Conspiracy-Mongering

Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna introduced its news feed feature the other day with this paragraph:

"The involvement of Scotland Yard in the News of the World phone-hacking scandal is causing headlines all over the world. It has now become apparent that police complicity in the operation meant that official information on the extent of the hacking was downplayed or even suppressed."

However, the main and only story to which the news feed leads -- a story in the Sunday issue of The New York Times by Don Van Natta, Jr. -- does not provide one iota of evidence that there was "police complicity" involving Scotland Yard and those individuals working for News of the World who were hacking into people's private records and cell phones.

What that story does provide is a complex tissue of phrases such as "former senior officers acknowledged" that "some officers... might be guilty of crimes themselves"; and that one of four "former senior investigators" interviewed "said it was 'utter nonsense' to argue that the department did not have the resources" to sift through and follow up on the many bags of evidence about the hacking -- which simply amounts to a subjective opinion by some former employee; as well as the opinion of another "senior Scotland Yard official who retired within the past few years" that "[i]t appears to be collusion". All amounting to the hill of beans of the opinions of former "senior" officials. (And what makes all these former employees "senior"? -- the reporter Mr. Van Natta, Jr., never explains; though it does have a nice sound of beefing up the integrity of the source).

In the slightly less brief news brief to which the reader is led by Baron Bodissey's introductory blurb at the front page of his news feed, Baron Bodissey (apparently, for no attribution is given for the slightly expanded description before the reader would then click on the title to get to the actual story in The New York Times) refers more accurately to:

...police officials who now admit to mishandling the case.

A "mishandling" of a case is something quite different from "police complicity", and to elide the two -- particularly when the latter is the first thing the reader sees and the former is buried as another layer one has to click to get to -- is evidence either of sloppy reportage and/or of a mindset that cannot sufficiently distinguish between the conspiracy it wants to see and the conspiracy that has yet to be proven to be there.

Following that tersely accurate clarification, we read in that second layer of introduction this (again, apparently also by Baron Bodissey):

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, Don Van Natta Jr. explains how the British police agency and News International, the British subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the publisher of The News of the World, became so intertwined that they shared the goal of containing the investigation.

This description may, or may not, signify "police complicity". The descriptor "so intertwined" is subjective, and depends upon a tissue of inconclusive indications, and the conclusion "that they shared the goal of containing the investigation" is ambiguous, and could very well mean, on the part of Scotland Yard, that their ineptitude ("mishandling the case") had the cumulative effect of "sharing" that goal -- but did not necessarily demonstrate the active intent being slyly (or confusedly) implied. Indeed, the wording of the original article from which the above is drawn adds more qualifiers to substantiate my interpretation -- such as:

"The testimony and evidence that emerged last week... indicate that [the police and the paper] became so intertwined that they wound up sharing the goal of containing the investigation." [emphasis added]

Overall, the main and only article from The New York Times certainly does not clear up this ambiguity, but only lays on thick the various layers of tissue, each one of which taken alone is as flimsy as gossamer, but taken and swallowed whole as a bundle comfortingly reassures the conspiracy theorist of what must be the case -- in this case as in any and all cases like this, both known and "covered up": namely, that those Elites (in this case, upper level people in the news media and the police) are bloody guilty (as they always are) of manipulation and mendacity in high places in order to advance their corrupt agendas which include the aggrandizement of nefarious power in order to impose evil tyranny over the Common People, and these Common People are getting fed up being controlled by Big Brother, and the Revolution is coming soon, so stock up on water and ammo; etc. (And by the way, the Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, who resigned yesterday only because everybody is getting hysterical about this (as they usually do with similar stories), never went to university and comes from a working class family: some "Elite", eh?)

The entire article in The New York Times consisting of four pages is an artfully complex construction based upon a turgid inflation of two main facts:

1) the police had several bags of evidence relating to the hacking scandal to sift through and follow up on, which they left in storage and procrastinated on;

2) executives "and other officials" at the newspaper in question had several social dinners over a long period of time with "top officials" at Scotland Yard.

