Former Child Actor Is Let Down After Opening Up to Media: ‘I named names, but they’ve buried my story’
by Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
October 21, 2012
Has Rupert Murdoch’s Times Newspaper also joined the BBC’s practice of covering for child abusers in high places?
On Friday Oct 11, former child actor and now investigative journalist, Ben Fellows, published his own sordid account of his personal experiences growing up in show business and working at the BBC. The following week, his story was picked-up by the London newspaper Daily Express on Oct 17th.
Ben Fellows on the BBC’s News 24in 2006.
What the public is not aware of however, is that the Murdoch-owned Times newspaper in London had also summoned Fellows to an interview regarding his story the following day on Thursday Oct 18th.
“Since the original story I wrote, a lot of readers, people and other members of the media have been asking me to name names, and actually accusing me of feeding the abuse system by not naming names in my initial story. So when the Times contacted me, it seemed like the ideal opportunity to names names.”
Fellows continues, “It’s all rather easy to pin the entire scandal on a deceased, former celebrity like Jimmy Savile, but if you’re going to name the names of currently active entertainment professionals and politicians, you have to go with the biggest and strongest media outlet because you will get sued and the Times told me, ‘You have nothing to worry about, we have the most powerful lawyers in the world’ – and that gave me the confidence to name names”.
According to Fellows, he was interviewed by Jack Malvern, a veteran and senior writer with the Times at the Novotel in Greenwich last Thursday, with the promise that his story would go out in the Saturday morning edition of the Times, but when Saturday arrived, no story appeared – and thus, no names were named.
“The fact they haven’t run my story worries me, because they asked me to talk and I did – and now I’m not sure which way to turn”, explains Fellows.
“It made me feel like I had been ‘debriefed’ and not interviewed, and that maybe the only reason I was summoned there was to give information to them (the Murdoch press) for their own internal use.”
The irony of this situation is too much to ignore, as the Murdoch empire’s flagship ‘anti-paedophile’ newspaper, The Sun, is pulling no punches with the BBC over their Jimmy Savile cover-up, since the BBC has been exposed for moth-balling two internal investigations over child abuse within their state-funded media realm.
In the case of Fellows, he appears to have hand-delivered a number of top show business and political personality names to the Times, names whom he has witnessed first-hand to be involved with a wide range of highly inappropriate and illegal activities – including predatory advances on a child actor (Fellows), offering and consuming of Class A narcotics, and the promise of success by top producers in exchange for sex. He maintains that some of the names the Times is holding include a few of the most powerful individuals in the entertainment industry.
Fellows believed that the reason the Times has killed the story is because one of the names he gave was a celebrity who SKY TV has a heavy amount invested in for the coming season.
“They wanted me to name names, but not the ones I gave them!” said Fellows.
“I had no idea that this person was to be the star of SKY this coming season when I named them in my Times interview. Now they are sitting on the whole story because it conflicts with their organisation’s plans this year. The hypocrisy is clear to see, and very disappointing to say the least.”
“What the Times is doing here, is no different than how the BBC is covering for itself. And the end result of both cover-ups is that the public have less knowledge of child abuse in the system. I think our major media outlets are failing the public, and I now it’s there for everyone to see.”
So now the Times has joined the BBC in covering-up reported activities of people in positions of power and influence, in their own self-interest.
“I was offered an ‘Exclusive’, but I did not respond to this because it sounded like code for ‘money’, but I fully expected to run this story with so many high profile people mentions”, said Fellows.
Tonight’s episode of Panorama on BBC is nothing more than a late move to try and repair what is clearly a broken and corrupt media giant.
Similarly, Tuesday’s appearance at a House Select Committee by George Entwistle, current Director General of the BBC, is unlikely to yield much, as Entwistle, then Director of Programming at the BBC, was also the man who allegedly pulled the BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ investigation last Dec 2011.
Fellows adds here, “I am concerned that when it’s all said and done, the BBC and the government are just going to have Jimmy Savile ‘done and dusted’ and maybe pin some conviction on an old employee, then close the book on what is clearly an institutional and social disease which has infected the BBC and other corridors of power in Britain”.
How long will the Times sit on this story, and if they do run it, will they name the names that Fellows delivered to them?
Considering the weight of allegations from the Savile Affair, we all can agree that it’s in a free society’s best interest for any major newspaper to print a story which deals with the protection of children – which is certainly, at least in our opinion – in the public’s interest.
….
