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    Sex-abuse musical chairs

    The London-based Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) was established in 2014. It has a mandate to investigate VIP abusers with links to Westminster. Regrettably, it cannot be described as truly independent since it is a creature of the Home Office, the parent department of MI5 which blackmailed, protected and exploited paedophile networks in the UK and Ireland and has dirty tricks embedded in its DNA. An “independent” Inquiry? The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) was established in 2014 by Theresa May in her then capacity as Home Secretary. Her first choice as chair was Lady Ann Elizabeth Oldfield Butler-Sloss, whose appointment was announced on 8 July 2014. A storm of protest swept her off the chair within days because she was the sister of the late Michael Havers. He had served as Margaret Thatcher’s Attorney General in the 1980s. As reported in Village last month, Havers spoke up for the high-ranking British diplomat and MI6 officer, Sir Peter Hayman, after he had been exposed as a paedophile in March 1981 by Geoffrey Dickens MP in the House of Commons. The police had discovered that Hayman had been involved in a paedophile network and was a connoisseur of child pornography. Havers, speaking in his capacity as Attorney General, parried that Hayman’s collection was not extreme and had not warranted prosecution. Butler-Sloss was born on 10 August 1933. Since the IICSA is likely to last another 12-15 years, she would have been well on the way to her century when it finished. Just what was Theresa May thinking? May’s second choice as chairman was Dame Catherine Fiona Woolf, DBE, JP, DL, who was appointed in September 2014 and lasted a month. She was a friend and neighbour of Leon Brittan who had served as Home Secretary in the 1980s. In 1984 he was handed the Dickens Dossier which exposed a VIP paedophile network, by Geoffrey Dickens MP. Brittan commanded all the resources of the police and by lifting a telephone could have ensured that immediate action was taken to end the rape and brutalisation of children described in the institutions in the dossier. Instead he did precisely nothing. Why? In 2014 it emerged that the Dickens Dossier had disappeared. When quizzed about this, Brittan initially claimed he had no memory of ever having received it but later relented and “recalled” he had handed it over to an official in the Home Office. After media reports that Brittan had been a dinner party guest at Woolf’s house on at least three occasions, she stepped down from the IICSA and was replaced by Judge Lowell Goddard who shouldered the burden until 2016 when it became too much for her. One would almost be forgiven for suspecting that the Inquiry was designed to topple over under its own weight. A subterranean campaign against the truth A campaign to suppress the truth about manipulation by MI5 and MI6 of VIP paedophile networks has been afoot for decades and shows no sign of abating. As detailed in recent editions of Village, last year MI5 and MI6 (which is attached to the Foreign Office) lied to the Hart Inquiry about their involvement in the Kincora scandal and received a clean bill of health from it. Meanwhile pro-establishment figures in the media (at least one of whom has been linked to MI6) have been campaigning to end police investigations into historical child abuse. There is growing support for this initiative among the British public on account of the behaviour of the police who investigated the singer Cliff Richard and others for child abuse when – patently – there was no evidence against them. Their behaviour was so inept one would be forgiven for thinking their intention was to poison the public against historical abuse inquiries. Some of the vice rings which the IICSA should be investigating overlap with networks in Ireland. The odds are stacked high that the IICSA will be persuaded to ignore them in light of the publication of the Hart Report earlier this year which was meant to have dealt comprehensively with Irish issues but was hoodwinked by the spooks. General-Election woes A small number of courageous Westminster parliamentarians have tried to shine a light on these issues during the last few years. Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, they have suffered nothing but bad luck and now face a more difficult battle to retain their seats in the British general election. Simon Danczuk MP is one of them. He is a candidate in Rochdale and author of the book which denounced the notorious paedophile Sir Cyril Smith. He revealed in 2014 that a Tory minister attempted to get him to back down as pressure was mounting on Leon Britton over the disappearance of the Dickens Dossier. He explained how: “As I was making my way from the House of Commons on Monday night after a late vote a Tory minister stepped out of the shadows to confront me. I’d never spoken to him before in my life but he blocked my way and ushered me to one side. He warned me to think very carefully about what I was going to say the next day before the Home Affairs Select Committee, where I’d be answering questions about child abuse. ‘I hear you’re about to challenge Lord Brittan about what he knew about child abuse’, he said. ‘It wouldn’t be a wise move’, he advised me. ‘It was all put to bed a long time ago’. He warned me I could even be responsible for his death. We looked at each other in silence for a second. I knew straightaway he wasn’t telling me this out of concern for the man’s welfare”. Danczuk persisted and became the target of a torrent of salacious reports about his private life in the red tops. Worse still, an accusation was hurled against him that he had raped a man in 2006, an allegation he described as “malicious, untrue and extremely upsetting”. At the

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    An Offence Against The State

