Real Crimes And Word Games

National Union of Mineworkers’ GS Frans Baleni’s extraordinary article from last Friday’s Mail and Guardian is called “A silent crime in the mines”. This is real crime, corrupt crime, causing death in the pursuit of profit. See the link below. Karima Brown’s article from yesterday’s Business Day, linked below, is another extraordinary piece of work, rounding off three days of devastating blitzkrieg journalism starting with Saturday’s revelations in the Weekender. The anti-Zuma (and related) crowd could only manage to crank up their damage-control on Snuki-TV yesterday evening nearly three days after the publication of Squires’ letter. It consisted of a rag-bag of unconvincing“ analysts” plus an odd assembly of personalities including Dumisa Ntsebeza. But the station’s heart was not in it. This was not the story. The story was the one the Business Day was running with. Even in the usually relentlessly anti-Zuma Star yesterday there was a funny cartoon from Zapiro (‘The 17 month slumber of Judge Hilary “Rip Van Winkle” Squires’), and an article that contains a good roundup of some of the silliest of the Squires word games. (See the link below). This article quotes again what the Supreme Court of Appeal picked up and regurgitated, namely the passage from Hilary Squires’ judgement that begins: “It would be flying in the face of common sense and ordinary human nature to think that he (Shaik) did not realise…”, correctly noting that this was the root of Squires reasoning, if it can be called reasoning. This root is explicitly planted in the soil of “common sense”, and not in law or in the factual evidence. It is fantasy. Squires was making the story up according to his preconceived idea of what would be in a person’s mind in the circumstances. Basing his actions on this fantasy, Hilary Squires put Schabir Shaik away for 15 years, banned him from directorships and took at least R33 million off him. Squires is corrupt. He corrupted his own mind with fantasy. Another kind of corruption the blatant dishonesty of the South African Jewish Report as related by Minister Ronnie Kasrils (see below). Comrade Ronnie puts up a staunch and powerful critique. The SAJR refused to publish it, although they did not hesitate to put invented words into Ronnie’s mouth, and publish those. Now, that’s corruption. Another kind of corruption would be to take a good newspaper and ruin it, which is what seems to have happened to the (London) Guardian over the last year or two. The laughable rubbish about “Al Qaida” (a fantastic bogey) plotting a nuclear attack on Britain was a top story in that once-great newspaper yesterday. Corrupt people think: The bigger the lies, the longer they hang around. That’s what they think. Click on these links: A silent crime in the mines, Frans Baleni, Mail and Guardian (935 words) When courts parrot common knowledge, Karima Brown, B Day (821 words) An overall corrupt relationship, Political Bureau, The Star (763 words) SAJR, Kasrils responds, 13 Nov 06 (739 words) Al-Qaida plotting nuclear attack on UK, Vikram Dodd, The Guardian (480 words)