Massive Cover-Up of Risks from Flooding to Numerous U.S. Nuclear Facilities
nsnbc
October 21, 2012
“And U.S. officials are apparently a primary reason behind Japan’s cover-up of the severity of the Fukushima accident … to prevent Americans from questioning our similarly-vulnerable reactors.”
Numerous American nuclear reactors are built within flood zones:
As one example, on the following map (showing U.S. nuclear power plants built within earthquake zones), the red lines indicate the Mississippi and Missouri rivers:
Numerous dam failures have occurred within the U.S.:
Reactors in Nebraska and elsewhere were flooded by swollen rivers and almost melted down. See this, this, this and this.
The Huntsville Times wrote in an editorial last year:
A tornado or a ravaging flood could just as easily be like the tsunami that unleashed the final blow [at Fukushima as an earthquake].
An engineer with the NRC says that a reactor meltdown is an “absolute certainty” if a dam upstream of a nuclear plant fails … and that such a scenario is hundreds of times more likely than the tsunami that hit Fukushima :
An engineer with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) … Richard Perkins, an NRC reliability and risk engineer, was the lead author on a July 2011 NRC report detailing flood preparedness. He said the NRC blocked information from the public regarding the potential for upstream dam failures to damage nuclear sites.
Perkins, in a letter submitted Friday with the NRC Office of Inspector General, said that the NRC “intentionally mischaracterized relevant and noteworthy safety information as sensitive, security information in an effort to conceal the information from the public.” The Huffington Post first obtained the letter.
***
The report in question was completed four months after … Fukushima.
The report concluded that, “Failure of one or more dams upstream from a nuclear power plant may result in flood levels at a site that render essential safety systems inoperable.”
Huffington Post reported last month:
These charges were echoed in separate conversations with another risk engineer inside the agencywho suggested that the vulnerability at one plant in particular — the three-reactor Oconee Nuclear Station near Seneca, S.C. — put it at risk of a flood and subsequent systems failure, should an upstream dam completely fail, that would be similar to the tsunami that hobbled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan last year.***
The engineer is among several nuclear experts who remain particularly concerned about the Oconee plant in South Carolina, which sits on Lake Keowee, 11 miles downstream from the Jocassee Reservoir. Among the redacted findings in the July 2011 report — and what has been known at the NRC for years, the engineer said — is that the Oconee facility, which is operated by Duke Energy, would suffer almost certain core damage if the Jocassee dam were to fail. And the odds of it failing sometime over the next 20 years, the engineer said, are far greater than the odds of a freak tsunami taking out the defenses of a nuclear plant in Japan.
“The probability of Jocassee Dam catastrophically failing is hundreds of times greater than a 51 foot wall of water hitting Fukushima Daiichi,” the engineer said. “And, like the tsunami in Japan, the man‐made ‘tsunami’ resulting from the failure of the Jocassee Dam will –- with absolute certainty –- result in the failure of three reactor plants along with their containment structures.
“Although it is not a given that Jocassee Dam will fail in the next 20 years,” the engineer added, “it is a given that if it does fail, the three reactor plants will melt down and release their radionuclides into the environment.”
***
In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, Richard H. Perkins, a reliability and risk engineer with the agency’s division of risk analysis, alleged that NRC officials falsely invoked security concerns in redacting large portions of a report detailing the agency’s preliminary investigation into the potential for dangerous and damaging flooding at U.S. nuclear power plants due to upstream dam failure.
Perkins, along with at least one other employee inside NRC, also an engineer, suggested that the real motive for redacting certain information was to prevent the public from learning the full extent of these vulnerabilities, and to obscure just how much the NRC has known about the problem, and for how long.
Huffington Post notes today:
An un-redacted version of a recently released Nuclear Regulatory Commission report highlights the threat that flooding poses to nuclear power plants located near large dams — and suggests that the NRC has misled the public for years about the severity of the threat, according to engineers and nuclear safety advocates.
“The redacted information shows that the NRC is lying to the American public about the safety of U.S. reactors,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and safety advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
***
According to the NRC’s own calculations, which were also withheld in the version of the report released in March, the odds of the dam near the Oconee plant failing at some point over the next 22 years are far higher than were the odds of an earthquake-induced tsunami causing a meltdown at the Fukushima plant.
The NRC report identifies flood threats from upstream dams at nearly three dozen other nuclear facilities in the United States, including the Fort Calhoun Station in Nebraska, the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota and the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, among others.
