General Mark Milley stands with Mike Pence, Trump, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and General Joseph F. Dunford. Credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Three Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020 was the headline of a piece published 10 days after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. What would happen, Rosa Brooks wondered in the article, if the President issued an order that was dangerously unhinged? So: “Prepare to invade Mexico tomorrow!”, or: “I’m going to teach China a lesson with nukes!”. There could, she wrote, be a possibility of a “military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders”.
In a follow-up piece, And Then the Breitbart Lynch Mob Came for Me, Brooks detailed the torrent of abuse that came her way after the piece was published. The alt-right had responded to her suggestions with howls of indignation, culminating in a death threat: ‘I AM GOING TO CUT YOUR HEAD OFF … BITCH!’
Four years later, and President Trump is refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, is referring to mail-in ballots as a “big scam”, and declaring he wasn’t sure that the election could be “honest”. Shortly after his release from the Walter Reed Medical Center, Trump shows no signs of softening. He reiterated his contempt for the American electoral system in a frenzied tweet-storm:
Ari, THE MEDIA IS CORRUPT, JUST LIKE OUR DEMOCRAT RUN BALLOT SYSTEM IS CORRUPT! Look at what’s happening with Fake, Missing and Fraudulent Ballots all over the Country??? VOTE https://t.co/PaFBuskB19
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020
Along with his recently expressed desire to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send troops onto American streets during the protests which followed the killing of George Floyd, the President has spurred speculation that he might seek to use the US military to prolong his time in office. New York Times Columnist, Thomas Friedman, described Trump’s statements as “a six-alarm fire”, saying “I think it’s DEFCON 5;” and Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, warned that Trump, protected from ongoing criminal investigations only so long as he is in power, is unashamedly putting the nation on notice that he is planning a coup d’état.
Leading Republicans have promised an “orderly transition” which has reportedly been insufficient to relieve deep anxieties shared by senior military and Defense Department officials that they may be given unlawful orders if deployed during protests after the vote. In public, officials have insisted that the US military will not play a role settling election disputes — but debate is said to be intensifying in private about its role should there be civil unrest.
And now, a group of lawyers is officially offering advice to worried military and National Guard members. In the US, the law requires service members not to obey “flagrantly unlawful” orders but those who refuse to obey orders take considerable risks as, under military law, disobeying an order is itself a criminal offence. The Orders Project, founded in response to the militarised use of force against protestors this summer, has compiled a legal sourcebook for military personnel as a guide to what a soldier’s legal position might be in situations where loyalties conflict.
So, it turns out that Brooks anticipating that the military might refuse “to obey certain orders” wasn’t such an incendiary fantasy after all.
In fact, exactly this scenario — in which a president’s closest aides and military chiefs deliberately ignore or subvert orders from their Commander in Chief — has already played out in American history, under Richard Nixon. Such were his aggressive and impulsive outbursts that military and defence officials feared he might upset the fragile geopolitical order of the late 1960s/early 1970s. “If the President had his way,” Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, quipped on several occasions, “there would be a nuclear war each week.”
According to several members of Nixon’s inner circle, many of whom I met during the making of the documentary, The Secret World of Richard Nixon, there were a number of episodes in which the President’s staff thought it better to ignore his orders or to come up with explanations of why they couldn’t be carried out.
On 29 August 1969, for instance, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked a US passenger plane en route from Rome to Tel Aviv and forced it to land at Damascus International Airport. Nixon spent that evening with his friend Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo, a Florida businessman who also served as his personal financial adviser. At 3am, according to Leonard Garment, Nixon’s Special Assistant from 1969 to 1973, the President called Kissinger, and said: “Henry, I want you to set in motion plans for the bombing of Damascus. This is an order. This is not something for discussion.”
Kissinger told the President that he would do as he asked, but in fact did nothing. Syria, then as now, was a Russian ally, and such a move would have been highly confrontational, potentially sparking a larger conflict between the superpowers. Kissinger interpreted Nixon’s order as, in his words, “posturing for the people he was with that evening” and decided to take the matter into his own hands. No bombs were dropped on Damascus.
