Harvey Proctor slams British police as he accepts £900,000 payout for disastrous Operation Midland sex abuse probe



It largely ruined his life.  Not only did he lose his job, home and reputation due to false accusations of paedophilia and murder, but the former Tory MP believes the authorities tried to tear apart his family. He was also left penniless. So this award is a minimum. 

He is certainly right to demand the resignation of dear Cressida.  She was in charge of the operation that resulted in the police killing of an entirely innocent Brazilian electrician.  Anybody else would have been demoted over that but she was instead put in charge of the entire London police.  Why? She is an open Lesbian.  That's a huge tick in politically correct Britain.  Will she be demoted now that she is responsible for two great miscarriages of justice?  Probably not

Harvey Proctor, the former Tory MP, has accepted a payout of almost £1 million from the Scotland Yard over its disastrous handling of Operation Midland, but has still demanded that the Commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick resigns.

The 72-year-old, who was investigated by the force for more than a year after being falsely accused of child murder by the fantasist, Carl Beech will receive £500,000 damages and £400,000 in legal costs.

It is believed to be the biggest ever payout by a police force over negligent behaviour which did not result in wrongful imprisonment and marks a humiliating end to the debacle for the Met.

But despite accepting the payout, Mr Proctor has refused to go quietly and has issued a withering statement blasting the Met over its numerous failings.

In the statement, Mr Proctor, who lost his home and his job as a result of the police investigation, said had refused to sign any non disclosure agreements as part of the deal and remained free to criticise Scotland Yard.

He said: "Cressida Dick failed abjectly in her duty and should resign, while Steve Rodhouse is a very stupid man who should not be the deputy in charge of the National Crime Agency."

Mr Proctor launched legal action against the Met and had been willing to take the case to trial at the High Court, where if he had won, he could have expected an even larger payout.

But he said: "I am heartily sick of these police and their mealy-mouthed apologies to me and I did not want to take a fortune from public funds. Just enough to put my innocence beyond doubt, and to warn the police not to make this same mistake with other people."

Operation Midland was launched in 2014 after Beech told detectives he had been raped and abused by politicians and high profile figures during the 1970s.

Scotland Yard declared the allegations as credible and true and launched a multi-million pound investigation which saw the homes of Mr Proctor, D-day veteran Lord Bramall and the late Lord Brittan raided and searched.

After traducing the reputations of number of highly respected figures, the investigation was eventually closed down without a single arrest being made.

Retired High Court judge, Sir Richard Henriques, published a damning report into the Met's handling of the case, highlighted 43 separate blunders by the police.

Beech, who is himself a convicted paedophile, was eventually charged with perverting the course of justice and was jailed for 18-years in July.

Earlier this month, Mr Proctor reported five former Met officers to Northumbria Police in a bid to spark a fresh criminal inquiry into the investigation.

Among the allegations he has made is that the police misled a district judge when applying for the search warrants to raid the homes of the suspects.

He is still waiting to hear if a criminal investigation will be launched. A spokesman for Scotland Yard said: "The MPS is assessing the complaint."

All of the officers involved in Operation Midland have been cleared of any wrongdoing by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

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The Big Lie of Psychiatry: The Rosenhan experiment exposed

A review of The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

“All of the little things—the wig, the lying about his hospitalization dates, the exaggeration in his medical records, the playing with numbers, the dismissal of Harry’s information, the unfinished book, his never tackling the subject again—all of these piled up. Rosenhan does not seem to be the man I’d believed in.”

You can say that again.

David Rosenhan (1929-2012) was the Stanford psychologist whose sensational “pseudopatient study” shook psychiatry to its foundations. Published to worldwide acclaim in 1973, it saw eight sane people fake their way into mental hospitals, get misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, and have trouble getting back out. Five decades later it is still regularly cited, taught, and invoked as proof that psychiatric diagnoses lack validity.

In this new book, journalist Susannah Cahalan makes a strong case that Rosenhan pretty much made it all up.

The Great Pretender is the book of the decade. Assuming Cahalan’s research is sound, it will force a retraction by the journal Science, and every psychology and psychiatry textbook in the world will have to be rewritten. It’s also a gripping detective story and a terrific read. Cahalan’s documentation is rich, her research seemingly exhaustive, and she thanks a fact-checker in her acknowledgments.

As Cahalan tells it, Rosenhan’s study is nothing but one lie or exaggeration after another: most of the “pseudopatients” never existed; there were only two, besides Rosenhan himself, and one actually enjoyed his experience in the hospital.

Rosenhan lied when he wrote that his sole presenting symptom was hearing a voice say “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” Not so, as Cahalan shows in a bombshell screenshot of his admission file:

He has felt that he is "sensitive to radio signals and hear what people are thinking." He realized that these experiences are unreal but cannot accept their reality. He has tried to insulate out the noises by putting "copper over my ears". One reason for coming to the hospital was because things "are better insulated in a hospital". He has also had suicidal thoughts.

Worse, Cahalan discovers that Rosenhan didn’t “gain admission” to the hospital. His wife had him committed.