***
Larry Criscione, a risk engineer at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who is one of two NRC employees who have now publicly raised questions about both the flood risk at Oconee and the agency’s withholding of related information, said assertions that the plant is “currently able to mitigate flooding events,” amounted to double-speak.
Criscione said this is because current regulations don’t include the failure of the Jocassee Dam — 11 miles upriver from Oconee — in the universe of potential flooding events that might threaten the plant. “I think they’re being dishonest,” Criscione said in a telephone interview. “I think that we currently intend to have Duke Energy improve their flooding protection and to say that the current standard is adequate is incorrect.”
According to the leaked report, NRC stated unequivocally in a 2009 letter to Duke that it believed that “a Jocassee Dam failure is a credible event” and that Duke had “not demonstrated that the Oconee Nuclear Station units will be adequately protected.” These statements — along with Duke’s own flood timeline associated with a Jocassee Dam failure and NRC’s calculated odds of such a failure — were among many details that were blacked out of the earlier, publicly released report.
***
Richard H. Perkins, a risk engineer with the NRC and the lead author of the leaked report, pointed to the analysis by the Association of Dam Safety Officials in an email message to The Huffington Post. “I felt it made a significant point that large, fatal, dam failures occur from time to time,” he said. “They are generally unexpected and they can kill lots of people. It’s not credible to say ‘dam failures are not credible.’”
Dave Lochbaum, the Union of Concerned Scientists engineer who reviewed a copy of the un-redacted report, says these revelations directly contradict the NRC’s assertions that Oconee is currently safe. “Fukushima operated just under 40 years before their luck ran out,” Lochbaum, who worked briefly for the NRC himself between 2009 and 2010, and who now heads the Nuclear Safety Project at UCS, said in a phone call. “If it ever does occur here, the consequences would be very, very high.
“Japan is now building higher sea walls at other plants along its coasts. That’s great for those plants, but it’s too late for Fukushima. If in hindsight you think you should have put the wall in,” Lochbaum said, “then in foresight you should do it now.”
Other Comparisons Between Dangers In U.S. and Fukushima
There are, in fact, numerous parallels between Fukushima and vulnerable U.S. plants.
A Japanese government commission found that the Fukushima accident occurred because Tepco and the Japanese government were negligent, corrupt and in collusion. See this, this and this. The U.S. NRC is similarly corrupt.
The operator of the Fukushima complex admitted earlier this month that it knew of the extreme vulnerability of its plants, but:
If the company were to implement a severe-accident response plan, it would spur anxiety throughout the country and in the community where the plant is sited, and lend momentum to the antinuclear movement ….
The U.S. has 23 reactors which are virtually identical to Fukushima.
Most American nuclear reactors are old. They are aging poorly, and are in very real danger of melting down.
And yet the NRC is relaxing safety standards at the old plants. Indeed, while many of the plants are already past the service life that the engineers built them for, the NRC is considering extending licenses another 80 years, which former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority and now senior adviser with Friends of the Earth’s nuclear campaign David Freeman calls “committing suicide”:
You’re not just rolling the dice, you’re practically committing suicide … everyone living within a 50 mile radius is a guinea pig.
Indeed, the Fukushima reactors were damaged by earthquake even before the tsunami hit(confirmed here). And the American reactors may be even more vulnerable to earthquakes than Fukushima.
Moreover, the top threat from Fukushima are the spent fuel pools. And American nuclear plants have fuel pool problems which could dwarf the problems at Fukushima.
And neither government is spending the small amounts it would take to harden their reactors against a power outage.
The parallels run even deeper. Specifically, the American government has largely been responsible for Japan’s nuclear policy for decades. And U.S. officials are apparently a primary reason behind Japan’s cover-up of the severity of the Fukushima accident … to prevent Americans from questioning our similarly-vulnerable reactors.
Globalresearch – via The 4th Media
Mossad behind latest Beirut bombing
Voltairenet.org
October 21, 2012
On October 19, Israeli Mossad car bombing killed Lebanese internal security chief Brigadier General Wissam al-Hassan near Sassine Square in Beirut’s predominantly Christian district of Ashrafiya. Wissam al-Hassan, a close Sunni ally of President Michel Sulaiman, had recently earthed an Israeli spy cell in Lebanon. The deadly blast killed 8 people and injured another 78, mostly Lebanese Christians.