A year later, in the middle of September 1970, terrorists from the same organisation hijacked several aeroplanes and forced them to land in the Jordanian desert. Nixon again responded by ordering bombing raids on PFLP positions in Jordan, which this time would have provoked both Syria and Iraq, the PFLP’s Russian-backed sponsors, and complicated Jordan’s position as a US ally.
After consultation with Kissinger, Nixon’s then Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, told the President that cloud cover made such a raid impossible. ‘Conveniently,’ Laird said later, ‘there was bad weather.’ (Jordan’s deserts in summer aren’t known for their heavy rainfall.) ‘I’ve always tried to carry out the orders of the Commander in Chief’ said Laird, ‘but on some occasions it was better to protect him.’
Towards the end of Nixon’s presidency, as Watergate took its toll on his mental equilibrium, some of his staff went further.
In the spring of 1974, Joseph Laitin, a public affairs officer at the Bureau of the Budget, was walking up a stairway in the West Wing of the White House when someone ran down the other way, bowled into him, and took off with a number of other men in pursuit. ‘My God,’ Laitin thought. ‘That was the President of the United States running away from six Secret Service agents.’ The look in Nixon’s eye, he said later, ‘was one of desperation. And that bothered me.’
James Schlesinger, then Secretary of Defense, felt similarly. He was concerned about Nixon’s access to the nuclear codes. At a meeting of the Joint Chiefs attended by Laitin, the chairman General George S. Brown the told the gathered company that Defense Secretary Schlesinger ‘wanted an agreement from the Joint Chiefs that nobody would take any action, or execute orders on the use of nuclear weapons, without all of them agreeing to it.’ According to Laitin, ‘they were shocked, but they all agreed.’
Schlesinger was also concerned about the possibility of the President trying to sidestep impeachment by surrounding the White House with troops loyal to the presidency – in the same way that Pentagon officials are now worried about Trump potentially refusing to leave the White House and ordering troops onto the streets to quell any civil unrest should he contest the election result.
Fearing the ‘bloody mess’ that might ensue if two sets of US troops found themselves facing each other outside the White House, Schlesinger issued another unorthodox order. “I told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he disclosed in an interview 26 years after the event, “that every order that would come from the White House had to come to me, directly, immediately upon receipt. There were not to be any extraordinary military measures that would be taken at anyone’s behest.”
A former head of the CIA, Schlesinger was not a liberal by any definition. Reportedly, his first words on taking office there were: “I’m here to make sure you don’t screw Richard Nixon.” By the spring of 1974, however, he believed that the President was no longer capable of controlling his emotions. Some – such as Nixon’s press secretary, Ronald Ziegler – maintained that it was inappropriate for Schlesinger to issue such orders. But Schlesinger, who died in 2014, remained adamant that he had done the right thing. “The President was the duly elected man in office,” he explained, “and it is not the responsibility of his cabinet officers to question whether or not he is balanced – save when there is clear evidence that he is no longer capable of the job.”
Interviewing members of the Nixon Administration about this period, a picture emerged of individuals constantly improvising in the untidy grey area of conflicting loyalties to the Constitution and Commander-in-Chief. Their responses altered from day to day with Nixon’s changing mental condition as well as rapidly evolving political events.
In the end, facing the near-certainty of impeachment, Nixon resigned peacefully on the 8th of August 1974. No ‘extraordinary military measures’ were taken. Ultimately politics and personality decided the day. Evidence of Nixon’s complicity in the cover up surrounding the Watergate burglary had eroded his remaining political support and, in the face of overwhelming opposition, his rage and paranoia gave way to defeat. These factors and the presence of certain key individuals around him ensured that the system was respected.
