Met Police Agent Provocateurs

[Jan Klimkowski]

Paul - you have your analysis of the existing evidence, and I have mine.

There's little point in continuing at this point in time.

But for the record:

Jan,

My disagreements with your position on this affair summarised:

1) Both the Grauniad and the Green movement are themselves deep state actors and milieux: any serious analysis must factor this in;

Massive and unhelpful over-simplification.

Not all journalists and green activists are deep state actors, and the fact that some (perhaps many) of their editors/leaders may be, does not negate the importance of either the protest movement or the principle of investigative journalism.

2) There is, by your own admission, at least one bureaucratic beneficiary (the Met) of this circumscribed expose, thus raising the question of how "innocent" the campaign of revelation is;

You've spent the rest of this thread claiming it's an MI6 operation to get the cops out of MI6 territory. You lost that argument, so now you come up with this one.

3) While I agree with you unreservedly that the deep state doesn't relish seeing its tawdry and criminal SOPs quite so thoroughly aired, this has precedent* and is an acceptable price to pay for scuppering a rival;

You're welcome to your opinon.

I don't share it, and see little extant evidence to support it.

4) I think you overstate by a margin the impact of 3) - the function of the political "elite" & the MSM is, after all, to learn nothing and challenge nothing (at least, nothing of immediate utility or import to the higher levels of government & its allies);

I think you understate by a margin the impact of the exposure of deep state sponsorship of agent provocateurs and false flag activities.

5) Your explanation of how this story was put together can only explain so much: there is detail within it that cannot be attributed to even the most scrupulous pieces of investigative journalism (as commonly understood).

Many investigative stories have as their starting point lawyers uncovering state or corporate shenanigans, and advising their clients that they should to speak to "respectable, broadsheet newspapers" to get the story "on the record" and prevent the state from closing the case down.

If I was a defence lawyer in the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station case, and uncovered the fact that key prosecution evidence (taped conversations) were recorded by an undercover police officer, who quite possibly "led the conversations" in certain directions, and that the prosecution had withheld this fact from the defence in evidential discovery, I would be absolutely furious. I would also want to ensure that any other agent provocateur evidence was properly disclosed, and I would definitely use the press to make this public domain and flush out any other such undisclosed behaviour.

In my judgement, and my experience of MSM newsrooms, once such information reaches an honest journalist, he or she runs with the story to the best of their ability (which may be mediocre or outstanding). The suppression, and shaping, of the story will occur when editorial staff get involved, (or, in the rarer cases when the particular hack receiving the story is in fact on the intel payroll).

It is clear in the piece I excerpted above that members of the protest movement identified several "protestors" as police undercover agents. Guardian editorial staff and lawyers would then have insisted that their hacks contact senior police officers in ACPO plc and NPOIC and put these allegations to them. It appears that ACPO plc and NPOIC confirmed that some of these "protestors", eg Officer A and Officer B, were police undercover assets, and requested that pictures of them be pixellated. The Guardian complied with this - indeed Guardian senior editors and lawyers probably insisted on this.

Like it or not, all this is standard national journalistic practice.