American Jewish film-maker, political commentator and former personal secretary of Bertrand Russell, Ralph Schoeman 77, told Iranian Press TV that the bombing has all marks of Israeli Mossad.
“As 1992 to today in the day bombing of Beirut the identical scenario, who benefits from attempting to divide Lebanon and spread the turmoil, who benefits destabilizing the government in Damascus, who states to destabilize Beirut and subject Lebanon to civil war, the Zionist regime, the Mossad. It is a classical operation of Mossad,” he said.
TV – A Weapons of Mass Persuasion ~ The Truth About Television [video included]
FromTheTrenchesWorldReport.com
October 21, 2012
Gerald Celente Channel Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.
– Edward Bernays 1929
Weapon of Mass Persuasion TeleviSION Predictive Programming : A great reason to get rid of you TV. We are being manipulated by main stream news by their lies and reporting biases and omissions. So many people believe what they see on main stream news as fact. Man made global warming hoax, Treyvon Martin case by showing a picture of an 18 year old with a picture when he was 9, not reporting of the passing of the NDAA, the 9/11 fable, KONY 2012. I haven’t had TV for about 6 years now.
Canada to enshrine draconian ‘anti-terrorism laws’ [video]
PressTV
October 21, 2012
The Harper government is set to re-enshrine defunct anti-terrorism laws that were brought into effect as temporary measures in the aftermath of the disputed events of 9/11.
The laws will enable the Canadian state to suspend the civil liberties of those nebulously labeled by police “a terrorist.”
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Chapter 10 & 11: Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion – JG Vibes [video]
End the Lie
October 18, 2012
Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion by JG Vibes
Chapter 10: Another look at the doomsday myth
Chapter 11: There is nothing positive about willful ignorance
Full Download: http://aotmr.com/books/free-books/finding-freedom-in-an-age-of-confusion/
Table of Contents
1. You are a pioneer of peace
2. Reclaiming your self esteem
3. You are king (or queen)
4. The golden age is tomorrow not yesterday
5. The state is not invincible its just a bad idea
6. You are not alone
7. Respectfully disagree without compromise
8. The sky may be falling but its only a storm
9. Learn from everyone but be your own teacher
10. Another look at the doomsday myth
11. There is nothing positive about willful ignorance
At least 13 killed, dozens injured in Damascus car bombing amid UN peace envoy visit [video included]
CounterPsyOps
October 21, 2012
At least 13 people have been killed and 29 injured as a powerful blast hit outside a police station in Bab Touma neighborhood in the old part of Damascus, reports the state news agency. It comes as Lakhdar Brahimi visits the Syrian capital for talks.
Smoke rose above what were believed to be twin car bomb explosions in front of a police station, witnesses said. Other reports suggest it was a taxi rigged with explosives.
Ambulances were seen rushing to the scene as police shut access to the area, Twitter user NMSyria reports.
At least 13 people were killed by the blast, SANA reported citing sources in the Interior Ministry. But given that the area is usually crowded, there are fears the death toll could be much higher. It is also unclear whether any police staff are among those dead or injured.
Several cars were burnt in the blast and houses sustained extensive damage. The area was busy at the time of the explosion, with people returning from Sunday prayers. Bab Touma is a predominantly Christian neighborhood. It is also a popular shopping place in Damascus.
Two more bombings were reported to have occurred in Syria on Sunday. An explosive device, planted “by terrorists”, detonated on a road in the capital’s neighborhood, injuring several passers-by. A suicide bomber blew up his car outside a Syrian-French Hospital in the besieged city of Aleppo. The latter instance resulted in material damage only, SANA said.
Meanwhile, the UN and Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is in Damascus for talks. On Sunday he met with President Bashar al-Assad in a bid to arrange ceasefire for the period of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, taking place next week.
“I appeal to everyone to take a unilateral decision to cease hostilities on the occasion of Eid al-Adha and that this truce be respected from today or tomorrow,” Brahimi told reporters in Damascus after meeting with Assad.
Syrians dousing a car following a bomb explosion outside a police station in a Christian quarter of Damascus’ Old City on October 21, 2012. (AFP Photo / SANA)
A Christian quarter of Damascus’ Old City on October 21, 2012. (AFP Photo / SANA)
A Christian quarter of Damascus’ Old City on October 21, 2012. (AFP Photo / SANA)
A wreckage of a burnt car following a bomb explosion outside a police station in a Christian quarter of Damascus’ Old City on October 21, 2012. (AFP Photo / SANA)
PN 