After going home, Rosenhan then leveraged his “experiment” to (apparently) lie his way to fame and fortune. He landed a lucrative double appointment at Stanford, where he spent the rest of his career.

Alas, that career can only have been utterly miserable, because that is where his lies evidently caught up to him. The hospital he’d stayed in had leaked his file, and it found its way to psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, the architect of the DSM-III. Cahalan doesn’t use the word “blackmail,” but she does suggest Spitzer cowed Rosenhan into silence forever after while he pursued his own agenda of revising, expanding, and medicalizing the diagnoses of the DSM.

The irony of this whole sorry mess is that of all people, a psychologist should know that living a lie is the chief obstacle to achieving serenity, inner peace, or—as we call it now—mental health.

I take a great interest in these affairs because I met or spoke with Rosenhan, Spitzer, and the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz about the Rosenhan experiment just before their deaths, right around the time Cahalan found her own way to it.

Cahalan came by way of a misdiagnosis she’d been given (the topic of her previous book, Brain on Fire).

My own interest was purely academic. In 2011, I'd discovered a startling similarity to Rosenhan’s experiment in a stage comedy from ancient Rome titled The Menaechmus Brothers. As I realized, the central theme of that play is exactly the same that Rosenhan raised in the famous first sentence of his article: “If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?” (Read my paper here alongside pages 83-93 of The Great Pretender.) It was eerie.

Flush and out of my element, I contacted Rosenhan, Spitzer, and Szasz for their thoughts. None of them knew the play, but their reactions were quite different. Szasz, who had published a critique of the Rosenhan Experiment, was eager to discuss my paper and sent me some immediate impressions. Spitzer professed himself uninterested in hearing more. Through his caretaker, Rosenhan initially expressed interest—especially in the title, which I chose to honor him—but he never got back to me. Since he was ailing and died shortly after, I’ll never know why.

With The Great Pretender, Susannah Cahalan will go down in history. Like her great predecessors—Dorothea Dix, Lady Rosina, Elizabeth Packard, Nelly Bly—she digs deep, investigates, and works to expose the psychiatric charades and charlatans of our times. If the facts are indeed as she presents them—and I call on Stanford to digitize and publish the materials she quotes from—then we all owe her a debt of gratitude.

SOURCE 







Understanding the Roots of the War on History

I am a historian by trade. One of the most important moments I experienced in my graduate training was when a professor explained that her doctorate was in the “philosophy of history,” not history itself. It is an important distinction because people equate history with mastering historical trivia. The possibility that there is a philosophy of or a way to think about history is rarely raised.

Actually, there are several different philosophies of history—often at odds with each other—not just one universal philosophy. During the early years of the American republic, history helped create a national identity and instill positive virtues in the public. Parson Mason Locke Weems turned to George Washington’s famous cherry tree-chopping incident to invent a memorable fable to teach children honesty. Other contemporaries agreed with this approach.

Early feminist educator Emma Willard wrote in The History of the United States, Or, American Republic that “The most important advantage of the study of history, is improvement in individual and national virtue . . . [especially in] the history of the American Republic.” These authors presented the Founding Fathers and military heroes as role models. The fact that white males dominated the nation’s early historical narrative reflected society as it existed at that time. Nevertheless, the pursuit of republican ideology, conveyed by words like liberty and freedom, was believed to be the engine that drove the United States toward a new enlightened age.

Even as the new age dawned, others lamented that only a few groups really prospered. Industrialization showered wealth on those who controlled capital but what about those who worked the machines and tilled the fields as well as the women and minorities who had even lower status? There could only be prosperity and justice when society shared its treasure with all its members. To these early critics, economic factors—not ideology—motivated human actions. Karl Marx became the spokesperson for this emerging philosophy—Marxism.

Shocker: Most College Students Think America Invented Slavery
In the early 20th century, a group of historians connected with the progressive movement declared war on traditional history. In 1921, husband and wife Charles A. and Mary R. Beard co-authored a high school textbook simply titled The History of the United States, a work that detailed the progressive movement’s plan to revolutionize teaching history. An online version of this important work can be found here. The volume’s introduction stated: “If the study of history cannot be made truly progressive [or organized] like the study of mathematics, science, and languages, then the historians assume a grave responsibility in adding their subject to the already overloaded curriculum.” Their approach expunged “The time-honored stories of exploration and biographies of heroes” and “all descriptions of battles” as unnecessary and even detrimental.

The Beards listed seven changes to the traditional narrative approach to history. First, their curriculum was topic-based. Second, these topics revealed how each had contributed to the nation’s development. Third, their approach “dwelt fully upon the social and economic aspects” of American history. Fourth, the causes and results of wars and the problems of financing and sustaining armed forces replaced military strategy. Fifth, discovery and exploration were omitted to make room for citizenship. Sixth, although recognizing America’s uniqueness in some areas, they believed attention must be paid to diplomacy, foreign affairs, world relations, and the influence of other nations. And seventh, they claimed that their approach would stimulate students to think and analyze, resulting in graduates ready for the modern world. Like Weems, the Beards believed historical instruction could mold the character of future citizens. We heard the fruit of the Beards' philosophical approach in Barrack Obama’s famous Berlin speech, where an American president declared himself a citizen of the world.

