Roger Whittaker

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Wild conspiracy theories: the ricin case (2)

Monday 25th April 2005

The article by Duncan Campbell in the Guardian of April 14th which I quoted here disappeared from their web site not long after, apparently as a result of legal pressure from the government.

See:
http://theinsider.org/mailing/article.asp?id=1117

Update: The Insider asked The Guardian why they removed the above article from their website but they provided no explanation until we offered to publicise the fact. On 20 April 2005 we received a vague statement from The Guardian by email stating that the article was removed for "legal reasons":-

"I can tell you that the article The Ricin Ring That Never Was was removed from the archive for legal reasons."

This was the response from the newspaper when The Insider asked for further clarification:-

"The article was not removed because of any inaccuracy. It was to do with a PII certicate [sic] protecting the identity of Porton Down [government weapons laboratory] experts who appeared as witnesses in the trial."

Source: Emails from Ian Mayes (Ian.Mayes@guardian.co.uk) on behalf of Barbara Harper/Readers' Editor's office (20 April 2005).

N.B. A PII certificate is a gagging device sometimes used by the government to silence the media in the name of "national security". It is a form of censorship that the public does not usually hear about. With libraries banned from archiving censored material, this is how Western governments rewrite history.

The official excuse for censorship in this case, that it was necessary to protect the identity of witnesses, is a demonstrable fabrication since their identities are readily available from other sources in the public domain which are not subjected to censorship.

Of course the google cache is still available.

Local copy here.