Hammering away
by BLACKSMITH
http://blacksmithbureau.blogspot.co.uk/
Let’s go back to what we alluded to briefly yesterday, Gerry’s visit to Portugal in January 2009.
Why bother to bring it up again?
Who needs mysteries?
Let’s answer the question indirectly by going back to what the Blacksmith Bureau has been all about since its inception. As we’ve said over and over, we don’t claim to know what happened on May 3 – no theories, no clues and no accusations that the parents were involved in their child’s disappearance, the thesis mentioned on BBC’s Panorama recently. We agree, in a sense, with all those funny little defenders of the McCanns who claim that “nobody” knows what happened that night and the case is a mystery.
But we don’t deal primarily with the mysteries of the Madeleine McCann Case but with the evidence of the Madeleine McCann Affair, a quite different, though related, subject in which the child herself plays almost no part and with the parents at the centre, just as Kate McCann’s book Madeleine, a key primary source, has the parents at the centre, beginning and end, with the child consigned to a section of some twenty pages out of 383.
Unlike our elusive abductor the parents have been extremely visible, although it is a peculiar sort of visibility in which, as we mentioned yesterday, their prominence on our screens and pages is in sharp contrast to the shadows surrounding almost everything important that they actually do. Nevertheless their recorded words provide primary evidence about them.
And that is the rather lengthy answer to the question posed above: Kate and Gerry McCann are known and proven liars, utterly comfortable when deceiving, completely capable, as Kate McCann makes clear in her book, of not giving themselves away in public when acting a part.
Nothing Personal
These aren't opinions or criticisms of the parents' characters but statements of fact. In other, happier, circumstances they might matter very little – most of us, after all, have known somebody who lies a lot and after a while we grow used to handling it.
“Oh Brian exaggerates a bit,” we say, or “gosh, I don’t think Charlie has as much money as he claims”. And as long as they don’t invite you to get involved in some smashing new financial opportunity, or offer to accompany your husband on an overnight trip to Brighton, the relationship can survive.
Again, it is a common accusation that our politicians lie all the time, so are the McCanns anything special? But politicians don’t, not, at least, in the way the McCanns lie. What they do, and have to do, is avoid answering some questions, in other words, be “economical with the truth”. If they are caught out in provable porkies, rather than evasions, they’re on the way out.
But the McCanns’ lack of truthfulness is not on this trivial, evasive level, as the Portugal visit and Madeleine, demonstrate. On page 206 of the latter we read of a situation which the couple decided to deal with by, as she admits, lying. Even if the situation had been serious they could have been evasive and postponed their planned Huelva meeting with journalists with apologies or with circumlocutions avoiding an outright lie.
Kate McCann is such a liar that the idea of doing the latter appears never to have occurred to her! The pair of them felt, she tells us, that if the journalists found out that the police were coming to their home at 10AM it would be some sort of serious disaster, implying, of course, that a lie might be justifiable. But what was this disaster that might justify the fibs?
With the clever disingenuousness which characterises so much of her book she avoids giving any reasons for its importance.
Go on, tell us
“We didn’t feel good about this at all,” she writes, in a paragraph which should be carefully compared with paragraph 2 and the one sentence paragraph 3 on page 243 to see how she works. “We didn’t feel good about this at all, but even if the judicial secrecy law had not prevented us from giving the main reason [come, come, Kate], can you imagine what would have happened if we’d announced to the journalists heading for Huelva that the police were coming to do some forensic work in our villa?”
Well no, the Bureau can’t imagine it,really can't and we don’t have the facts to do so. But the rhetorical question is a device – she has simply hidden the motivation for their behaviour by addressing the reader directly and leaving us to provide the answers ourselves – exculpatory if you’re a McCann supporter, otherwise if you’re not. Cute, eh?
Warning: tedious evidence ahead
Now, back to Gerry McCann and the January 13/14 Portugal affair, with the usual warnings that we’re going to quote primary source evidence at some length and if the old concentration span can’t take it, please skip.
He came, he saw, he porkied
Gerry McCann made his arrival in Portugal a well-planned major media event. His team released his arrival date in advance, together with steers that it was worth covering: as a result the cameras were waiting for him when he arrived at the airport and journalists from both countries were gathered to conduct their interviews, subject: why I am in Portugal.
The words can all be found, verbatim, on the McCann Files, as can his television interview. He was there, he said, to discuss with his advisers “what can still be done in the on-going search for Madeleine.”
“What we're really here to discuss is, errr... how we can work with the authorities to explore areas where other things can still be done that... that might make a difference and I think, errr... you know, this is the first visit that I'm here in, errr... Portugal but I expect it will be the first of, you know, several over the next few months.”
“Q: Do you plan to cooperate with the Portuguese authorities?
