Jimmy Savile met the Royal family not just on many official occasions, but frequently socially. He was a private Hogmanay guest of the Prime Minister on seven occasions. Of course not only on 31 December, I just think that fact illustrates how close he was.
I do not believe that all of these people knew nothing about his persistent and repeated behaviour.
It is not only that I do not believe they could fail to notice. It is that anyone with that level of frequent access to the Prime Minister, other ministers and Royal family would be checked out by the security services. He would not have experienced full positive vetting (now called direct vetting), but a level of vetting would have been carried out on Savile himself. And many of his friends were subject to frequent direct vetting and it is impossible that a picture of Savile would not have built up tangentially. MI5, Special Branch (now also renamed) and GCHQ have tens of thousands of employees. What do you think these people do all day?
When I passed my last direct vetting, the interviewing officer had spent four months of his life doing nothing but investigate me full time. He noted that I continued to have a rather extensive love life, but as it involved only consenting adults and I did not appear open to blackmail, it was no reason to fail me. We discussed this openly. He concluded by saying – and this may not be 100% his words but it is damn close and the sentiment was certainly this:
“Makes a change to be looking at relationships with women in a Foreign Office case. It’s usually small boys!”
We both laughed. Now I swear to you, at the time I really did think he was just joking. I must have been very naïve.
Good post. It states the facts from which the reader can make reasonable inferences. It contains no speculation for which there is no evidence.
sorry for mentioning this on SuperTuesday, but a seemingly counter-democracy action was allegedly piloted in the Gerald Ford Presidency by a known activist: read more at this glossy conspiracy website esquire.com ? or you could read the National Security Archive version (@George Washington University’s Gelman Library)
Loony, thank you for your comments above. I am sure that you are right and that the abuse you talk about has been tolerated and is still being allowed to continue in many cities other than Rotherham. The big sentence for one of the abusers looks like window dressing.
Could the different outcry be due to the fact that the victims were northern working class white girls and perpetrators better educated Pakistani’s,whilst Savile’s were more middle class southerners ?
Moreover from the press reports the abuse on the girls up north was on an entirely different scale both in cruelty and in the amount of victims.
I presume that at least 90% of the perpetrators are still carrying on as before and that only a tiny proportion of victims have come forward.
Who cares ?
geoffrey
Savile’s BBC Top of the Pops was in Dickinson Road Rusholme Manchester. Not many middle-class southerners around then. awash with em now though thanks to’t Beeb moving from Birmingham to Salford.
The BBC was actively pushing moral boundaries, as it has done with ISIS on the world service for over a year now. promoting it, justifying it and advertising it. Same old.
Giyanne,
Silly me,but my point is the same.
Giyane, 4:31 am, I was listening.
There will be no substantial changes to the Freedom of Information Act.
http://press.labour.org.uk/post/140264831189/this-is-a-remarkable-government-climbdown-in-the
‘I agree with most of what you say. In affairs like this there is always a tendency for some people – even many people – to try and create a wider context. The reasons for that are varied – they could be political, they could be the externalisation of a disaffection with society, it could simply be for the same reasons that most people like a good detective or ghost story.
This was certainly the case with the Dutroux child abductions and killings in Belgium. There were all sorts of rumours and theories floating around at the time about some vast paedophile network involving politicians, judges, police generals, royalty and supplying children across the whole of Europe. But all of them turned out to be complete nonsense.’
Habba- you are far too willing to accept the ‘official line’ on the Dutroux case .Claims that he was linked to wider paedophile networks aren’t IMO ‘complete nonsense’.
Verifying accusations of child abuse several years after the event is, I accept, a minefield, and in the end it boils down to what one considers reliable or unreliable testimony. In the Savile case, among the first allegations to surface after his death related to his involvement with the girls ‘approved school’, Duncroft, in Surrey. As it happens, the investigative blogger Anna Raccoon was previously a resident of this school, and knew some of Savile’s accusers. She immediately smelt a rat and has been on the case ever since, researching many of the claims made by Savile’s alleged victims, and finding much of the testimony unconvincing.
In the Dutroux case I find the testimony of one of the main accusers of paedophile network links, Regina Louf, convincing, particularly when looked at in the context of-
1. The ‘failures’ of the Belgian authorities to apprehend Dutroux prior to August 1996
2. The removal from the case of investigating magistrate Connerotte, on specious grounds, in October 1996- and the harassment he suffered while on the case, and subsequently
3. The number of suspicious deaths and ‘suicides’ of possible witnesses in the six and a half year period (!) between Dutroux’s arrest in August 1996 and subsequent trial in Spring 2004
4. The smearing of Regina Louf undertaken in the late 90s by sections of the Belgian press, and the refusal of the authorities to admit her testimony at the trials of Dutroux, Michelle Martin, and Jean Michel Nihoul
Dutroux’s link to the Belgian overworld, Nihoul, makes a startling appearance in this well researched Observer article by Olenka Frienkel-
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/05/dutroux.featuresreview
He was wrong to think he’d get off scot free – in the end (almost certainly to placate the outrage his acquittal would have caused) Nihoul got a nominal 5 year sentance. However his demeanour in the interview with Frienkel is typical of that of a ‘made man’ who thinks he is untouchable because he has ‘powerful friends’.
