Your Questions Answered

Do you believe that Kate & Gerry were involved in the disappearance of their daughter?

JB writes: If I did I certainly wouldn’t say so publicly. Who wants to be a loser? It  would be a stone cold libel for which no truth defence exists. As Carter Ruck warned their victim Bennett, his right to his views  is absolute, as is his right to pass them on to the police – but saying it publicly, which means attempting to persuade others that the McCanns are guilty, is another matter. One can do it as long as one has the irrefutable evidence to support it. For being too stupid to understand that point Bennett is now financially supporting his "enemies" and thus helping them prosper. Again.

But it would also be morally wrong. I've always asked myself, “if I was on a jury would I vote to convict the couple, given the evidence made public since 2007?” The answer is no, I certainly wouldn’t. I couldn't. So why would I want to make such a terribly serious claim without the absolute proof to justify it?

As far as neglect of the child is concerned, the Archiving Summary provides the evidence that they had not broken the Portuguese law by their actions.  I’m neither knowledgeable about, nor interested in, the subject.

So what is your problem with the McCanns?

I won't bother to repeat the proof that they've lied spectacularly about this affair. That is open and shut. More important is the question of that dreaded word principle, that from the very first day they set out to influence the public about their behaviour on a colossal scale while ignoring – no media! – the instructions of the police and attempting to go over their heads, either via secret channels to the media or by appealing for Foreign Office and thus government help against the police.

This was, without exaggeration,  the greatest, and most blatant public  attempt to bypass the legal and judicial system in modern European history, which is why it became so notorious world-wide. Instead of working within the law they engaged – expunge it! – an elaborate and highly expensive legal team not to argue their case to a coroner or a jury but to engage in a systematic campaign to convince the British public of their innocence, as the head of their defence admitted. By influencing the public mind - which smoothly ranges from sentimental hysteria to lynch mob savagery with very little in between, has no collective reasoning process and is therefore a much easier beast to tame than a jury -  it would be easier to ensure that the pair would never be extradited to Portugal.  They were right. It succeeded. But nobody yet knows for certain why they did it.

I’m not interested in small children; bringing them up was enough for me, thanks. I’m not particularly interested in cause-celebres or flesh-creeping mysteries. And I don’t much care about the future  of a couple of doctors.

But their attempt to substitute the paid media-blitzing of the   public for the rule of law was an insult, a perversion of everything that democracy stands for. It was only possible at all because of the international nature of the case: had the crime taken place in the UK all such behaviour would have been illegal, a serious contempt of court.

As a fanatical democrat, I was determined to challenge this attempt to co-opt all of us, without our agreement, into being their defence witnesses. Not on your life.

Why did you support Goncalo Amaral so strongly?

First of all it’s in the past, a subject I’m not interested in. We won. End of story.

Secondly, there was not the slightest sentiment involved. I have never met GA, have never spoken to him directly and communicated with him only through intermediaries. Both Amaral and I had the same aim: to see the McCanns'  claims tested in the judicial arena for the very first time, not indulged by star-struck MSM interviewers or smoothed by paid Crisis Management liars. That was why I agreed to become a defence witness for him.

The difference is that Amaral was fighting for his life and I was risking almost nothing but so what? The co-incidence of interest did no harm and, once we managed to persuade Sky to cover the Lisbon 2009/10 hearings we were home and dry: it turned out exactly as we'd suspected but had never dared to fully believe. For the very first time the facts  that the couple and their lawyers had worked so hard to conceal – the fact that GA was mainstream PJ, not the “rogue cop” they claimed, the fact that all the PJ detectives involved dismissed their version of events as a “fairy story”, the fact, as prosecutor Menezes stated, that the group had lied about the checking – were out in the open. Not long afterwards the Sky twitter-feed man, Jon di Paolo, tweeted those words so ominous for the couple's  future, that "M/S Duarte seems to be very angry and has started to shout". A few days later the McCanns’ meltdown on the court steps took place and things, as we knew, would never be the same again.

Why have you turned on other commentators on the case? Aren’t you all on the same side?

