A small test of integrity

We are currently still waiting for the final conclusions of the FV Trident Re-opened Formal Investigation to be published. However, from what we’ve gathered so far, it seems that the government has already decided to prevent the truth from emerging at the end of this protracted and costly inquiry; we do not believe for a moment that the Aberdeen Sheriff will be able to deliver anything other than the outcome requested by UK ministers.

The current government should have had few reasons to manipulate the results of this formal investigation, unless pressures threatening to affect their political interests have recently provided them with suitable motivation.

Of course, it is not difficult to understand that those who directed the cover-up in the Gaul RFI have a vested interest in seeing that the Trident inquiry goes the same way. Delivering justice in the Trident case, they might fear, could open the Gaul’s families’ eyes and their appetite for a similar treatment.

What may be even more daunting is that subsequent disclosures about the miscarriage of justice in the Gaul case would be linked to some of the most prominent entries in the New Labour Party bestiary.

Notwithstanding that, we would urge our government once again to resist undue pressures, permit an honest conclusion to the Trident investigation and allow the families of the victims to finally obtain justice. It is too ugly to persist with the deception, especially when these families know very well that they are being deceived.
It is also imprudent to think that the truth - already difficult to contain - would not, sooner or later, overcome official censorship, lies and the suppression of facts. Any delay in acknowledging this can only make a future exposure many times more embarrassing.

The Trident RFI may be just a small test of official integrity, but small things like this determine the direction of a government’s course and the chances they have of passing other, more strenuous trials.

LINK

FV Trident Investigation - the role of the MAIB

So far, the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) has been sheltered from the strong winds blowing around the ongoing Re-opened Formal Investigation into the loss of  FV Trident.

However, we know that, prior to the re-opening of this new investigation, the MAIB played an important role in assessing the causes behind Trident's loss.  We have now sent them a Freedom of Information request that, hopefully, will shed some light upon the official handling of this case.

NOTE: In the Gaul RFI, the MAIB produced a detailed report (Rep no.4/99) which accompanied their recommendation for a re-opening of the Gaul investigation. It is therefore to be expected that at least the same level of service and transparency should have applied in the Trident inquiry.

Their name liveth for evermore

HMS Ark Royal

A ship that one of us helped build in the late seventies (together with her sister, HMS Illustrious):

Clippings

Trident

In our previous post, we condemned the actions of the Department for Transport (DfT) for shredding a file, which contained important information on the 1976 NMI stability tests on the FV Trident (The information was destroyed before it could be called as evidence in the current investigation into Trident’s loss, while, at the same time, some £6m was being spent by the DfT to repeat the stability tests and obtain new ‘evidence’ and a different theory for her loss).

NOTE: It now appears that the FV Trident RFI transcripts of evidence, which used to be accessible from the government site: fv-trident.org.uk, have recently been removed. We have no idea why this happened, but can only suspect that they are about to undergo a process of improvement at the end of which they may no longer accurately reflect what was said during the 2009-2010 hearings, but what the officials wished they had said. 


UPDATE 26.11.2010 - The DfT intimated that the fv-trident.org.uk "keeps going offline" and that they didn't know why - that it was clearly a technical problem, not their intention to close the site down.
Well, then it must be a serious technical problem, since the site has been offline for more than a month now.

Gaul

We have recently noticed that the official video of the NMI stability tests on the Gaul, transferred to the National Archives in March of this year, has also suffered from data loss during this process. The previous 35.9Mb clip has now shrunk to 20Mb, and its original recording of 18.39 minutes now only runs for just over 10.36 minutes before it freezes.

Critically, the lost material is at the end of the clip - the part that refers to the NMI stability report, analysis and conclusions.

Here is the site and video clip in question: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100303142156/http://www.fv-gaul.org.uk/video.htm

It would seem that, bit-by-bit, in a slow and stealthy fashion, a number of elements of recorded history have been lost or modified over time with public officials stepping in to plug the gaps with new and opportune slants and an adulterated perception of the past reality.

Ayn Rand once wrote, “We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality”. Likewise, we foresee, the consequences of the our political establishment’s re-write of history will not be late in presenting themselves.