Documents relating to the investigation of Regina Louf’s pimp, Tony Van Den Boegarde, were included in one of the wikileaks dodument dumps a few years back. A discussion thread was initiated in the wake of the documents dump by a wikileaks supporters forum, and contains several useful links, including to the Frienkel article above,a Radio 4 investigation she also undertook, and other reports in both UK and Belgian media.
Take a look at some of the links above and then tell me claims that Dutroux ‘acted alone’, and had no wider links to other paedophiles, are correct.
Habba
The discussion thread on the wikileaks supporters forum can be found here-
http://www.wikileaks-forum.com/belgium/358/belgian-pedophile-trafficking-ring-and-alleged-cover-up-marc-dutroux-and-nihoul/15315/
Habba-
Before you dismiss Olenka Frienkel as a deluded conspiracy theorist take a look at this Q& A she did at the Beeb after her documentary on Dutroux was broadcast. She cleared has a sharp head on her shoulders, and can seperate the wheat from the chaff- as you’d expect from a senior journalist with her experience.
If she accepts Regina Louf as a credible witness, that is good enough for me-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent_europe/1953293.stm
Anyone interested in more about service attacks should read this. Here’s just one relevant section.
https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-Q4-cloud-security-report.pdf
Akamai State of Internet Security.
Sites offering booter/stresser tools are purportedly set up to allow
administrators to load test their own sites. However, many of the
sites are used as DDoS-for-hire tools, relying on reflection attacks
to generate traffic.
Because the vast majority of these sites are subscription-based and
usually only allow attacks to last 1,200–3,600 seconds (20–60
minutes), their use has decreased the mean length of attacks. In the
past, most DDoS attacks were based on infected bots and would
last until the attack was mitigated, the malicious actor gave up, or
the botnet was taken down. Instead of spending time and effort to
build and maintain DDoS botnets, it is easier for attackers to use
booter/stresser tools to exploit network devices and unsecured
service protocols.
Old Mark
I haven’t looked closely and don’t really care to. However, I did jump on the bandwagon with my first comment here.
Are you saying there is no evidence that Savile had sex with children beyond fans who might have appeared of age?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/belgium/1465294/Life-for-Dutroux-and-his-wife-gets-30-years.html
Council services are stripped to the bone. Class sizes are getting bigger teachers getting fewer. No money for doctors no money for ambulances council workers being laid off no money to mend the roads, care homes closing.
Yet when a council has to limit the number of people who can get Gaelic lessons they are threatened with legal action by a government funded organisation. They can find enough of our money to pay for both sides of the case.
The ugly side of Nationalism.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/scotland/article4702858.ece
http://www.whale.to/c/reality6.html#345%5D
On Belgian Networks
Enormously researched and documented
BobM’s link may be “enormously researched and documented” but you have try to reach a judgement about the quality and reliability of the documentation.
For example, one of the footnotes appearing on the link contains the following:
[13] Leaked Dutroux dossier, consisting of thousands of official reports, all located on three DVDs. X-testimonies have been removed from this dossier, just as anything else that might point to a larger network around Dutroux. Got it from someone who was personally investigating the Dutroux case and may or may not publish a book in the future. …”
One will note the observation that “anything else that might point to a larger network..has been removed from this dossier”.
There you have it : the dossier contains nothing which might point to a larger network – therefore, any such information must have been removed from the dossier.
How do we know something has been removed? We don’t – we just have the bloke’s word for it.
Kempe
The update is that Dutroux is still inside, his applications for early release having all been turned down (they are usually granted in Belgium if the prisoner has behaved well).
His wife, on, the other hand, has been released (in the face of considerable protest)a year ago after serving around half of her sentence. She is supposed to live as a lay person in a convent somewhere in Wallonia.
You – and Old Mark – might be interested to know that Dutroux has been hinting at the existence of wider networks ever since he was arrested but curiously enough has never come out with the slightest detail. The ConspiraLoons would say that he is afraid of getting murdered if he talks but opinion generally is that, being a cunning and congental liar, he is talking poppycock.
Fred; I don’t recognize the ‘good’ face of Nationalism.
Super-Duper Tuesday exults in the rise of the machines and the dupes who vote for them.
A love of one’s country is much worse than it used to be.
Hab
You must be the fastest reader on earth.
I wonder what you will make of this thumbnail of the author?
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Jo%C3%ABl_van_der_Reijden
could it be that the security service know of most if not all of what goes on but choose to sit back and use it to blackmail those in volved,blackmailed in the sense that they can easily get them to “toe the line” do their bidding.What about all the lournos who must have got wind yet stayed stumff,the whole establishment are rotten/vile to the core,you get the government you support.