Of course Trump is not Nixon. And, although Trump’s political support may wane should he lose the election, his grandiose narcissism may elicit a different response, as might the guidance of those around him. In an interview last month, former political consultant to the Trump campaign and convicted felon, Roger Stone, told InfoWars’s Alex Jones that Trump should impose ‘martial law’ in the event of ‘election fraud’. And in June, when Trump decided to put on a show of strength and give a speech outside a church that had been damaged during protests close to the White House in D.C.’s Lafayette Square, the military provided assistance – armed members of the National Guard were present while military helicopters circled above. And, as he walked across the square, the president was flanked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley, wearing military fatigues, and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper.
Both Milley and Esper faced a barrage of criticism for taking part in the event. Milley publicly apologised. “I should not have been there,” he said in a video address soon afterwards. Esper also broke with the president, saying that active duty troops should not be sent to control protests. “I don’t support invoking the Insurrection Act” he told reporters gathered at the Pentagon.
If Trump fails to agree to a peaceful transfer or questions the election result, it will be another ‘stress-test’ for a political system, which has already been pushed to new extremes under this presidency. For now, at least, the military has made its position clear, stating that it will play no role in the transition of power after the election. In his closing remarks during a virtual town hall at the end of September, General Milley encouraged US troops to remain neutral: “Stay apolitical,” he said “and keep the Constitution close to your heart.”
Milley’s words contained an echo of President Gerald Ford’s speech given at his swearing-in ceremony after Nixon’s resignation. “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” said Ford. “Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”
Let’s hope that, whatever the result, the same is true after November.
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SubscribeHard to think of a better way of obtaining a bit of positive PR for the beleaguered monarch. The courts would need to come round and cross all the ts but a swift and expansive gesture in the direction of justice would go a lot further than Vennells reluctantly handing back her CBE ever could.
II was aware of this scandal years ago – I can’t remember the source but may have been this website: https://www.postofficescandal.uk Certainly, it was not our ‘National Broadcaster’ which bloated and highly remunerated organisation I am required by law to finance. Had they done their job, with the same enthusiasm they have shown for the trans movement, this travesty of justice may have been brought to light much, much earlier !
The BBC DID do their job – assorted documentaries on the subject, including a very comprehensive, multi-part series on Radio4 last year. However due to the pressure of a minority group on the right wing who hate the idea of an independent broadcaster, the Conservative government could ignore the obvious facts because they came from the ‘woke’ BBC.
Many SPMs don’t want a Royal Pardon as it leaves their convictions in place. I understand their point of view but they should remember that their case was R v Bloggs, so an intervention by R is very significant.
I would, though, want the judicial appeal process to grind on, nevertheless. I am very uncomfortable with the proposed legislation, which would see politicians set a very dangerous precedent of being able to overturn Court rulings they don’t like.
Looking at the matter from across the Pond, I had to read up on the scandal courtesy of Reuters. In the Reuters articles, I saw that the various payments to the innocent postmasters/mistresses seemed to range between fifty to a little over a hundred thousand pounds.
Based upon the devastating effects of unjust incarcerations, and the lives of people–as well as their families–ruined for a decade or more, that seems awfully small recompense.
While calls for the heads of the transgressors is all well and good, and Royal pardons may be entirely appropriate, my sincere hope would be that those injured in this terrible error receive more than a relative pittance they have thus far to help rebuild their lives.
One reason for the pitiful payouts so far was that the sub-postmasters had to use a litigation funder in order to get lawyered-up and take on the might of the Post Office. The litigation funder, in this case Therium, takes all the risk (i.e. if the sub-postmasters had lost the case, Therium would have paid the Post Office’s legal costs), but risk-taking comes at a huge price. Consequently, much of what the court awarded the sub-postmasters went to Therium and its funding sources.C’est la vie.
I agree with Ruth that a pardon for what you haven’t done is insulting
Although some have described the Horizon scandal as “Kafkaesque”, to me it resembles more the witch trials. First, the standard of proof: there was the presumption that Horizon was perfect, which effectivel inverted the notion that somone is innocent until proven guilty: Secindly, the Post Office teams that checked on these supposed financial irregularities got bonuses for confessions and prosecutions, in much the same way that the so-called “witch-prickers” got a bonus when the woman was “found” to be a witch.