    On 1 December 1972 a car bomb exploded beside Liberty Hall in Dublin. Fortunately no one died but George Bradshaw, a CIE bus driver, and Thomas Duffy, a bus conductor, perished in a second explosion at Sackville Place. No one has ever been charged with these crimes. The UVF belatedly claimed sole responsibility for them but there are legitimate doubts about the veracity of this claim. These bombings were part of four bombings in Dublin’s north city centre at the end of 1972 and beginning of 1973 and are to be distinguished from the even more horrific bombings in the same general area in 1974.   A State In Denial Margaret Urwin has just published ‘A State in Denial’ which unravels a web of intrigue connecting the British Secret State (BSS) to loyalist paramilitaries at a variety of levels. No objective reader of this impressive work could doubt that London focused the might of its counter-insurgency arsenal against Republicans while turning a knowing blind eye at loyalist wrongdoing and also arming and colluding with them. Irwin’s book is fascinating for its dissection of official papers to discern what was going on behind closed doors.   The Man with the English-Belfast Accent The publication of ‘A State in Denial’ is timely as yet another anniversary of the 1972 Dublin bombings comes around. On that fateful evening a man with a mixed English-Belfast accent parked a car bomb beside Liberty Hall. After he alighted, he asked someone who had just left the building when it was likely to empty out for the night. One of the cars used by the bombers to get to Dublin was a Ford Zephyr which had been stolen in Antrim from an Englishman called Joseph Fleming the previous August, along with Fleming’s driver’s licence. Fleming’s licence was put to use on two occasions in November 1972 by an imposter posing as Fleming, to hire cars in Belfast. The imposter was either extraordinarily reckless or had good reason to believe Fleming’s licence was not detailed on the lists circulated by the RUC to carrental companies. He obtained a number of cars over the space of a week, a timespan which underlines his confidence about the use of a stolen licence; and all this at a time when an epidemic of car bombings was bringing Belfast to a standstill. In addition, he left his fingerprints and handwriting on the forms he completed. Another significant fact was that he spoke with a mixture of a Belfast and English accent.   Kitson’s Military Reaction Force The UVF would have us believe that its volunteers: • Stole Fleming’s car in August 1972 and hid it for three months, and; • Drove it across the Border with its original registration plates on display, and; • Proceeded to Dublin at the same time – and possibly as part of a convoy of cars, parked it with explosives, and • Faced an extremely high risk of detection because the rental cars had been acquired using a stolen licence which the gang must have believed was on an RUC watchlist; • Yet all the while possessed the confidence to proceed without any high-level protection from the BSS. It is unlikely this is what happened. On the other hand, the highly secretive Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF) of the British Army had the nerve, skill and high-level protection in place to undertake just such an operation. The MRF was literally above the law. It was a sprawling organisation established by Brigadier Frank Kitson in 1971 to engage in agent-recruitment; surveillance; drive-by shootings (deploying the type of weapons the IRA were known to carry); laundry collection, to detect the residue of explosives on clothing; and even brothel management, to collect gossip and obtain blackmail material. It had access to loyalist agents recruited by the British Army and M15. Stealing vehicles and hiding them at its Palace Barracks HQ for use later was one of its known practices. The MRF could easily have arranged for the details about Fleming’s vehicle and licence to have been erased from the RUC watch lists. With this backing, the loyalist gang that bombed Dublin (or at least some of them) would have enjoyed the confidence to hire the cars and drive them to Dublin.   Albert Ginger Baker Albert Ginger Baker, an alleged British Army deserter, who joined the UDA in the early 1970, ticked all the boxes as an MRF agent. His family have claimed that he was involved in the 1972 bombings. In 1976 the Sunday World published an article exposing his links to a ‘Captain Bunty’, a mysterious figure who can only have been his handler. The pair met regularly in a Belfast coffee bar. Baker was involved in a string of gruesome sectarian murders in Belfast. During one of them, James Patrick McCartan, a 22-year-old forklifttruck driver, was stripped naked, hung up by his ankles and punched, kicked and beaten with a pickshaft, while a dagger was used to stab him in the hands and thigh over 200 times. He was threatened with castration and dropped head first from the ceiling. Eventually one of Baker’s UDA superiors gave him a pistol and told him to kill McCartan. Baker put a hood over his head, and blasted into his skull three times. A grenade Baker’s gang used in another attack was standard British Army issue, which raises questions about how they acquired it. It is doubtful the prospect of bombing Dublin could have troubled the conscience of those in the BSS who ultimately controlled men like Baker. Baker suffered some sort of a crisis in 1973, and fled to England where he confessed to a string of sectarian murders to the police in Warminster, in Wiltshire. As far as the BSS was concerned, some rather nasty cats were now peeping out of the bag. Damage limitation became the order of the day. Hence, while Baker was convicted and sent to prison in 1973, his secret link to the MRF was

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