GM: Of course.”
“The purpose of this visit was to, errr... really look at what can still be done in the search, we want to be, you know, looking positively, not backwards - looking forwards. 'Cause, you know, we want to find our daughter. It's pretty simple really.
“In an exclusive interview to the Portuguese News agency Lusa, Gerry McCann stated that he has no intention, at least for now, to promote any process against the Portuguese state or any other entity, namely media outlets, highlighting the fact that the important thing is to forget the past and try to keep searching for his missing daughter.”
“He assured journalists that it is the first of many visits to set up new operations in the search for his daughter.”
He was asked what he was looking for on this visit.
“ We are going to analyse if in fact everything was done to find Madeleine [this is in a 24 hour visit]. If the authorities acted correctly. And, more importantly, to find out if there is any lead that we can explore.”
At the end of the visit “A friend " [in fact one of Clarence Mitchell’s golems]said “Gerry is very pleased with his trip and in future, when the time is right he may well return with Kate, as a couple together.”
Whew!
There we are. Every single word was an outright lie.
Thanks Kate
As Kate McCann so foolishly let slip on page 335 of Madeleine there was one, and only one, reason for Gerry McCann’s trip. She writes:
“We had already spoken to our legal team on several occasions about taking action [against Amaral] and knew that the only way of assessing our chances of success would be to seek advice from a Portuguese libel lawyer. We had first talked on the phone to Isabel Duarte on 28 November . She was really understanding and sounded nice. By this point we felt as though we had been condemned by an entire country , so to receive sympathy from someone in Portugal was like stepping into a welcoming warm bath. Six weeks later, [i.e. January 13/14] Gerry went to Lisbon to meet her.”
He hadn’t come to “discuss things with the Portuguese authorities. He hadn’t “come to see what can still be done in the on-going search for Madeleine.” He didn’t “analyse if in fact everything was done to find Madeleine,If the authorities acted correctly, and, more importantly, to find out if there is any lead that we can explore.”
Watch him lying here: http://www.mccannfiles.com/id107.html
Can you look at that video of McCann lying his head off to a dozen different reporters and be sure that you could tell when he is telling the truth and when he isn’t? We can't.
Gerry McCann, like Cliff Richard who travels to the Algarve unnoticed on a regular basis, could have flown in to Portugal unnoticed and unrecognised; instead he chose, without any necessity, to lie to the public as a conscious concealment strategy.
Some things just won't go away
And so we come to the crunch: Mr McCann, a demonstrably proven liar, is the last person who claims to have seen his daughter alive; Gerry McCann and his wife are the only people who claim first-hand knowledge of an abduction; Kate McCann is the only witness who claims that the bedroom window was open at 10PM on May 3.
Decency suggests that we should hesitate before disbelieving their versions of the truth, but reality demonstrates that their unsupported words cannot be relied on.
And there is, we regret to say, a further factor. The Portuguese archiving dispatch, whose author Menezes had, for obvious reasons, no access to the above proof of repeated lying (yet who still accepted, even then, that they had not told the truth about the “checking”) has this key paragraph justifying his conclusion that they should be released from their arguido status.
“The non- involvement of the arguidos, the parents of Madeleine, in any criminal activity seems to result from the objective circumstances of them not being inside the apartment when she disappeared, from the normal behaviour that they adopted until said disappearance and afterwards, as can be amply concluded from the witness statements, from the telephone communications analysis and also from the forensics’ conclusions, namely the Reports from the FSS and from the National Institute for Legal Medicine.”
That is five reasons. One of them is “the normal behaviour that they adopted until said disappearance and afterwards, as can be amply concluded from the witness statements.”
But we've seen the proof that Gerry McCann is a practised deceiver.
And the evidence of Kate McCann’s book, previously quoted, and the further evidence on page 122 that she was adept at masking her feelings when necessary, so successful in fact that she was publicly criticised for being “cold “ and “poker faced” while actually in emotional turmoil behind the façade, shows the same aptitude.
So Mr Menezes’s sentence, representing some 20% of his justificatory reasons, obviously loses all its force.
Go on, give us a rebuttal
Whenever the BB demonstrates facts like these, the supporters of the parents, so verbose at other times, fall strangely silent, or attack the messenger with abuse and, curiously,"boredom". Unlike their enthusiastic contributions when the evidence is open to opinion, like the angels-dancing-on-a-pin interpretations of the dog’s activities, they never have anything to say in actual refutation of the claimed facts we present. Yes, reading about facts which are uncomfortable to your case but which you are intellectually incapable of challenging could be boring, couldn't it?