In the trials, the prosecutions were handled by the Post Office and the Post Office was the beneficiary from successful prosecutions.
Witch trials ended in Scotland because people realised that the evidence and procedures used were ludicrous.
Differently from England and Wales, the Scottish prosecution of sub-postmasters was handled by the Crown Office, an organization ulimately headed-up by an appointee nominated by Nicola Sturgeon. Ironically, in November, 2022, Nicola Sturgeon formally apologised to those accused of witchcraft in Scotland. But the Scottish courts were convicting sub-postmasters at the same rate (pro rata) as the Post Office were prosecuting them South of the Border. So a similar apology from the SNP-led government and their legal appointees would be appropriate.
I think it’s an ideal opportunity for the king to step in. I can’t believe he has been so slow. The public are behind this and he should back them. It would be cowardly and stupid for him not to whatever the costs to protocol.
Let’s see. As a moral and ethical person it’s the kind of thing he would champion…but maybe the ties that bind his impartiality and his quiet life are too strong? Sooner rather than later he should put his shoulder to the wheel. This is not about awards. Alan Bates has already refused them, this is about the face on the stamps sold by the post office having some gravitas.
A lack of mainstream media coverage has been a huge contributor.
Sadly I suspect that the BBC did not cover this thoroughly as it would have had to criticise a high-powered female.
You just have to look at their coverage of Sturgeon, Arden and Merkel to understand their track record.
I don’t think so. I didn’t follow it actively, but still I have known about it for quite some time.
I think people didn’t believe it possible to start with, and after that nobody wanted to clear up the mess because it would implicate everyone. The problem is the political class allowed this not just to happen, but to continue. Nobody cares enough.
A good case for reading Private Eye, Ian Hislop was saying that they first covered it in 2010, I think, and that they have been banging on about it ever since. Also Computer Weekly picked it up a long time ago. The main stream media should keep an eye on these sort of publications and investigate the issues they raise, if they can’t be bothered to do the journalism themselves.
Something for the BBC bashers here – Radio4 last year ran a major documentary on the subject – interesting that did not raise the indignation like the docudrama has.
The BBC had a “File on Four” type program about this in December 2014 which I remember hearing. It was all known then. They also have “File on Four” programmes from 2020 and 2022 covering this.
Parts of the BBC are still good and do proper investigative journalism. It’s the “big name talent” (people like Marr, Kuensberg, Peston) in the media who aren’t doing their real jobs here.
It was also very well covered by Private Eye and Computer Weekly at the time. It was quite obvious to anyone with any experience of software projects that this was yet another screwed up software project.
It seems that too many people in positions of authority just didn’t want to hear it.
This all reminds me of how Tony Blair only discovered his moral compass about Saddam Hussein a decade after he started his murderous was with Iran and gassed the Kurds. The politicians will all be queueing up to condemn the Post Office and Fujitsu. But they knew all this 10 years ago and did nothing. With a few notable exceptions (like James Arbuthnot).
But perhaps some of them were too busy with their own cover-ups (Jimmy Savile et al) to bother with this one. I guess covering up is a full time job for some of these people …
“You turn a blind eye to my guilty semi-secret and I’ll do the same to yours” sort of thing.
For the record, this is the BBC program I heard on December 9th 2014 – Radio 4 Today program:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04tjdlg
0735
A group of MP’s campaigning on behalf of at least 150 sub postmasters who say they were wrongly accused of false accounting and fraud has said that it has lost faith in the Post Office’s attempts to resolve their claims. For several years a vocal minority of sub postmasters say that they have been made scapegoats for what many claim is a faulty IT system which created thousands of pounds worth of shortfalls where none existed. Some were bankrupted and lost their homes. A few were sent to prison. Jo Hamilton is a sub postmaster who pleaded guilty to false accounting. James Arbuthnot MP is leading the campaign to help sub postmasters.
