Nonsense before you find Clarke admitting his part, and “making an impromptu apology to him for effectively ruining his life.”

* And then we come to the Second part of the book.

Chapters 14 to 46, some 190 pages out of the 265 are devoted to the pursuit of a single person. A new suspect, but only in the minds of Clarke and H. Wolters, a German State Prosecutor.

He is, so far as I know, not a suspect in Portugal, nor probably in London, but Clarke seems totally convinced that this suspect is somehow better than all the previous ones.

This second two thirds of the book changes into a lengthy travelogue. The style changes again into the contemporary historical present with a suspiciously large amount of direct speech. Suspicious because with the possible exception of the interview with H. Wolters which may have been recorded with permission, it is unlikely that any of the direct quotes, in full quotation marks, are any such thing. Unless Clarke is wired for sound the whole time, of course.
But it is a style were are familiar with, and we must accept.

* In terms of Investigation it is a mixture.

Never once does Clarke question the abduction story. But also never once does he actually set out in print what the full story actually IS. What would have been involved, what the MO is thought to have been.

He appears to have swallowed the whole story that the shutters were forced, despite being on film watching the scenes-of-crime girl trying to find a single print on obviously intact shutters. He was there. He saw, but as Sherlock Holmes says to Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia’ “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”
Clarke saw, but he then seems to have assumed.

He styles himself as an Investigative journalist, but sometimes as merely a ‘stringer’ – one who “contributes reports, photos, or videos to a news organisation on an ongoing basis but is paid individually for each piece of published or broadcast work” WIKI.

Here in the first third of the book he has failed to investigate anything much.
And that which he did he got tragically and disgracefully wrong, identifying a man (Murat) as a suspect, having him interviewed, made “arguido”, hounded by the Tabloid press and universally vilified, and eventually awarded £600,000 in damages against the very tabloid papers for which Clarke had written, purely on the basis of an observable disability, and in Clarke’s own words “ruined his life”.
Clarke confesses that it was he, rather than Lori Campbell, who set it all in train.
They should both bow their heads in shame. People have resigned for less.


The second two thirds are a complete contrast. Here, although he is single-mindedly pursuing one man and filling in a mountain of background detail about him, he seems not to worry that the link between the reported disappearance of Madeleine and Christian Brückner is tenuous at least, even if, as Clarke apparently does, he believes there was an abduction in some vague unspecified way in some vague unspecified time frame.

It would be too easy to dismiss this as a witch hunt.
A child has died. Let’s lynch the local village idiot, and drown the old women with Alzheimers who talks to her cat and doesn’t wash.

But what is the difference between that and “A child has been reported missing. Let’s lynch the guy with the funny eye, and the bloke who steals diesel and goes to raves and smokes pot.”

Brückner may be involved in something. I have no evidence either way.
But until someone explains exactly what that something IS that he is supposed to be involved IN, we should all retain open minds and continue to ask the questions of those who are secure in their own pre-judgment.

The undoubted fact that he is not the sort of person with whom one would wish to have anything other than purely professional dealings, is undoubtedly a pervert, is probably severely psychologically damaged as Clarke catalogues, and has been convicted of a string of heinous crimes and misdemeanours, does not make him automatically guilty of every unsolved crime in Europe.

Clarke tries to suggest he is guilty of the unsolved disappearance of René Hassée, the little boy clearly washed out to sea at Aljezur, and even, almost incredibly, of the solved murder of Joanna Cipriano.
As one of the Tapas 7 said “I’m not making this up”.

Clarke’s description of Kate McCanns book as “excellent”, and of the Summers and Swann pathetic re-hash of existing statements as a “detailed benchmark tome” may give us an idea of the standards he applies.

There are several strange and jarring grammatical errors and malapropisms which an educated and experienced wordsmith or his editors and proofreaders should perhaps have found.
“. . . it was frustrating that despite Lori and I appearing to have almost cracked the case . . .”
“. . . sinister letter to my wife and I . . .”
“. . . they eyed Lawrence and I up suspiciously.”
are sub-O level, grammatically and structurally.
Of DCI Amaral’s book –
“which he wrote on retirement from the force and which must be viewed as extremely sceptical - “
is simple illiteracy. I think I know what he intends to convey but it takes some working out.

* And then there are the simply straightforward factual errors. 

Every one of these can be checked independently, and most people who have followed this case over the 14 years know the truth.
Clarke has exactly the same access to all the files and the reports as everyone else, and very probably much more. He is surely well aware that some of these are not true, and they therefore qualify as Lies.