Anyway, until we see that this key aspect of their behaviour is being evaluated by investigators we’ll just go on hammering away with these facts taken from the pair’s own words – a source which grows larger and more suggestive with every passing year.
by BLACKSMITH
http://blacksmithbureau.blogspot.co.uk/
Let’s go back to what we alluded to briefly yesterday, Gerry’s visit to Portugal in January 2009.
Why bother to bring it up again?
Who needs mysteries?
Let’s answer the question indirectly by going back to what the Blacksmith Bureau has been all about since its inception. As we’ve said over and over, we don’t claim to know what happened on May 3 – no theories, no clues and no accusations that the parents were involved in their child’s disappearance, the thesis mentioned on BBC’s Panorama recently. We agree, in a sense, with all those funny little defenders of the McCanns who claim that “nobody” knows what happened that night and the case is a mystery.
But we don’t deal primarily with the mysteries of the Madeleine McCann Case but with the evidence of the Madeleine McCann Affair, a quite different, though related, subject in which the child herself plays almost no part and with the parents at the centre, just as Kate McCann’s book Madeleine, a key primary source, has the parents at the centre, beginning and end, with the child consigned to a section of some twenty pages out of 383.
Unlike our elusive abductor the parents have been extremely visible, although it is a peculiar sort of visibility in which, as we mentioned yesterday, their prominence on our screens and pages is in sharp contrast to the shadows surrounding almost everything important that they actually do. Nevertheless their recorded words provide primary evidence about them.
And that is the rather lengthy answer to the question posed above: Kate and Gerry McCann are known and proven liars, utterly comfortable when deceiving, completely capable, as Kate McCann makes clear in her book, of not giving themselves away in public when acting a part.
Nothing Personal
These aren't opinions or criticisms of the parents' characters but statements of fact. In other, happier, circumstances they might matter very little – most of us, after all, have known somebody who lies a lot and after a while we grow used to handling it.
“Oh Brian exaggerates a bit,” we say, or “gosh, I don’t think Charlie has as much money as he claims”. And as long as they don’t invite you to get involved in some smashing new financial opportunity, or offer to accompany your husband on an overnight trip to Brighton, the relationship can survive.
Again, it is a common accusation that our politicians lie all the time, so are the McCanns anything special? But politicians don’t, not, at least, in the way the McCanns lie. What they do, and have to do, is avoid answering some questions, in other words, be “economical with the truth”. If they are caught out in provable porkies, rather than evasions, they’re on the way out.
But the McCanns’ lack of truthfulness is not on this trivial, evasive level, as the Portugal visit and Madeleine, demonstrate. On page 206 of the latter we read of a situation which the couple decided to deal with by, as she admits, lying. Even if the situation had been serious they could have been evasive and postponed their planned Huelva meeting with journalists with apologies or with circumlocutions avoiding an outright lie.
Kate McCann is such a liar that the idea of doing the latter appears never to have occurred to her! The pair of them felt, she tells us, that if the journalists found out that the police were coming to their home at 10AM it would be some sort of serious disaster, implying, of course, that a lie might be justifiable. But what was this disaster that might justify the fibs?
With the clever disingenuousness which characterises so much of her book she avoids giving any reasons for its importance.
Go on, tell us
“We didn’t feel good about this at all,” she writes, in a paragraph which should be carefully compared with paragraph 2 and the one sentence paragraph 3 on page 243 to see how she works. “We didn’t feel good about this at all, but even if the judicial secrecy law had not prevented us from giving the main reason [come, come, Kate], can you imagine what would have happened if we’d announced to the journalists heading for Huelva that the police were coming to do some forensic work in our villa?”
Well no, the Bureau can’t imagine it,really can't and we don’t have the facts to do so. But the rhetorical question is a device – she has simply hidden the motivation for their behaviour by addressing the reader directly and leaving us to provide the answers ourselves – exculpatory if you’re a McCann supporter, otherwise if you’re not. Cute, eh?
Warning: tedious evidence ahead
Now, back to Gerry McCann and the January 13/14 Portugal affair, with the usual warnings that we’re going to quote primary source evidence at some length and if the old concentration span can’t take it, please skip.
He came, he saw, he porkied
Gerry McCann made his arrival in Portugal a well-planned major media event. His team released his arrival date in advance, together with steers that it was worth covering: as a result the cameras were waiting for him when he arrived at the airport and journalists from both countries were gathered to conduct their interviews, subject: why I am in Portugal.
The words can all be found, verbatim, on the McCann Files, as can his television interview. He was there, he said, to discuss with his advisers “what can still be done in the on-going search for Madeleine.”
“What we're really here to discuss is, errr... how we can work with the authorities to explore areas where other things can still be done that... that might make a difference and I think, errr... you know, this is the first visit that I'm here in, errr... Portugal but I expect it will be the first of, you know, several over the next few months.”
“Q: Do you plan to cooperate with the Portuguese authorities?
