1. US
law enforcement by Ray Smith of USPIS, who ran Operation Avalanche in the
US.
US law enforcementIt is useful to compare the statement below, made by National Crime Squad contact, USPIS Postal Inspector Ray Smith, with the subsequent statements made by police officials in the UK. The following transcribed extract was from a broadcast on CBC radio in Canada, released the day after Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the end of Operation Avalanche, the US counterpart of Operation Ore, where 144 suspects were identified and targeted from the list of some 35,000 US credit card identities, resulting in a claimed 100 arrests nationwide. This report was broadcast on 09/08/2001, Operation Ore rolled out in May 2002 after several months of covert preparation and legal wrangles states side.
The transcribed extract was from a CBC Radio in Canada. Web page used to be here but has been deleted, and broadcast used to be here but has been deleted as well. The shortened extract can be downloaded from the local archive here.
UK law enforcement
This was published in the Daily Telegraph on 29/01/2003 after Ray Smith (USPIS) and the National Crime Squad returned from a conference at Wilton Park. The original article is here and in the local archive here.
This was part of a statement made to parliament on 18/12/2002. The report moved around the government website, but the last known location was here and an archived copy is available here and as a pdf here.
This statement was made by Trevor Pearce on 07/12/2004 as written evidence to the house of commons. The copy on the government website is available here and an archived copy here.
Audio download of this snippet here.
International conference led by NCS and the foreign office
The above was based on conferences at Wilton Park on 22-24/03/2004, which can be found here together with the pdf summary. An archived version is available in web or pdf format.
CommentaryBill Hughes No evidence of babies being brutalized on a Landslide site could be found by investigators, though such material is out there on the Internet. What Bill Hughes alleged the police could not do in the UK, they not only could do but repeatedly did. It would seem this was just one of numerous attempts to create and sustain a witch-hunt based on false and dramatized information. Jim Gamble No comment necessary as this aspect of the Ray Smith radio interview with CBC is substantially truthful, US law enforcement didn't target known innocent people (on this operation). Trevor Pearce No comment necessary as this aspect of the Ray Smith radio interview with CBC is substantially truthful, US law enforcement didn't target known innocent people (on this operation). Stuart Hyde That doesn't really need a commentary. West Midlands Police have removed their web page, which advised people what to do in the circumstances that don't exist according to Stuart Hyde, however a local archive capture is available here. Wilton Park Already dispensed with. CBC report Two images were displayed with the CBC report, a picture of Thomas Reedy, Landslide's owner, and a web page containing banners, Ray Smith mentioning explicit banners during the interview.
The inference was clear, that online payment broker Thomas Reedy was advertising illegal material. This originated from the testimony of Dallas Police Detective Steven Nelson, who claimed to have clicked a banner on the home page of the Landslide site arriving at the site above (similar to broadcasts by the BBC). The banner that he claimed to have seen, was shown in a grainy copy of part of a page on a web page as below, making it impossible to read where the page was located. Courtesy of the Internet, researchers were able to go back, and prove it wasn't there, and that the banner that he claimed to have clicked, didn't come from Lolita World as shown above. In the case of the website with banners shown above, the address has been conveniently removed, leaving people to presume this belonged to Thomas Reedy. It didn't, rather it is one of many pieces of evidence that proved that Dallas Detective Steven Nelson lied blatantly and repeatedly. Click for full size As for Thomas Reedy, he was accused by Ray Smith of exploiting children. Children were and always are exploited in the Western World, but the foreign webmasters who put underage imagery on web sites using the Landslide payment system, along with countless other AVS systems, were put there for credit card fraud, exploiting the potency of a taboo. The CBC broadcast including USPIS Postal Inspector Ray Smith, makes it (quietly) clear, most people were innocent, and left in peace. The UK police statements make it clear, everyone was guilty, and everyone a target. With some six thousand web sites using the Landslide payment system over time, and just a few of them illegal and principally involved in credit card fraud, the truth screams loud enough without being said. The truth is reflected in the evidence given to the National Crime Squad, that was trusted to only a few specially selected police officers and partners at Celt Limited, much of it never released, much of it concealed. In one of Ray