“Amaral - who later wrote a lucrative book claiming the McCanns killed their daughter. . .”
He did NOT. His book suggests at worst accidental death and concealment of a body. Relatively minor offences. Nothing more.
“Amaral – who made enough money from his book to buy a new house”
He did not. Either make enough money, or buy a house

“It emerged that his [Murat’s] lazy eye was in fact a glass eye…”. [my emphasis]
It is not. Robert Murat has a detached retina and has no sight in the eye, like Gordon Brown and Admiral Lord Nelson. The eye is intact. It simply doesn’t work.
Murat explained this himself in detail at the Cambridge Union debate in 2008 and it was widely reported and is still on-line in the Guardian archive. [see Link, or google ‘Murat glass eye’ and read No 1]
Despite that the myth persists amongst the gutter press, and part of his speech was about how the Tabloids had ‘spoken to school friends’ which is Tabloid for totally invented stories, of his taking it out and rolling it round the playground.
But Clarke is clearly of that breed. He writes for and is paid by the red tops, Sun, Mirror and Mail, and has done for decades, so he doesn’t need to concern himself with facts or details too much. The truth washes over him without even cleaning off any of the dirt.

Although Clarke is happy to describe everyone else as Conspiracy Theorists, he is free with the most often used of their techniques. That of posing a question to which there is no immediate answer, and using that to form the foundation of the next part of the theory.
“Because we cannot yet fully understand the building of Stonehenge/Pyramids/Macchu Picchu (delete as appropriate) – – could it be that extra-terrestrials were at work. Only they surely had the advanced technology needed to move the stones/ flatten them/carry them to the top of the mountain.
And what did these beings look like, and where did they come from ? – note how it has now changed from a vague falsifiable suggestion into an accepted fact.

Consider these, a tiny sample of the whole

“Could it be that he discovered something he shouldn’t have, and got silenced ?
“Could he have been involved in some sort of child sex ring himself ?
“And could he be the same blond friend who . . .
“. . .could he be involved in Brückner’s crimes
“. . .could he have been working for a larger number of accomplices involved ?
“… may [sic] he have made considerable amounts of money from snatching her ?
“Regarding the gun, could this be the same one . . .
“Could this be the mystery business man ?
“Could this be the evidence that makes the German police so certain she is dead ?
“Could it be she found photos of Maddie ?
I don’t know Jon. You are the Investigative Journalist. Tell us. Or tell us you don’t know.

And then there is the list of TTBD. Things to be Done. Unfinished business.
For Clarke this involves digging up half of the Algarve and most of Niedersachsen.

This is just one paragraph.
”Why haven’t they excavated his infamous Yellow House in Praia da Luz? Why haven’t police dug up Villa Bianca in Foral where he spent considerable time? . . . Sabine Selllig has pleaded with police to dig up the grounds of the allotment home he lived in in Braunschweig . . And nothing.”
elsewhere -
“I haven’t seen any activity around here, no excavations, no police, no searches,”…
“ I expect the police will come and dig the place up at some stage . . .”
“Why hasn’t more been done on the grounds in Portugal, and Germany digging up Brueckner’s former properties and places of interest, looking for evidence ?”

There are lots of cellars and tunnels, and secret hiding places, real Indiana Jones and the Missing Child stuff, though sadly the Secret Hidden Secure Compound with the four largest and most dangerous dogs in the world with their world-record bite don’t merit a mention, even in passing.
Which is a shame. I was looking forward to them.

There is an entire chapter on the Casa Pia case. But after six pages it ends in the rather plaintive sentence
“But it didn’t solve the mystery of Maddie.”
Well, no. Nothing at all to do with it.

So it’s a bit messy, a bit mixed. Sometimes episodic, sometimes a chronological travelogue, other times thematic. For someone who has not followed the story so far it could be confusing.
But as someone once said “Confusion is good”.

And of the McCanns ?
“I never wavered in my belief that the parents were innocent.”
“Because I believed the McCanns were entirely innocent . .”
“Whilst the documentary didn’t have a knockout punch it did raise a number of key issues . . . .the family were almost certainly innocent . .”

And of H. Fülscher, defence lawyer for Brückner ?
“eccentric”

And of the unending innuendo ?
“he said some things. . . and about his private life – but he insisted I did not publish them. I have agreed not to.”
“why he left in 1999 is open to conjecture, and it would be unfair to print any of the gossip . . .”
“There was something very dark about W. . ., I wish I could ask W, who was gay and had a younger boyfriend, but he died in 2017”

Easy isn’t it Jon? Lucky that most of the rest of humanity finds it unacceptable.

But I shall follow it up in the next Chapter. Out soon. Free.


LINK

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/mar/06/tabloids-madeleine-mccann-robert-murat


https://whatreallyhappenedtomadeleinemccann.blogspot.com/2016/08/chapter-42-my-first-impressions-of-jon.html