Annoyingly, there is no audio recording available. And it’s quite hard to track this down.
The BBC did a lot of work on this subject. But they’ve let ITV take all the credit ! But congratulations to them all in pursuing this through to the end for over 10 years.
I agree. The vogue of the female Top Boss is a cornerstone of BBC propaganda and culturally consolidated in the wider corporate landscape. The repression of men in management and the media is palpable.
Royal pardon? Terrific idea – where do I sign? Plus whatever else is needed to ensure full restitution and secure accountability. Cinema has always been a source of momentum for restorative action. Mega congrats to ITV.
I wouldn’t want a “pardon” for something I hadn’t done. I would want full, public acknowledgement of my innocence and prosecution for those who accused and punished me.
The wholly State-owned Post Office was dressed up as a limited company to erode or eradicate Ministerial accountability for it, and as part of the weird Long Blairite cult of “captains of industry” from 1980s satire and sitcom, yet somehow elevated to heroic figures. Evidently, Tony Blair and his circle had not got the joke in the Thatcher years.
Paula Vennells had never worked in the public sector. She continued to hold non-executive directorships of private corporations. She was made “a non-executive director of the Cabinet Office”. A what? And she was interviewed for the Bishopric of London, with a seat in the House of Lords, a seat on the Privy Council, probably a life peerage on retirement, and certainly a prominent role in the Coronation, despite never having been on the Church of England’s payroll.
Clergy have been so elevated in the past after ordained lifetimes in old school academia or on the staff of public schools, for good or ill closely connected to the Church of England, and with pastoral and liturgical aspects to them. Now, though, they are so elevated from this, and whereas those late-middle-aged professor and headmaster bishops had been ordained in their twenties, Vennells would have been raised to the purple at the reasonable age of 58, but after only 12 years in Orders and 11 as a priest. This is not a sectarian point. The Catholic Church is also beset with managerialism. We just go about it differently.
As Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer could have taken over and discontinued any private prosecution if he had judged that its continuation would not have been in the public interest. Instead, though, there have already been six appeals in which the Respondent has not been the Post Office, but the Crown Prosecution Service, and the CPS acted on behalf of the Post Office several times, including by prosecuting Seema Misra, who was sent to prison and put on suicide watch while pregnant, eventually giving birth while wearing an electronic tag. Horizon was installed under the Blair Government.
In Scotland, where private prosecution is almost impossible even before considering the enormous cost that made it so rare elsewhere, all roads lead back to the Crown Office, which is headed by the Lord Advocate, a figure so overtly party political as to have a seat in the Cabinet. Holders of that office during the period in question have included both Labour and SNP politicians, as the SNP would do well to ponder before it opposed United Kingdom-wide legislation on an ostensible point of constitutional principle.
We all know about the role of the Liberal Democrats, so the Conservatives can say in all fairness that they did not come out of this well, but Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP all came out of it worse, with more to come out about each of them. You had better believe that there will not be a General Election until the autumn.
This is a problem in many institutions. They are led by an inner circle of people who have no front line experience of the work of said institutions. It is almost as if a cabal of crooks have taken over the echelons of power.
And that is a key problem. Because they have no front line expertise in the domain they claim to be managing, they are completely at sea when something goes wrong. They do not have the “BS detector” that someone who’s worked their way up would have and seem unable or unwilling to investigate. Easier to employ layers of yes men (and women) and pretend everything is fine until you move on to the next sinecure.
For every Paula Vennells, there’s a Howard Davies (of FSA [later the Farcical Conduct Authority – who screwed up almost everything they touched], LSE [Gadaffi’s son’s donation buying a place] and RBS/NatWest [“houses aren’t difficult to buy”] fame). But he’s just one of hundreds and probably no worse or better than many others. Britain is infested with these parasites.
I have no doubt that anyone in the organisation pointing out that the vastly expensive Horizon system was a complete crock to the hierarchy would have been as popular as a lumb of excrement in a swimming pool and his career would not have progressed even if he was not actually eased out.