Smith's reports, the scale of the fraud was clear. He mentioned the worst images that were on one site using the payment system had subscriber accounts with billings of £13,000. At £19.82 per month, the accounts are showing an equivalent to a site access time of 55 years of membership. Clearly fraud on a massive scale, and it was this very fraud that led to Landslide losing it's merchant account weeks before US law enforcement raided with the press in tow. During the press conference at the end of Operation Avalanche in America, the scene was set with a proud presentation of the real home page of Landslide. Nearly a year later, Operation Ore launched in the media with a fake one. Michael Mead of USPIS was shown a version of the real home page when giving evidence to a UK trial via video link on 05/10/2005. This is part of the transcript:
Once again we have a problem, as Sharon Girling issued a sworn statement by way of correction on 05/02/2003 as follows:
MM/4 was given to Sharon Girling on 02/10/2002, which contained the sites visited when Dallas Detective Nelson subscribed to and others during his investigation, and Michael Mead never saw it before, despite the fact he alleged to have seen other pages in the same evidence, to have been investigating this evidence, and the US media showed the real home page. What Michael Mead gave to Sharon Girling and had never seen, was shown at the USPIS press conference at the end of Operation Avalanche on 08/08/2001, the mountain scene being part of the real Landslide home page. Michael Mead attended the Landslide trial, and the real home page was shown there too. Lies can be denied, but can a contradiction be true?Michael Mead (USPIS) and Detective Steve Nelson (Dallas Police) provided sworn testimony which was used in Operation Ore trials. The statements were no less than a farce, littered with easily evidenced lies, contradictions and incompetence. An example known contradiction below:
compared with
and
and known by
Michael Mead made an extraordinary statement, on 05/10/2005, when giving sworn testimony to a UK court room:
Michael Mead tended to contradict himself rather often.
and then
That is despite the fact that in the original Landslide trial, the video that verified this evidence had gone missing and the web capture evidence investigated by Dane Ritcheson, the forensic examiner for USPIS, told a different story, as the banner wasn't there. The investigation commenced on 28/04/1999 terminating 08/09/1999. This compares with Nelson in court testifying against Thomas Reedy.
Who wrote the David Cruz testimony?
That is equivalent to over eight million dollars a month going through 12 illegal web sites, with several thousand other active web sites. Is it true? William Rector, the auditor for the US Attorney's Office, testified at the trial of Landslide, having audited the accounts, 80% of them directly to bank statements. For a sales period from September 1997 through to August 1999, he made the following sworn statement in court for the Landslide billing and profit:
Even the statements by William Rector in court from his audit are in conflict with the truth. Landslide was raided on the 8th of September 1999, but the company was knocked out of business some time before that. The fraud rocketed the charge backs through the one percent ceiling, leading to Superior Credit withdrawing their merchant services, a fax to that effect arriving at Landslide on the 10th of August. Without a merchant account, Landslide could not charge credit cards, the prime function of the business. The biggest source of fraud was coming through web sites run by US law enforcement at the time, webmastered by Arief Dharmawan and Michael Yamin who were secretly indicted under seal, three webmasters R W Kusama, Hanny Ingganata and Boris Greenberg being publicly indicted along with Landslide, Thomas Reedy and Janice Reedy. The last transaction through from Miranda, the company with ownership of these web sites, hit the Landslide database on 31/07/1999, for sites called nudist, blackcat, nympho and lolihard. Rector claimed in court to have audited the Landslide accounts for the month of August (1999) for AVS and KEYZ sites, and his statement alleged that 519 sites sold that month, with AVS amounting to $126,186 and KEYZ $698,996, a total of $825,182. Not quite the 1.4 million dollars a month claimed by Jim Gamble (SOCA), but as Landslide had ceased trading in August, seemingly quite remarkable figures in their own right. Labour MP, Judy Mallaber (Amber Valley), working with John Carr of CHIS said in parliament:
In relation to this MP's latter statement, no illegal imagery was produced for Landslide, Landslide was an Internet payment broker not a gangster, and the material was used for credit card fraud by incriminating the victims, the standard Internet scam. A highly emotive statement, but factually incorrect.
Margaret Moran's evidentially false testimony (archive) was the subject of formal complaints to the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner at the House of Parliament, neither of whom would investigate this MP's conduct. Where did click here come from?
