When Nicky and Mark Webster failed in the High Court last week to win back their first three children taken from them in a forced adoption, forever, by Norfolk County Council I found myself under attack.

The writer Beatrix Campbell wrote in The Guardian:

The parents were championed by award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney. It was this case that encouraged the family courts to open up and let us see the judge's thinking. When the judgments were made public in the Webster case, Norfolk county council waited for the rush. No one had come knocking, they said, when I asked for them. I asked Sweeney what he thought - had he read them? No he hadn't, he said.

That is wrong.

I read the judgments.

My producers and editors read them.

I reported on the key elements of the judgments.

And I read them out, on air.

In 2006, with BBC colleagues, I had gone to court to get the facts of this case into the public eye. The BBC was the primary applicant in the case and I was the reporter driving the story. As a result the law forbidding the media from reporting Family Court cases was changed. True, I didn't bother to ask Norfolk's press office for a copy later because I was in court when Mr Justice Munby handed down his judgment in November 2006, which I read, immediately.

The judge said:

where the parents allege they are the victims of miscarriage of justice, it is more than usually important that the truth, the whole truth should out. If as the parents allege they have lost three children, and stand the risk of losing a fourth due to the deficiencies in the system, then there is a pressing need for the true facts to be exposed.

For BBC1's Real Story With Fiona Bruce broadcast in November, 2006, we reconstructed Judge Munby giving his ruling. In all, I made five BBC documentaries on the Websters, concluding with a Panorama, called 'Missing Children', in July 2007.

In that programme I reported Munby's judgement and the earlier judgment, in 2004, in which the judge said:

I conclude that these injuries are non-accidental injuries. I conclude that the only possible perpetrators of child B's injuries are the two parents and I exclude anyone else as being a possible perpetrator of these injuries.

Implicit in Campbell's comments is the suggestion that we ignored evidence that pointed to the parents' guilt. I also reported that Child A - their little girl in the bureaucratic jargon - had very poor teeth and Child B - their boy - was described an 'intensely anxious' and I reported that both children, according to Norfolk, had suffered from emotional neglect.

The Websters gave answers to all the allegations against them.

It is true that Beatrix Campbell did telephone me to ask for my version of events - but not in 2009. I recall the conversation because I was in Russia, about to ask a professor of physics about polonium poisoning, in late 2006. Campbell writes that I said: 'I take my line from the parents'. An alarming answer. It would be, if she was right about about how I do my job.

If Beatrix Campbell, a paid up member of the columnist party, had been in court, as I and other reporters were, she would have heard this statement from the family's health visitor:

the team leader told me that the medical opinion was overwhelming and that I should agree with her, that I should not let my emotions get in the way. I was very upset but felt I had to do what my superior said. I was very unhappy. I had given my professional opinion that neither parent would deliberately harm their children.

In each programme I challenged the Websters about the evidence against them: principally, that their son had unexplained fractures. It turns out that the scientific evidence in favour of their innocence is strong. Their little boy, Child B, was allergic to cow's milk and so he was on vitamin-boosted soya milk. A different GP advised them to take their little boy off the vitamin-boosted soya and use unfortified soya instead. The Websters questioned the advice but did what they were told by their GP. Child B developed scurvy and weak bones which led to fractures - but none of the doctors in the original case in 2004 realised this. As a result the 'unexplained fractures' were held to be abuse and all three children were taken from them, forever. Three experts at the Appeal Court in 2007 agreed that scurvy was the most likely diagnosis.

Norfolk said it would no longer seek to prove that Child B was deliberately hurt by either parent - the very evidence that had led to their children being taken away and adopted.
In our Panorama I asked Dr David Bender, a molecular biologist and nutrionist at University College, London, what he thought of the GP's advice. He replied: 'very sad, to put it mildly.'

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

It's not every day that you get to ask a member of a royal family, last in the line of the Holy Roman Empire, of the blood line of Charlemagne and co, whether he is a crook. Or not.

We were in Liechtenstein, a tiny monarchy, squeezed between Switzerland and Austria, high up in the Alps. There is of course, no suggestion, that the royal had stolen my trousers or anything like that.

It's all to do with national sovereignty, the theft of electronic disks and the little matter of billions of dollars stashed in places the world's tax men can't find.

The point is that Little Rich Liechtenstein is a tax haven, and there's a bloke who is not very keen on tax havens. His name is Barack Obama, and so tax havens the world over - and they include Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and the Caymans.

The charge against tax havens is that they don't just help rich cheats avoid tax while the rest of us pay more, but they can also be used by organised crime, dictators and terrorists.

Last year Heinrich Kieber, who had previously worked at the LGT trust, part of the royal banking group in Liechtenstein, became a global whistle-blower.

Kieber, whose past is a bit murky, copied the files of the royal bank trust containing the secrets of the super-rich, did a runner and flogged his disks to German intelligence, the BND, for five million Euros.

Last Valentine's Day, the German authorities arrested the boss of the German Post Office, Klaus Zumwinkel. Just last week he was convicted of evading tax, sentenced to two years, suspended, and ordered to pay back four million Euros plus one million in fines.

Now hundreds of other tax cheats around the world, some in Britain, too, are now worrying that they might be next...

The Liechtenstein royals, who from their schloss in Vaduz pretty much run the banking group, the tax haven and the state, were not amused. Last spring Liechtenstein put Kieber's name on an Interpol watch-list. Then the mob - or somebody pretending to be the mob, it's not quite clear, and you can't phone them up to check: 'Hello, is that the Mafia?' - put out a ten million dollar hit on Kieber, who went into hiding.