Other progressive historians reinforced this view of history in which economic factors drive history. In particular, the Marxist notions of property and class struggle began to gain favor. These authors and their works shaped several generations of students, who would, in turn, become authors and teachers. While the Beards and most progressive historians have largely been relegated to historiographic reading lists, their influence on the modern history profession cannot be overstated. The popularity of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States demonstrates how widely accepted and entrenched the progressive interpretation of history launched by the Beards has become.

This economic approach to history has been popular on campuses and in textbooks for years. Examples are familiar: the American Revolution was a war for economic independence; the Founding Fathers were rich white men who established a government to protect their own interests; the nation was built by the labor of workers who toiled for the benefit of slave owners and industrialists; the Westward Expansion stole land at the expense of Native Americans and Mexicans; and women and minorities endured a menial and minimal existence. Words such as liberty or freedom masked bigotry and greed. Heroes were not the misguided men who fought for kings and capitalists on faraway battlefields but those who struggled in factories and fields against oppression. It was a world that cried out for fairness and change as well as a world, too, in which the individual triumphed only if assisted by the power of the government, the basic tenet of progressivism. The case can be made that all historical interpretations have a political agenda at heart. However, progressive historians created a world view designed to help politicians reconstruct society.

Victimhood is key to the progressive interpretation of history. Basically, if someone gains then someone else loses. Thus, history becomes a scorecard for identifying winners and losers. Those with wealth and power use it to oppress others. The goal of progressive history is not to understand the past but to identify guilty parties. Assigning roles of oppressor and oppressed (i.e., victim) signal which past wrongs must be righted. Since the guilty culprits are dead, the responsibility to make things right rests with their progeny. The beneficiaries aren’t the original victims but their descendants. An economic redistribution of wealth is usually suggested to demonstrate contrition.

To modern progressives, no narrative can exist other than the claim that powerful groups oppress less powerful groups, which supports the moral, legal, and political implications that history’s victims deserve restitution. Progressive history strikes at the very root of the early American republican historical narrative by rejecting the notion of American exceptionalism. Rather than acknowledge and celebrate the Founding Fathers and other early heroes, progressive historians denigrate them and work to remove them from the public discourse. Look no further for an explanation of what is happening to statues deemed offensive and guilty of some past injustice.

Why do historical interpretations matter? The boundary between history and politics is razor-thin and too many practitioners claim to be historians when in fact they are political operatives. I am not referring to just the academic voices in the classroom crying for social justice but the advocational historians who strive to maintain their group heritage and/or identity. Both can be extreme in their own way, picking the historical “facts” that support their view of the past. Moreover, the struggle for control of the historical narrative has made the field unappealing to the public in general and students in particular. It is an unhealthy situation for both the profession and the society it professes to serve.

We have all heard the well-worn rejoinder, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Nevertheless, many in our society go about their daily lives with little or no regard for history or those who write it. It is enough to beg the question, "Is history obsolete?" The answer, of course, is no. However, it is time that those in the profession reevaluate how we present history to the public and adopt strategies to address the problem of societal disinterest. If no remedy is found, it is historians themselves who face becoming irrelevant.

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Priests across Australia will be forced to report child sex abuse admitted at confession or could face charges themselves under strict new laws

What stupidity.  It will achieve nothing.  All it will do is victimize a few faithful priests.  And how will they prove what is said in the confessional booth?

Australia's chief legal officers have agreed to standardise laws making it mandatory for priests to report child abuse revealed to them during confession.

Federal and state attorneys-general meeting in Adelaide on Friday agreed to three principles for the laws, which were recommended following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Those principles say that 'confessional privilege' can't be relied upon to avoid a child protection or criminal obligation to report beliefs, suspicions or knowledge of child abuse.

They also dictate that clergy would not be able to use that defence to avoid giving evidence against a third party in criminal or civil proceedings.

Work on such laws is already well under way in most states and territories, but legal expert Luke Beck said the agreement will implement a nationwide standard.

'Some states are already in compliance with this and they don't have to do anything else,' said Mr Beck, an associate professor at Monash University. 'Now, all have signed up and said 'yes, we're going to do it'.'

In June 2018, the ACT was the first state to introduce laws which forced priests to admit any sexual abuse confessions.

The Victorian Labor government promised to push the law through in November last year.

Up until now, NSW, Queensland and Western Australia have protected priests.   

Teachers, police and medical practitioners are already legally required to report child physical and sexual abuse allegations.

The Catholic Church has insisted priests would be obliged to defy the laws, with Melbourne Archbishop Peter Comensoli previously stating he was prepared to go to jail rather than break the confessional seal.

'For Catholics, confession is a religious encounter of a deeply personal nature. It deserves confidentiality,' he said in August.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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