http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/bbc-and-victim-apologise-to-lord-mcalpine-after-admitting-abuse-claims-were-a-case-of-mistaken-identity-8301293.html
BBC's Newsnight must not become the dominating issue.
| Mr. Steve Messham |
Before everyone rushes off
down another cul de sac of disinformation, just stop and think for a
moment about yet another smokescreen, produced by what ever forces
are so determined to conceal the extent of and subsequent cover up
of, child abuse in this country. Quite rightly, it seems, Lord
McAlpine has received an apology for being identified on the
internet, following a BBC Newsnight feature concerning allegations in
respect of a North Wales care home. A victim of the abuse, Mr. Steve
Messham, now admits that he “ misidentified” the Tory peer as
taking part in abuse. The result of this has been immediate outrage
directed against the BBC and Newsnight in particular, the
cancellation of all current Newsnight investigations, the ordering
of an urgent report on the care home investigation by BBC's Director
General, George Entwhistle, and the suspension of all co-productions
with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism across the BBC. Quite a
reaction, which has resulted in the focus of attention once more
being directed at the BBC and its methods of reporting. Back in
October of this year, I was arguing that the investigations at the
BBC must not be allowed to take centre stage in these and the wider
issues involved in the child abuse investigations.
The current media
reporting, verging almost on the hysterical, is however achieving the
very effect that the conspirators would seek to create, Namely, to
divert attention away from the original crimes and the subsequent
cover up.
I am drawn to this view by
what Mr. Messham said in his apology and other less obvious
indicators.
He said: "After
seeing a picture in the past hour of the individual concerned, this
[is] not the person I identified by photograph presented to me by the
police in the early 1990s, who told me the man in the photograph was
Lord McAlpine."
From
this it is evident that the police, investigating Mr. Messham's
allegations back in the early 1990's, showed him a photograph of a
person who the police themselves identified as Lord McAlpine ! It
has already been stated by a number of abuse victims that the police
investigations at that time were less than thorough and frequently
involved intimidation of the victims themselves in an attempt to
pressure them into changing or even retracting their stories and
allegations. Why then should we not accept that presenting a victim
with a photograph of an unknown person and identifying that person as
someone else, was not part of a wider operation to ensure that the
inquiries went nowhere resulting in the investigation being dropped
due to “insufficient evidence”. This in itself demands an
inquiry of its own. The way in which police forces in at least five
other regions handled the investigations and the way in which victims
were treated seems nothing short of a scandal in its own right.
The
involvement of “establishment” figures at all stages of these
abhorrent events is not a “conspiracy theory”. The volume of
anecdotal evidence provides compelling justification to continue the
search for the truth.
There
are far too many factors emerging from the whole child abuse scandal
to allow a navel contemplation exercise at the BBC to dominate our
attention. The victims of the abuse deserve better than that.
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