But the game of tax haven secrets tit-for-tat wasn't over.

A pre-recorded taped interview of Kieber then turned up in Washington DC and was played to the United States Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations. He told the Senate that his files showed evidence not just of tax evasion on a massive scale but money salted away by corrupt officials and dictators.

Given all this hoo-hah, it seemed right to hurry along to Liechtenstein.

Imagine my disappointment on discovering that Liechtenstein was, in fact, the most boring place on earth. I'm used to boredom - I work for the BBC, for heaven's sake - but Liechtenstein was as dull as ditchwater, no duller. They bank behind closed doors. They create fuzzy trusts behind close doors. They make false teeth. And then they go to bed. The person who most looked like a ruthless killer was Howard, and he was the BBC producer.

The next morning we heard that there was a banking seminar at the university on openness. This being Liechtenstein, the openness meeting was closed, at least to us.

But imagine the almost erotic charge when we heard that a royal prince had turned up, His Serene Highness Prince Nikolaus von Liechtenstein.

His serenity turned out to be a tall cove, with lots of teeth, and they didn't look false to me.

He had a posse of princely PR people with him, and, if it came to a fight, we were outnumbered. On the other hand, I had Howard the ruthless killer on my side.

I asked His Highness: 'Kieber's lawyer says that the Liechtenstein royal family by aiding and abetting tax evasion are effectively crooks. So the question is: are you a crook, sir?'

By way of answer the prince socked my jaw with a left hook, then picked up a chair and smashed it over my head. I swayed slowly like a felled tree, and then crashed to the ground. Meanwhile, Howard had silently garrotted all the PR men...

Oh, all right, I made all that up.

To my question: 'are you a crook, sir?' the prince replied that America and Liechtenstein had different laws, and that Liechtenstein had a sovereign right to run its affairs as it thought fit.

Perhaps the prince didn't quite address the American issue that tax haven micro-states should not be allowed to undercut the tax-raising powers of the great democracies, but, fair do's, a good answer.

But, some might add, how very boring, how very Liechtenstein.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?

Journalism's job is to kick the powerful in the backside when they get things wrong - and they do, all too often - and see what happens next. If you doubt whether that precise definition is in the BBC Producer Guidelines, then you might have a point. (It is, in fact, written in a secret code on page 94 but if I told you how to crack it, I'd have to kill you).

This blog is dedicated to the victims of power gone mad, bad or just plain wrong. This summer for Panorama I met people in all three categories while spending five weeks travelling in China just before the Olympics. I duly noted the country's amazing economic growth, but came face-to-face with the authoritarianism of the powers-that-be in the Chinese Communist Party. I will never forget the day we went to see a school knocked flat by the earthquake in Sichuan while all the other big buildings around had stood intact. Our official minder told grieving parents, effectively, to shut their mouths lest they say anything critical about China. There's a clip on You Tube, so you can judge for yourselves.

Later on in 2008 working on a Panorama about tax havens, to be screened sometime in the New Year when the editor can be tempted to give it a slot, I met Jack Blum, a rare bird who happens to be a lawyer based in Washington DC and believes in ethical behaviour. Jack and I chewed the fat about how the super-rich like to park their money out of the taxman's reach but we also reflected on how some of the world's powerful states will cope with the 'crunchion'. (Don't bother look it up. I've just made it up because I couldn't be bothered typing out 'credit crunch generated recession'). 

Jack believes that the United States and Britain will take a big hit, but that both countries have democratic institutions strong enough to cope with the crunchion. Can the not-so-very democratic regimes in China and Russia - however alluring the topless shots of strong man Vladimir Putin fishing and shooting may be - withstand the storms to come? Wise man Jack shook his head, and fears trouble for those who march in step in Beijing and Moscow. We shall see.

Closer to home, injustice still creates great pain for pernicious and unnecessary reasons. Last  spring I did a Panorama which questioned the safety of the conviction against Keran Henderson now in jail for manslaughter for killing little Maeve Sheppard, a child she was baby-minding. Keran, hitherto a pillar of the community in Buckinghamshire, denies she harmed the child. The only evidence against Keran was 'shaken baby syndrome' - a massively controversial scientific doctrine which some sceptical doctors and most bio-mechanics say doesn't make sense. Britain's child protection establishment, however, believes that Shaken Baby Syndrome is valid.

Keran is still in prison, but her appeal will be heard sometime in the New Year.

Meanwhile, don't tell the Panorama editor but I did a bit of moonlighting the other day for Newsnight, reporting on the long agony of Suzanne Holdsworth. She spent three years inside for murder for a crime that didn't happen. There are grave questions about the thoroughness and fairness of the investigation by Cleveland Police, but they've announced that they won't be apologising to Suzanne.  Her partner, Lee Spencer, is not impressed by a police investigation that failed to take statements from two surgeons who were going to operate on the brain of the boy she was wrongly accused of murdering. 

Suzanne Holdsworth is the eighth person wrongly convicted of murder or manslaughter I have helped clear the name of  or free since joining the BBC in 2001, starting with Sally Clark, Angela Cannings, Donna Anthony, Lorraine Harris, Ray Rock, Angela and Ian Gay. 

But I'm afraid there are plenty more people inside who shouldn't be.

Meanwhile, fans of Scientology's number one parishioner, Tom Cruise, will be interested to see how he plays anti-Hitler hero Claus Von Stauffenberg in the upcoming film Valkyrie. If you can't work out what I think about that, you shouldn't be reading this blog.

 

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?