Now again we have a problem with Michael Mead, who quite literally lied on the hoof to a UK courtroom (he attended the Landslide trial but did not give testimony). The clickz system was hosted by Landslide on their servers, via the clicz.com domain, and when Nelson and Mead claimed to have seen the infamous 'click here' banner, rotating banners were only supplied by the clickz system. If the system wasn't working, the banner would not have appeared, indeed no banner would have appeared. The page in question can be viewed on this site, no banner shows as the clickz system is shut down. So many lies were told about this banner, indeed as recently as 08/03/2006 by John Carr, who represents every vested interest not just in Operation Ore, but stakeholders in the US too.
An extract from the broadcast, featuring John Carr, can be heard here. The BBC presenter tries to assist John Carr, indeed rescue him at the end of the extract above, but the broadcast triggered a flurry of complaints to NCH, who retain John Carr as an Internet expert. John Carr is neither honest, nor an Internet expert, his main expertise in relation to computers is using them in political campaigns in the US and UK. John Carr has not made any retraction of the false statements he made at this time and still enjoys the full backing of NCH. John Carr's wife, Baroness Thornton, is in the House of Lords.
The officer who visited Landslide to deliver the post 'undercover' was none other than FBI Agent Frank Super. Michael Mead simply told another lie, as a postal inspector he should know what delivering the post involves, and he didn't do it. Prosecution expertsSam Type, expert for the prosecution, was questioned over the integrity of the Landslide data. Without previously disclosing the fact to the defense, a legal requirement as this was evidence that undermined the prosecution case, it was admitted that the American evidence was contaminated.
Here we have a contradiction. If very few files had been modified by US law enforcement, how could they be dotted all over the computer? We could of course continue, but it is evidentially established, that a serious and organized deception was in play, and significant contributors included: US - Robert C Adams (USPIS), Michael E Mead (USPIS), Ray Smith (USPIS), Steven A Nelson (Dallas PD), Bill Walsh (Dallas PD), John Ashcroft (US GOV), Mike Marshall (TX STATE/Microsoft), William Rector (TX STATE/SEC), Kenneth C Weaver (USPIS), Don Smiddy (USPIS), Frank Super (FBI). UK - HMIC Sir Ronnie Flanagan, Bill Hughes (SOCA), Jim Gamble (SOCA), Trevor Pearce (SOCA), Stuart Hyde (WMP/SOCA), Paul Griffiths (GMP/SOCA), Andrew Mulholland (SOCA), Sir Stephen Lander (SOCA), DAC Alan Given (MPS), DS Peter Suggett (MPS), HOPS DS John Levett (MPS), DCI Dave McDonald-Payne (MPS), DAC Rose Fitzpatrick (MPS), DS Tony Evans (MPS), Chief Constable Barbara Wilding (SWP), Chief Constable Carole Howlett (Norfolk Police), Adam Hinks (IPCC), Nick Hardwick (IPCC Chair), John Wadham (IPCC Deputy Chair), Mehmuda Mian-Pritchard (IPCC), David Petch (IPCC), John Carr (CHIS/GOV/IWF/NCH/SOCA), Tony Blair (GOV), Brian E Underhill (SOCA PE), Nicholas A Webber (SOCA PE), Dr Sam Type (SOCA PE), Dr Nick Sharples (SOCA PE), Dr Andrew Blyth (SWP PE), Paul Webb SWP, Chief Inspector Cheryl Jones (SWP), John Polychronakis (WMPA) |
"These sites can be horrendous.
The Operation Ore sites showed newborn babies being brutalized." 
"If you consider operation Ore, in
1999 towards 7,000 people in the UK sat at their computers and accessed
child abuse web sites. Three or four years later, that investigation is
on-going."
"The Pedophile On-Line
Investigation Team (POLIT) is one of several specialized units within the
NCS, and is charged with the investigation of on-line pedophilia,
including the UK co-ordination of the now publicized Operation ORE. This
operation started when, in 2001, the details of 7,272 British suspects who
had accessed child abuse images on a US website with their credit cards
were passed to UK authorities. Operation ORE subsequently became the
largest ever single investigation into online activity of this
nature."
Sir Stephen Lander has declined to
comment.