That's it.

(The added detail of Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson recuperating from some cancer-related procedure at some spa -- in which a Mr. Wallis, "former deputy editor" of the paper who then was hired by the police "to provide strategic media advice on phone-hacking matters", had some financial interest -- is no more substantial than "senior" police officials having dinners once in a while with "top officials" from the newspaper; and altogether none of it proves anything -- except that there was something going on that could lead various people to have the subjective impression that a "cozy intertwining" between the police and the paper existed.)

Buried in that 4-page story is, to me, this far more interesting detail:

In the fall of 2006, Sir Ian Blair, then the police commissioner, had the option of assigning the case to the Specialist Crime Directorate, the division that handles homicides, robberies and the like. It had 3,500 detectives at its disposal and could have reviewed every document, several former officials said. [There are those "former officials" again, popping up to offer their subjective opinion on what coulda, shoulda, mighta, may have been -- though notice that this time they are not "senior" officials... Anyway, to continue:]

The man leading the unit, Tarique Ghaffur, was known among his colleagues for refusing to toe the line. Mr. Ghaffur had led an internal inquiry into the police harassment of a prominent black activist and concluded that the man had been the victim of “unreasonable targeting by police officers.”

Boing!!! What is Scotland Yard doing hiring a Muslim (Tarique Ghaffur) to create and head the Specialist Crime Directorate unit!? And notice Mr. Ghaffur's priorities -- obstructing his own police force in its supposed "harrassment" of a "prominent black activist" (one wonders if that "activist" was a Muslim) and otherwise "refusing to toe the line". One wonders why, and how specifically, a Muslim head of a police unit would go about doing that. Reading this detailed resume of Ghaffur shows just how deeply and intimately he has been involved for the past two decades in various police activities surrounding two key aspects of the Muslim problem: "race relations" with the "South Asian" community (i.e., Muslims); and community outreach with Muslims with regard to terrorism (including the 2005 train bombings and other attempted attacks after that).

Apparently, in 2008 or thereabouts, Mr. Ghaffur sued Scotland Yard over supposed "discrimination" against him based on his "race" and "religion" (i.e., Islam). In that story, it comes out that in 2006, "he said that Muslims were being discriminated against as the result of anti-terror legislation."

On some discussion forum called SciForums.com, I found a commentator named "vincent" who has some acutely pertinent and scathing commentary on Ghaffur in this regard, and it is well worth reading.

This is what Baron Bodissey should be posting, not the flimsy tissue of allegations put out by the mainstream media in its exaggerations about the vague and murky "intertwining" between Scotland Yard and the Rupert Murdoch hacking scandal it may have been irresponsibly remiss in duly investigating. Indeed, that "Specialist Crime Directorate unit" (created and headed by a Muslim) should not be wasting its time sifting through several bags of data (much of which was probably inconclusive anyway) concerning some possible hacking scandal (much less should it have been indulging in the community outreach with Muslims in England) -- as The New York Times insinuates through its transparently un-objective reportage -- but should have been, and should continue to be, pursuing its #1 priority: protecting England from Muslims.

Conclusion:

The above example I have analyzed overall here is typical on Gates of Vienna, such that it imbues the site with an atmospherics of amorphous conspiracy-mongering.

A typical response from a reader at Gates of Vienna to the above story shows precisely the conspiracy-theory mindset being fostered:

This is about so much more than phone hacking it is only scratching the surface of the state within a state and the shadow government that has had a stranglehold on the British people for decades.

Less frequently, but prominently, Baron Bodissey or guest bloggers (like Fjordman or El Ingles) publish at Gates of Vienna lengthy analyses (such as this most recent one, The Shadow Knows: Part Six) saturated with a mood alienated by Western structures and bristling with assumptions and factoids leading to quasi-apocalyptic prognostications and conclusions, in turn developing into what appear to be pragmatic programmes -- broadly speaking and sometimes getting into specifics -- for some pan-Western revolution and/or civil war.