GM: Of course.”
“The purpose of this visit was to, errr... really look at what can still be done in the search, we want to be, you know, looking positively, not backwards - looking forwards. 'Cause, you know, we want to find our daughter. It's pretty simple really.
“In an exclusive interview to the Portuguese News agency Lusa, Gerry McCann stated that he has no intention, at least for now, to promote any process against the Portuguese state or any other entity, namely media outlets, highlighting the fact that the important thing is to forget the past and try to keep searching for his missing daughter.”
“He assured journalists that it is the first of many visits to set up new operations in the search for his daughter.”
He was asked what he was looking for on this visit.
“ We are going to analyse if in fact everything was done to find Madeleine [this is in a 24 hour visit]. If the authorities acted correctly. And, more importantly, to find out if there is any lead that we can explore.”
At the end of the visit “A friend " [in fact one of Clarence Mitchell’s golems]said “Gerry is very pleased with his trip and in future, when the time is right he may well return with Kate, as a couple together.”
Whew!
There we are. Every single word was an outright lie.
Thanks Kate
As Kate McCann so foolishly let slip on page 335 of Madeleine there was one, and only one, reason for Gerry McCann’s trip. She writes:
“We had already spoken to our legal team on several occasions about taking action [against Amaral] and knew that the only way of assessing our chances of success would be to seek advice from a Portuguese libel lawyer. We had first talked on the phone to Isabel Duarte on 28 November . She was really understanding and sounded nice. By this point we felt as though we had been condemned by an entire country , so to receive sympathy from someone in Portugal was like stepping into a welcoming warm bath. Six weeks later, [i.e. January 13/14] Gerry went to Lisbon to meet her.”
He hadn’t come to “discuss things with the Portuguese authorities. He hadn’t “come to see what can still be done in the on-going search for Madeleine.” He didn’t “analyse if in fact everything was done to find Madeleine,If the authorities acted correctly, and, more importantly, to find out if there is any lead that we can explore.”
Watch him lying here: http://www.mccannfiles.com/id107.html
Can you look at that video of McCann lying his head off to a dozen different reporters and be sure that you could tell when he is telling the truth and when he isn’t? We can't.
Gerry McCann, like Cliff Richard who travels to the Algarve unnoticed on a regular basis, could have flown in to Portugal unnoticed and unrecognised; instead he chose, without any necessity, to lie to the public as a conscious concealment strategy.
Some things just won't go away
And so we come to the crunch: Mr McCann, a demonstrably proven liar, is the last person who claims to have seen his daughter alive; Gerry McCann and his wife are the only people who claim first-hand knowledge of an abduction; Kate McCann is the only witness who claims that the bedroom window was open at 10PM on May 3.
Decency suggests that we should hesitate before disbelieving their versions of the truth, but reality demonstrates that their unsupported words cannot be relied on.
And there is, we regret to say, a further factor. The Portuguese archiving dispatch, whose author Menezes had, for obvious reasons, no access to the above proof of repeated lying (yet who still accepted, even then, that they had not told the truth about the “checking”) has this key paragraph justifying his conclusion that they should be released from their arguido status.
“The non- involvement of the arguidos, the parents of Madeleine, in any criminal activity seems to result from the objective circumstances of them not being inside the apartment when she disappeared, from the normal behaviour that they adopted until said disappearance and afterwards, as can be amply concluded from the witness statements, from the telephone communications analysis and also from the forensics’ conclusions, namely the Reports from the FSS and from the National Institute for Legal Medicine.”
That is five reasons. One of them is “the normal behaviour that they adopted until said disappearance and afterwards, as can be amply concluded from the witness statements.”
But we've seen the proof that Gerry McCann is a practised deceiver.
And the evidence of Kate McCann’s book, previously quoted, and the further evidence on page 122 that she was adept at masking her feelings when necessary, so successful in fact that she was publicly criticised for being “cold “ and “poker faced” while actually in emotional turmoil behind the façade, shows the same aptitude.
So Mr Menezes’s sentence, representing some 20% of his justificatory reasons, obviously loses all its force.
Go on, give us a rebuttal
Whenever the BB demonstrates facts like these, the supporters of the parents, so verbose at other times, fall strangely silent, or attack the messenger with abuse and, curiously,"boredom". Unlike their enthusiastic contributions when the evidence is open to opinion, like the angels-dancing-on-a-pin interpretations of the dog’s activities, they never have anything to say in actual refutation of the claimed facts we present. Yes, reading about facts which are uncomfortable to your case but which you are intellectually incapable of challenging could be boring, couldn't it?
Anyway, until we see that this key aspect of their behaviour is being evaluated by investigators we’ll just go on hammering away with these facts taken from the pair’s own words – a source which grows larger and more suggestive with every passing year.