That simply doesn’t wash with me. I would never employ someone if I knew they were incapable of doing the right thing here. But then, I’ve never worried about being popular at work.
Note also that some of these people are members of professional organisations and supposely signed up to their ethical standards.
Similarly, the Post Office barristers who colluded in not disclosing relevant information in the court cases must now be in an interesting professional situation – it being hard to see how they haven’t brought their profession into disrepute and not met the accepted professional standards.
What is astonishing about this case is that it was not merely a few people that failed – it seems it was *everyone*.
I got the impression from your previous post that you favoured the idea that the people at the top were insulated from reality by layers of yes men. I am sure you would want to know the facts but if a culture prevails where too vigorous assertion of an inconvenient truth gets you nailed as a troublemaker word of inconvenient truth tends to dry up despite professional ethical standards.
I have already indicated that those prosecuting have an obligation to reveal to the defence lawyers facts known to them that undermine the prosecution case. I presume those instructing prosecuting barristers were careful not to allow any discloseable evidence to suggest the Horizon system was not robust into the barristers bundle. Barristers are not technical experts and are entitled to rely on expert evidence.
People at the top are only insulated from reality if they are already out of touch with it and lack the curiosity and will to engage with it. I regard the “yes men” thing as much as a symptom as a cause.
Lawyers are not merely highly paid process jockeys. They are supposed to have and use professional judgement. They don’t merely advance arguments without first making an assessment of whether they are real and true. I get the sense that competent, professional barristers would have sensed that Fujitsu and the Post Office were withholding evidence. They have questions to answer here.
We must ask the question; did the Post Office have DEI quotas or inducements in its policy for the recruitment of its executive staff – like the BBC, Parliament with its All Women Lists, the Met, the Fire Brigade, NHS, Judges Benches and most ESG rightthunk City firms. If the answer is yes, we should simply recognise that a Progressive State so hostile to the principle of merit, so wedded by ideology to discriminatory action will end up a failing corrupt croneyish second rate state… as evidenced daily in our news.
A royal pardon plus an overturning of wrongful convictions through due legal process is a minimum requirement.
I believe there’s an investigation underway by the police into the conduct of those in positions of responsibility such as Vennells and also Fujitsu. If they haven’t broken any laws then the law is indeed an ass, and justice will not be obtained until due process has been completed in this regard too.
Mind blowing to think someone is okay with prosecuting people to cover for their mistakes. Maybe it was hubris and incompetence, but it’s shocking nevertheless.
I wouldn’t want Vennells to be made into a scapegoat, though.
I don’t understand the downvotes. I know ‘the buck stops with me” and so on, but I doubt Vennells ordered to behave in a certain way, amidst cries of horror from the people working for her. The problem is systemic (see Grenfell).
If Vennells goes to prison for 20 years and nothing else happens, nothing will change because a new Vennells will emerge.
Nothing will change if we do not prosecute and punish the criminals in this matter (who do appear to be the Post Office management and Fujitsu and not the postmasters).
The fact that this is not sufficient for your broader goals does not mean we should let the guilty walk away.
As I see it, the level of incompetence and cowardice required to create the situation requiring such a cover-up suggests that it’s not a question of “who should be fired and held accountable” amongst the Post Office and Fujitsu management, but rather whether there’s anyone who *should not be fired* here. There is no evidence (yet) of anyone in either organisation even trying to do the right thing (it being glaringly obvious 10 years ago to anyone with an ounce of common sense what the right thing was). We’re at the point – or certainly were – where simply shutting them down and starting again might be the best option.
I read this morning that Paula Vennells apparently made the final three short list for Bishop of London a few years ago and had the support of Justin Welby.
This is the quality of the caste of management we have in these organisations. No judgement. No common sense. No honesty. No actual qualifications for their jobs.
I’d also consider bringing back the stocks and the ducking stool for these cases !
