Israeli Tank Fires At School In Gaza, Killing Over 40 And Wounding Many Others

Illicit Relationship Was Hushed Up By The Pro-Tory Press.

Robert “Bob” Boothby was a Conservative party member as well as a BBC commentator on public affairs.
He entered parliament in 1924.
During his more than 30 years in parliament, Boothby had a protracted affair with Dorothy Macmillan, the wife of his Conservative colleague Harold Macmillan, beginning in the 1930s and continuing through Macmillan’s succession to Prime Minister in 1956.

Boothby also had a gay affair with notorious East End gangster Ronnie Kray,  who with his identical twin Reggie, dominated London’s underworld for twenty years.
That illicit relationship was hushed up by the largely pro-Tory tabloid press for years before being inferred by the Daily Mirror in 1964.
The revelations sparked an MI-5 investigation but did not derail the career of the now Baron Boothby, who continued to sit in the House of Lords until his death in 1986.

If Bob Boothby had entered politics a generation later, he may well have met the same fate as his Tory colleague John Profumo.
Profumo was British Secretary of State for War when he began an affair with 19-year-old model, Christine Keeler.
At the time of their relationship, Keeler was also involved with Soviet naval attaché and suspected spy, Yevgeny “Eugene” Ivanov.

Rumours of the affair and its potential security implications spread rapidly and, unlike Boothby’s underworld associations, did not stay quiet.
Profumo denied the affair to the House of Commons.
The police became involved and Keeler testified to the relationship, leading to Profumo’s resignation on June 5, 1963.
Profumo’s wife Valerie stood by him.
After his death, declassified M15 documents from the 1930s revealed Profumo had also had an affair with a Nazi spy.
( Wilfred Soon )

The UK Government And MI5 Hid The Report On The Car Bombing Outside The Israeli Embassy In London And Two Palestinian Students Were Falsely Convicted.

Confidential intelligence agency reports may show the car bombing of Jewish targets in London six years ago was part of a secret “tit for tat” war between Israel and Iran and had nothing to do with two Palestinian students convicted at the Old Bailey.
Important and relevant information presented to M15 before the explosions was not disclosed at the time of the trial, even though it could have affected the outcome.
Former MI5 officer David Shayler cast doubt on prosecution speculation that the bombing of the Israeli embassy, and a second blast at the offices of Jewish charities in north London, had been down to “homegrown” Palestinian extremists, working on their own.

Shayler’s information pointed to a much larger and more sophisticated organisation being responsible for the bombings.
According to Shayler, a reliable source had warned M15 that an attack on the Israeli embassy was imminent.
But a report was shelved and the police were not notified.
Attempts to establish the truth of Shayler’s claims had been stifled.
The home secretary Jack Straw had signed “public interest immunity” certificates preventing disclosure, throwing a blanket of secrecy over intelligence agency information.

Attempts to find out what role Israeli government agents had played in examining the scene of the Israeli embassy blast had also come to nothing.
Somebody undoubtedly did come from Israel and for some reason nobody knows who they were or what they took away from the scene or what conclusions they came to.
The type of explosive used in the Israeli embassy bomb was also still a mystery.

Jawad Botmeh, 31, and Samar Alami, 33, both British residents, were jailed for 20 years in December 1996 for conspiracy to cause explosions in the UK.
The pair, graduates from English universities, were convicted on the basis that they were part of a UK-based extremist terrorist cell.
They admitted experimenting in an amateurish way with a certain type of explosive in order to provide technical information for the protection of their home communities in Palestine.

But they denied involvement in the bombings, insisting the explosions in London were counter-productive.
The campaign to free Botmeh and Alami has been supported by Amnesty International and numerous politicians.
In a joint statement, MPs Lynne Jones and Tony Benn said they believed there had been a miscarriage of justice.
( Nick Hopkins, 25.10.2000 )  ..  theguardian.com

Child Abuse Was happening Within The Care System.

Liz Davies remembers the moment when she realised that she had a scandal on her hands.
For several months she had been talking to groups of children she suspected were being abused.
Then, one day, two young boys walked into her small council office in Islington.
One of the boys looked afraid, but the other reassured him.
“It’s all right, she’s not one of them”, he said.
It was those chilling words that gave Liz Davies her first hint that much of the horrible child abuse she was uncovering was happening within the care system of Islington Council, the very organisation meant to protect the borough’s most vulnerable children.

That was in April 1990.
The scandal would eventually explode into the national consciousness two-and-a-half years later in a series of exposés in London’s Evening Standard.
They described a care system penetrated by paedophiles that had abysmally failed to care for scores of children.
The council, then led by Margaret Hodge, was appointed as the country’s first Minister for Children in 2003, initially condemned the stories, for which Liz Davies and several other social workers acted as anonymous whistleblowers.

Although police investigations dismissed claims of a paedophile ring operating in Islington, allegations of child abuse at the children’s home on Hodge’s watch were borne out by official inquiries.
Hodge’s name would forever be associated with one of Britain’s most notorious child abuse scandals.