\0/
I
/\
BobM
“Hab
You must be the fastest reader on earth.
I wonder what you will make of this thumbnail of the author?
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Jo%C3%ABl_van_der_Reijden”
_______________________-
Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Our Transatlantic Friend “Lysias”, for instance, thinks I don’t read at all. 🙂
Re your question : I suspect you’ve a good idea what my answer would be….
“John Young”
“could it be that the security service know of most if not all of what goes on but choose to sit back and use it to blackmail those in volved,blackmailed in the sense that they can easily get them to “toe the line” do their bidding.”
____________________
No, I don’t think so, “John”.
To get any sort of traction, you’d have – at the very least – to give lots of convincing chapter and verse as to who was being blackmailed and told to toe the line and what they were coerced/blackmailed into doing (or not doing).
If you’re up for it I’d be delighted to read you?
BTW, where has our “Hong King -based” new contributor “Chris Roberts” disappeared to?
He burst onto the CM scene with a whirlwind of lengthy posts and then, after a bare fortnight, not a peep out of him.
Did he ever really exist?
Open letter to the governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom urging them to free Julian Assange. 500 signatories, many well-known.
By a very brief and cursory count, more than 70 prominent women have signed this letter, which I have not failed to point out to Craig’s Twitter pals Hyde, Freeman, Daisley, Cohen and Kamm, who love to sneer at middle-aged men with disregard for women.
Also among the signatories are our very own Craig Murray and John Goss! Wish I’d known. Would have signed myself.
http://diem25.org/urging-sweden-and-the-uk-to-free-julian-assange/
Kind regards,
John
Fred: The highly partisan Murdoch rag to which you link suppresses all but the first para or two and makes you pay for the rest. But from what’s on display it’s Bord na Gaidhlaig which is complaining because the council isn’t supplying unlimited places for Gaelic stidents. The other iniquities of which you complain are just as true in England, btw. Yet we can afford Trident, military action in Libya and Syria, and to bail out our criminal bankers. For national reasons…
@ Old Mark 29 Feb, 2016 – 11:21 am
‘It’s difficult enough to place oneself in the mind of these paedophiles, but the idea that the state itself is using them to its own ends, supplying them and then holding the evidence gleaned against them, is torture to the soul.’
That’s a fair point Herbie, and seems likely to have applied in the Kincora and Dutroux instances- but such a claim has no relevance here wrt Savile.To repeat, there is no doubting that Savile was a sexual predator who sometimes used under aged partners; in the music biz world that was a characteristic he had in common with (and these are just documented examples) Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, David Cassidy, Jimmy Page, Bill Wyman and John Peel. I wouldn’t call any of these guys, or Savile, a paedophile, they were just sexual opportunists who were oblivious to the letter of the law as it applies to the age of consent.
Neither the Dame Janet Smith Report, nor any of the commenters here, have produced hard evidence to show that Savile was in some sense part of a paedophile ring, or a procurer to the rich and famous a la Jeffrey Epstein. All the evidence points to him being a creepy loner who rarely socialised with colleagues and only once, for a brief period, lived with anyone other than his mother. The idea that he was some sort of smooth talking ‘fixer’ who not only enjoyed young flesh himself, but procured it for others, is quite far fetched.’
The vile creature Savile frequented hospital mortuaries, where he sexually abused corpses (and some hospital staff knew it); he reportedly procured kids for Ted Heath from Haut de la Garenne in Jersey, who would take them out in his yacht – many kids went ‘missing’ from the Boy’s home, and police have been digging up large areas looking for bodies – but the ‘suspicion’ is that some were abused, then dumped in the sea by Heath.
His hobnobbing with Royalty, with all kinds of sexual deviancy going on in Bucks Palace among the staff, does not look good at all.
Savile was no loner; he was a serial sexual predator of anyone and anything, and even stole a corpse’s glass eye and had it made into a ring.
He held a regular ‘Friday breakfast club’ for local police; I’m afraid the old notion of the ‘British Bobby’ has long been out of date.
Defending the depths of depravity does you no favours, ‘Old Mark’.
Further re my post above:
Jimmy Savile had sex with DEAD BODIES in mortuary, shocking NHS report reveals
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jimmy-savile-sex-dead-bodies-3773152
Further re my post above:
Jimmy Savile had sex with DEAD BODIES in mortuary, shocking NHS report reveals
Paul B- correction, the Mirror article you link to accepts the testimony of all of these alleged victims of Savile as credible- but the actual investigations carried out at the hospitals themselves (at great time and expense, by senior NHS managers), are much more cautious in their conclusions-
http://annaraccoon.com/2014/06/26/eyeball-eyewash-the-yewtree-allegations/
In fact, the only reports which the various authors deem credible are the incidents at a Leeds Hospital and Hospice respectively,involving women of 44 and 16 respectively, both of which amount to groping. The testimonies alleging necrophiliac behaviour by Savile are far less credible.