Vennells and Welby are leading examples of the Woking Class elite. They ruthlessly deploy DEI weaponry to secure wealth, status and power, and don’t give a damn for the ‘little people’ they destroy en route. How people like them achieve such elevation to the top jobs is beyond my cognitive capabilities. They are detestable purveyors of cynicism and hypocrisy who exploit identity politics to feather their own nests and cancel those who fail to sing from their hymn-sheets. They’d be as comfortable in Putin’s Kremlin as they are in the British corridors of power.
Thank you for clarifying your comment.
A scapegoat is normally one who is innocent being punished for the faults of others which might explain the downvotes as there is clearly scepticism that Vennells didn’t know of and sanction the prosecutions despite knowing the unsatisfactory nature of the Horizon system.
It is a cop out to say the problem is systemic. Decisions were made by individuals to prosecute and individuals should be punished depending on the extent of their individual knowledge and behaviour. Unfortunately we know it almost certainly will not happen.
It is unlikely Vennells will be prosecuted but if she is successfully prosecuted she will not be a scapegoat as she will be guilty not innocent.
If by saying you wouldn’t want Vennells to be made a scapegoat you mean that only she should be punished for the way large numbers of people pursued the innocent Postmasters for alleged discrepancies in their accounts on the basis that they were “the only ones who claimed Horizon must be wrong” I would agree.
Everyone who was involved in prosecuting the postmasters knowing that there were numerous cases of claims the system was at fault but deliberately suppressing this evidence should be prosecuted for perverting the course of justice and all such persons should be forced to contribute to compensating the victims if this injustice rather than the costs falling solely on the hapless taxpayer yet again for the malfeasance of those employed in government work.
From the sounds of things Vennells, as the person in charge, should at least lose all her bonuses (financial and honorary) and ALSO be investigated for possible criminal negligence and actions.
The same for anyone else in the chain of command down to the very bottom. There must have been hundreds of people who know there prosecutions were an abuse of power and a miscarriage of justice
The operation of the law is a really important point in this case that is being massively under-remarked upon.
At law there is an assumption that computers and systems are working correctly. Put another way, the onus is on the defence to show computer systems are not working correctly. There is of course zero incentive on big tech companies to cooperate and show that their products are not working.
It is both interesting and telling that the legal profession have been very quiet about this aspect of law despite the significant media coverage around the Post Office/Horizon.
It is, of course, not for us to say on an internet forum whether anyone is guilty of any crime or not – but the operation of the law itself certainly should attract more comment. The fate of these post masters likely would have been different had the law not operated on the presumptions it does.
There is no legal presumption that computer systems are infallible but the natural assumption is that they are working as they should and have no incentive to lie about the evidence they present. Like any evidence it is up to the defendant to call the evidence into question but there is an obligation on the prosecution to disclose evidence that tends to show that the computer evidence may not be reliable.
I have not followed the cases sufficiently closely but what is worrying is that those prosecuting these cases seem to have suppressed evidence to suggest that Horizon in fact was not reliable. Such evidence as they had to this effect should have been disclosed. Claims that you are the only one suggesting that Horizon was at fault on the face of it appear to be prosecutorial misconduct if those pressing charges were aware otherwise.
Only a person who’s never worked with computer systems would assume that they are infallible. Do you know how long the bugs list is even for relatively good complex software products ? There is never time to test everything and never time to fix every problem that gets found. Only the most trivially simple programs can be bug free.
Fujitisu will almost certainly be in the clear. Having a crap system isn’t the same as breaking the criminal law. They may be in breach of contractual law but that’s between them and the PO.
The pardon/overturning of convictions v important but justice needs accountability too and that’s the bit missing at the moment. Some knew this was wrong and still carried it out. I guess that will come out of the Inquiry and just take longer to come to conclusion.
Separately, good the Author gives Private Eye credit here. The print media otherwise asleep on this more generally weren’t they. Sort of thing you’d have expected the Mail or Express to be championing years ago – small businesses being atrociously treated etc. Begs a little question too I think why they and others remained largely silent? Private Eye been making it clear for a decade how appalling this was.