I have taken the plunge and embarked upon this video-pod-casty thingy. Some people are really good at it, I’m not. Hopefully I’ll improve.
I was delighted to be joined by Miri AF who writes on Substack and on her website—see links below. Her often funny, thought provoking pieces are worth reading.
We agree that the Manchester Attack was a hoax. We disagree about the way the subsequent legacy media and High Court trial of Richard D. Hall proceeded. We disagree quite firmly about Hall’s role in the legacy reporting and judicial rulings.
I wish to make an apology to Miri and offer a correction to you. During the segment beginning at 37.55 - 51.00 I said Miri’s definition of harassment was “wrong.” This was amateurish—I’ll learn. What I meant to say was that Miri’s characterisation of harassment, as it was applied to Hall in the trial, was incorrect.
During the same segment, Miri offered the argument that Hall said he investigated one of the claimants to see if they were injured because, if they were not, that would show Manchester was a hoax. Miri then said that, having discovered they were injured, he maintained Manchester was a hoax and, consequently, there was no point in him investigating the claimants to ascertain if they were injured. Therefore, she argued, there was no purpose to this aspect of his investigation and he could not then cite this as reasonable investigative journalism.
I disagreed with Miri and fumbled my way through my rebuttal, eventually offering something cohesive at 50.43. My point, which I would like to clarify here, is that when Hall began the investigation he suspected that some of the victims may not be injured. Substantiating this could have provided categorical proof that Manchester was a hoax and he set about establishing the facts. This process included his visit to the home of one of he claimants.
This was part of Hall’s investigative journalism and he reasonably referenced it as such. Eventually Hall gathered all of the evidence he could and, once this process was concluded—the vital timeline I think Miri has overlooked—he was subsequently able to report the overwhelming evidence showing Manchester was a hoax. But Hall had not gathered or analysed all of this evidence when he visited the claimants address.
Hall was eventually able to report that the victims injuries were not substantive of a bombing and did not override the weight of evidence showing there was no bomb. Crucially, the point I failed to make well to Miri—and to you in the chat—was that Hall had no way of knowing this while he was in the process of gathering the evidence.
At the time, he did not and could not have known that the injury status of the victims would turn out to be something of an irrelevance. He was only able to come to this conclusion after he had completed the entire, initial phase of his investigation. Therefore, the visit to the claimants most certainly was part of his investigative journalism, contrary to Miri’s argument.
Anyway, thanks for watching if you do.
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Iain Davis Report of the Trial
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