Hodge’s appointment as Minister for Children sparked a furious campaign by the Standard and other newspapers to have her resign.
In 1990, Liz Davies’s colleague, David Cofie, raised the issue at a forum of local residents.
He also took his claims direct to Margaret Hodge, who was the local ward councillor.
Liz Davies asked for more resources to tackle the problem, but Hodge turned the request down.

They carried on their work.
They interviewed children as individual cases and privately built up a picture of widespread abuse, which they said was being carried out by a network of abusers.
They wrote 15 separate reports, but said their warnings still went unheeded, even as they uncovered appallingly serious allegations.

But, even as they uncovered stories of children being taken away by adults on weekend trips to the country or being placed in homes with suspected abusers, Liz Davies said her team’s work was ignored.
Margaret Hodge knows that as council leader she must ultimately shoulder the blame for what happened in Islington in the 1980s and 90s.
( Paul Harris and Martin Bright, 06.07.2003 )  ..  theguardian.com

Israeli Tank Fires At School In Gaza, Killing Over 40 And Wounding Many Others, Mostly Children.

An Israeli tank fired shells at the school in Jabaliya refugee camp, spraying shrapnel on people inside and outside the building.
The medical director of the hospital in Jabaliya said 41 bodies had been brought in so far and more could be on the way.

In addition to the dead, several dozen people were wounded, hospital officials said.
A hospital official said: “A lot of the wounded were missing limbs and a lot of the dead were in pieces.”
A United Nations official in Gaza said the school was clearly marked with a UN flag and its location had been reported to Israeli authorities.

Majed Hamdan, an Associated Press photographer, who rushed to the scene shortly after the attacks, said many children were among the dead.
In the morgue, most of the killed appeared to be children.
( The Guardian, 06.01.2009 )  ..  theguardian.com

A Succession Of Sex And Money Scandals.

While many admired Margaret Thatcher as the “Iron Lady,” others saw the Tories as the “nasty party.”
When John Major took over from Thatcher in 1990, he set out to change the party’s image.
In a 1993 speech, he famously declared that the country should go ‘back to basics’, returning to core values of “neighbourliness, decency, courtesy”.
The slogan came to be a source of ridicule for the government over the next few years as ministers were caught in a quick succession of sex and money scandals.
Chancellor Norman Lamont was revealed to have a sex therapist living in his rented-out London flat.

David Mellor resigned as a minister after sordid revelations of an extra-marital affair with actress Antonia de Sancha.
Transport minister Steven Norris was reportedly having simultaneous affairs with three women who did not know about each other.
Conservative MP Stephen Milligan was tragically found dead on his kitchen table as a result of auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Major himself denied an affair with Downing Street caterer Clare Latimer.
It was later revealed he’d had a four-year affair with fellow conservative MP Edwina Currie.

The Guardian newspaper brought the financial misconduct of certain ministers to light.
The newspaper accused two MPs of being paid thousands of pounds to ask questions in Parliament on behalf of Harrod’s owner Mohammed Al-Fayed.
Tim Smith resigned as Northern Ireland minister and later admitted to accepting the money.
Conservative MP Neil Hamilton lost his libel suit against Al-Fayed when the court was satisfied the Harrod’s owner had, indeed, made his case.
The Guardian and ITV’s investigative series both alleged that Conservative Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken had improper commercial relations with Saudi businessmen.
Aitken sued the news outlets but was later jailed for perjury after lying under oath.
A far cry from the “decency” which Major had promised the British people.
( Fred O. Wilson )

Israeli Army Officer Who Murdered A 13-Year-Old Palestinian Schoolgirl, Shooting Her 17 Times, Is Found Not Guilty.

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court.
The soldier, who has only been identified as “Captain R”, was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza.
Palestinian witnesses said they saw the captain shoot Iman twice in the head, walk away, turn back and fire a stream of bullets into her body.
( Chris McGreal, 16.11.2005 )  ..  theguardian.com

The Legality Of The Invasion Of Iraq Was Heavily Contested.

Dr. David Kelly, a British weapons expert and UN inspector, was found dead in Oxfordshire on July 17, 2003, shortly after being exposed as the source for a BBC report that questioned the government’s justification for the Iraq war.
The official Hutton Inquiry concluded he committed suicide, though this verdict remains highly controversial among some medical experts and politician.
Many critics, including some physicians, notably Dr. Stephen Frost, have contested the suicide finding based on medical evidence, arguing it was an “impossible” case of suicide and suggesting other possibilities.

BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan said David Kelly was in no doubt the government had “sexed up” the Iraq intelligence dossier at the heart of the Hutton inquiry.
He told the inquiry it was Dr Kelly who had first raised the name of Alastair Campbell in relation to the “transformation” of the dossier and the scientist had first raised the controversial claim that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.
The BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s defence correspondent added he spoke to two senior government sources and they did not deny Dr Kelly’s claims.
Gilligan’s notes show Dr Kelly suggested the dossier was transformed from something bland and “not very exciting” to something far more “sexy” in the week before publication.

A Fake Story Told By A Holocaust Survivor.

The account by Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat told the story of how, as a teenage boy, he was apparently kept alive in a Nazi concentration camp by a nine-year-old girl who threw him food over the camp fence every day for seven months.
Miraculously she was never spotted.
Even more miraculously, the pair were reunited on a blind date years later when they had both resettled in America.