Of course we aren’t on the same side, and never have been. Up to 2009 or so there were large numbers of people with real brain and expertise who were as hurt and offended as I was at the couple’s attempts to act extra-legally and I listened to, learned from and communicated with them. The 3As in particular had lawyers, broadcasters, scientists, creative people in abundance, most of them specialists in their own field. A genuine expert on DNA appeared, for example, from whom some of us learned a great deal  but  he was strictly factual so, of course, the owner Brenda, then a fanatical anti-McCann, drummed him out SAP for being "biased".

But after 2009 sensible people began to turn their back on the case and get on with their lives while continuing to read about the case. What was the point of continuing to obsess? I was a writer anyway so I decided to continue.

The loonies and operators descended.  Bennett, whose personal emails and “cunning plans” were all passed on to us by Goncalo unacknowledged, so that we knew exactly what he was up to, came in late with his dodgy business partner. They  began by rubbishing the rogatory interviews that we had published in the UK – one copy to a pro-McCann, one to an anti, one to a neutral – as forgeries, dismissing my assurance that I had examined them very carefully and that there was no doubt of their genuineness. That gives you some idea of their analytical talents.

He and his partner  then tried to exploit the nervous collapse of owner Brenda to take over the pitiful remnants of the 3As, stealing email addresses from the database en passant. They followed that by trying to exploit Nigel Moore’s money troubles and take over McCann Files. They failed at that too.

Do you seriously think I’m on the same side as that? Do you think I should be?

 

So why are you attacking them all so strongly now?

Because all of them, every one, are betraying the hopes of people – thousands of them – who were baffled, hurt, insulted, deeply troubled, at the wrong the McCanns had done in using them as involuntary defence witnesses and their apparent immunity. How had it happened? What was going on in this country? Bureau reader Brenda Leyland died, for Christ’s sake, died, because of her despair  that a couple of monstrous liars could exploit and manipulate modern media  and breach the spirit of UK law and get away with it.

 

Now, at last, there are firm, solid, evidence-based  reasons to be hopeful about this case. Perhaps, eventually, to glory in it. Yet the Usual Suspects are apparently intent on claiming that there is no point in even hoping, since the leader of the investigation is corrupt, the Grange squad, according to that famous expert on British institutions, Brown, is entirely corrupt, the Home Office is corrupt and the government loves sodomy with under-aged kids so much that it too is hopelessly corrupt. But that's exactly the shit that Kate McCann claimed about Portugal!

"The country was already reeling from a child-abuse scandal involving Casa Pia, a state-run institution for orphans and other disadvantaged children (when this finally came to court in 2010, six men, including a TV presenter and a former UNESCO ambassador, would be convicted) – the first such case ever to be tried in Portugal. Perhaps it was more convenient and less troubling to lay Madeleine’s disappearance at the door of her foreign parents, put an end to the matter and move on. Who knows?" (Madeleine)

The McCanns, as we know,  had a very good and continuing reason, a motive, for making such claims - to devalue or wreck the Portuguese investigation or reputation. So what's the difference? What's the reason for the Usual Suspects identical claims? Well, what is it? 

 

If they just stuck to their stuff  on facebook then one could ignore it. But they haven’t. All of them, including the worthless Brown - so busy plugging her own pamphlet on twitter that she hasn’t got time to study the facts of the case – are, in practice, if not in intention, acting as agents for the people who have very special reasons to want Grange closed down. There is no way round that.

The public supporters of the parents don’t merit attention anymore – they were defeated in  2017 and have become irrelevant. The MSM is no longer  actively promoting the cause of the couple and therefore don’t  need countering. In fact the MSM itself is now being used as a mere conduit to get to social media and influence the more gullible there rather than in the tabloids, in keeping with the loss of credibility and reach of the MSM itself.

 

The McCann Affair has always been about the truth - its establishment, its vital significance in everyday life, its intrinsic moral worth, whether to a Christian, Muslim or humanist  - not just about a missing child. Thank God that so many people,  still see truth itself as something to value, defend and aspire to. And the Usual Suspects are as guilty as the McCanns in not telling, or valuing, the truth.

And it’s that we’re highlighting.